Mikey Arroyo et al.

THE PUBLIC appears to have largely met with indifference President Duterte’s announcement that he wants the party-list system abolished once a constitutional assembly is convened to revise the Constitution. That many people are lending a sympathetic ear to the President’s denunciation of the “mockery of the law” that the party-list system has become is not surprising. Cynicism is usually the outcome of anything good that turns into a willful travesty of itself. The party-list system, enshrined in the Constitution no less, is a prime example, degenerating over the years from its lofty beginnings to yet another plaything of the political elite to try to perpetuate itself in power.

Who would argue, even now, with the noble intentions of the 1987 Constitution’s framers? In the immediate aftermath of the long dark night of social injustice and oppression under martial law, they mandated the novel provision that 20 percent of the House of Representatives would be composed of members of the long-marginalized sectors—the farmers, fishers, urban poor, laborers, indigenous peoples, and the like. This provision was the heart of the social-justice bent of the Constitution, a formal recognition that the crushing socioeconomic inequality that prevailed was anathema to the country’s democratic aspirations, and hence must be addressed by institutionally giving voice and space to those rendered invisible and unheard.

But beginning in 1995, when the enabling law on the party-list system was passed, various unscrupulous sectors saw the fresh, untested platform as a backdoor to joining or reinserting themselves into the ruling political order. Some others seized at the idea of pushing for civic or religious advocacies that would not qualify as coming from the underrepresented sectors, of which the law had mentioned only 12: labor, peasant, fisherfolk, urban poor, indigenous cultural communities, elderly, handicapped, women, youth, veterans, overseas workers and professionals. But then the reward was immense: Each party-list representative would enjoy, for starters, the same P70-million pork barrel allocation then being received by regular members of the House.

In time, the party-list system became more absurd by the year; hundreds of obscure groups purportedly representing just about anything filed for accreditation and jostled for a piece of the pie. A September 2012 report in this paper listed “health promoters, aviation advocates, athletes and hobbyists, entrepreneurs, former drug users, ex-military renegades, school dropouts, and even foreign-exchange dealers” as among 289 groups that sought accreditation with the Commission on Elections to participate in the 2013 polls.

Multimillionaires fronted for many of these groups. One, 1-AsalPartylist, claimed to represent the urban poor, but its nominee lived in Corinthian Gardens. The most egregious example happened in 2010, when Ang Galing Pinoy, said to be a group of security guards and tricycle drivers, won a seat in the House. Its representative was Mikey Arroyo, a son of former president Gloria Macapagal Arroyo and former holder of the seat that she now occupies, who had a declared net worth of P95 million and could not have possibly been a security guard or tricycle driver in his life.

This was the group Mr. Duterte alluded to when he said that the system had been abused and only those with money could win: “Inabuso lahat yan…  Ang nananalo ay yong may pera. Representing what? The security guards?” The situation was made worse by a 2013 Supreme Court decision stating that “parties or organizations… do not need to represent ‘any marginalized and underrepresented’ sector” to be able to take part in the party-list elections, essentially opening the floodgates to even more sham groups and poseurs.

Given the rot infecting the system, is it right to abolish it altogether? Perhaps revisiting the framers’ original intent is in order. Sectors such as teachers, youth, peasants and women that have made up the progressive representation in the House, for instance, have proven the value of the system by their significant contributions to pushing for laws, or at the very least raising public consciousness, on such issues as electricity reform, better labor conditions, public health and freedom of information.

Filipinos genuinely in the margins still need the party-list system. Reform, not abolish, it to make it truly work for them—and for the country, which needs to hear their voices.