Today’s stakes

The day before the start of the official campaign period, we proposed the following reading of the 2013 elections: “The fate of reform hangs in the balance.” The mandate from 2010 was clear: Clean up the mess left behind by the previous administration. But the campaign against corruption, while making headway in some areas and wowing financial analysts abroad, is a long way from becoming a complete success. For that to happen, more government reforms and forward-looking initiatives need to be sown and—crucially—take root.

The long struggle to pass reproductive health legislation, to give one example, is far from over; the possibility that a hostile Congress would defund or underfund the newly passed law is real. The transparency initiatives that have helped build credit-rating agencies’ confidence, to give another, need a few more years to become fully integrated into the practices of political institutions; the wrong set of elected officials can get in the way of integration.

It is unfortunate, then, that at both the national and local levels the message on continuing reform has been thoroughly mixed. “The issues brought to the fore in 2010 have been muddled; there are no clear choices between the main political alliances; there is a palpable lack of political idealism,” we wrote on Feb. 11.

What explains the muddling?

One cause has been the apotheosis of political dynasties. “More than in any other election since Edsa, the issue of political dynasties is front and center today; in large part this is because of the narrowest pool of viable senatorial candidates since 1995,” we argued on April 29. Will enough legislators in the 16th Congress muster the will to pass even a “smaller-scale” antidynasty bill? That, we argued on April 12, would have “the effect, at least as far as national positions are concerned, of decongesting the pathways to political power”—but we aren’t holding our breath.

Another factor, very much related to the first, is the use of political arithmetic that puts a premium on name recall rather than national achievement. “The work in the Senate can look tedious or decidedly small at times, but in fact, the Senate deals on a daily basis with national-interest issues and their wide-ranging ramifications,” we said on Feb. 14. “All these, and more, require a Senate that is not only genuinely solicitous of the general welfare or truly independent of the Executive, but also, unmistakably, competent.” This discussion of Nancy Binay’s lack of qualification was an echo of the Feb. 2 editorial, where we called out Bam Aquino’s credentials as “sorely wanting.” In a direct reference to the young Aquino’s I-look-like-Ninoy strategy, we pointed out the obvious: “Even his uncle Ninoy had a fairer estimation of himself when he chose to start his political career as mayor of lowly Concepcion town in Tarlac.”

A third reason. Many candidates spent very little time on high ground, and too much time in the gutter. The now-notorious “Morning Face-off” between Manila mayoral candidates Fred Lim and Erap Estrada “plumbed a new low in political discourse,” we wrote on March 15. A few days later, we had occasion to remark on Ernie Maceda’s radio challenge to President Aquino to dance Gangnam-style: “Maceda’s inane challenge is symptomatic of politics not only as entertainment, but as mindless entertainment.”

There is a fourth factor. By choosing to focus on the single issue of reproductive health, the Catholic Church lost precious credibility, at the exact time we needed it to serve as it has served the nation before: as a force for social justice.

“One institution could have made a difference by swinging the debate back to the substantive issues,” we argued on May 8. “The Church could have raised the flag for social justice, better governance, the war on poverty and corruption, this government’s seeming inability to consistently walk the talk on its ‘daang matuwid’ mantra, etc.”

Instead, and as we can see in the choices of the so-called White Vote, single-issue politics reared its head. “It would have been something, a real advance in lay involvement in politics, if the White Vote produced a list of candidates that did not slavishly reflect the whispered views of the Catholic bishops,” we wrote on April 15.

If voters can rise above these distractions and elect true reformists, authentic anticorruption advocates, propoor progressives, they will prove superior to leaders happy to muddle the issues or simply muddle through.