High hopes

Has the worm truly turned into a butterfly? The speech at the presidential inauguration hopefully heralds the beginning of the transformation: The candidate is working to become more presidential.

President Rodrigo Duterte’s election strategists had tapped into the rage repressed over decades of government failure to address basic needs. They stoked and fanned this anger to fever pitch by a campaign of calculated crudeness and verbal violence and turned it against political rivals, especially those in power, as the presumed sources of the current public misery, whose roots were actually planted well before their term.

The strategy succeeded brilliantly, mobilizing anonymous and unverified social media speculation to trump more rigorously-vetted social science research, projecting a sense of national crisis that demanded decisive strongman rule. This narrative baffled followers of Social Weather Stations (SWS) surveys, which reported positive approval scores for the overall performance of the administration and public morale never higher at the end of a presidential term.

The trash-talking, scorched-earth strategy, we were told, was devised only for the campaign. The authors recognized that what had proven emotionally effective for exciting and engaging voters can impede rational problem-solving, the crafting of public policies and the pursuit of good governance.

Now that he has claimed the big prize, Mr. Duterte can afford to manifest magnanimity; he no longer needs to carry such a big chip on his shoulder. Even those who have expressed grave reservations about a Duterte presidency fervently hope he will succeed. They know that the country can ill afford six years of drift or a risky rush into contentious political commitments.

Mr. Duterte assumes the presidency armed with advantages no president in recent memory has enjoyed. The broad popular support, reflected in the wide margin of victory, gives him an undisputed mandate to govern. This has also facilitated the formation of a compliant supermajority in Congress, with politicians taking the huge lead as the justification to switch parties.

Few in the incoming administration emphasize a third crucial advantage that Sonny Dominguez, appointed finance secretary, has recognized: Mr. Duterte is taking over a going concern. He inherits an economy that has averaged an annual GDP growth of 6.2 percent during the previous administration, the best performance in the region after China.

Much remains to be done, but objective observers acknowledge that the P-Noy administration made a start in addressing the concerns over systemic corruption in the bureaucracy that delayed the implementation of public-private projects. The public expects the Duterte administration to hit the ground running, especially since it does not lack projects that should gain the support of even the 60 percent of the electorate that did not vote for him.

The Duterte administration will have enough on its plate, after dealing with the inevitable complications of managing the transition period and getting its own bureaucracy up to speed.  Electoral campaigns necessarily project black-and-white differences between candidates to distinguish more sharply one’s strengths from the frailties of the others. But there is enough convergence on governance goals between outgoing and incoming administrations. This should encourage Mr. Duterte to use whatever successes the previous administration may have achieved as a platform to accelerate the completion of what it had not been able to accomplish.

After six years of preparation, the K-to-12 program, a key advocacy of the P-Noy administration, needs continuing support. Whatever his initial misgivings, Mr. Duterte has accepted, after conducting consultations with its proponents and with the appointed education secretary, Leonor Briones, that

K-to-12 may advance his own vision of how to improve the education sector. He now has the opportunity to bring behind him the Education Nation that persuaded P-Noy to pursue the K-to-12 program.

SWS surveys during the latter years of the P-Noy administration showed the areas where the “bosses” gave it a poor performance rating. An unfulfilled promise, for instance, was the enactment of a Freedom of Information Act, a law which should strengthen Mr. Duterte’s expressed advocacy for transparency and his campaign against corruption.

SWS respondents were also critical of the glacial pace in the movement of the Ampatuan massacre judicial proceedings. In a recent speech at the turnover of the Philippine National Police command in Davao City, Mr. Duterte showed himself well-versed in the problems of local government officials who use their positions, especially their control of police and security forces, for criminal purposes.

There should be other issues that those who voted for Mr. Duterte and those who did not can identify as common concerns. These include the strengthening of the Reproductive Health Law and the prosecution of the Napoles and Makati City cases.  It may be prudent for the new President to seek the harvest of low-hanging fruit around which the voters can rally, rather than on targeting controversial goals over which they can be expected to divide.

Edilberto C. de Jesus (edcdejesus@gmail.com) is professor emeritus at the Asian Institute of Management. Prof. Rofel Brion’s Tagalog translation of this column and others earlier published, together with other commentaries, are in https://secondthoughts.ph.