Ghosts of elections past November 6, 2006

MY ATTENTION WAS DRAWN TO SOMEthing Gabriel Claudio, the presidential adviser for political affairs, said last week. He told the opposition not to gloat over the defeat of the people’s initiative petition for Charter change as the game wasn’t over yet. The administration, he said, was all set to get back at the opposition by thrashing it in the elections next year. “Whether the elections are senatorial or parliamentary, the administration will have the advantage of a nationwide political machinery eager for vindication or revenge.”

Can this happen?

Well, if we can keep the elections reasonably clean—and that is one humongous if—the opposite is more likely to. Claudio is whistling in the wind, a (futile) effort to keep spirits up amid the Halloween horrors along the way. As things stand right now, the administration looks headed for a debacle of epic proportions, the likes of which have not been seen since the senatorial elections of November 1971. For the benefit of those who do not read their history and have been repeating it like a bad karma, what happened then was this:

Those elections were preceded a few months earlier by the bombing of the Liberal Party miting de avance at Plaza Miranda on Aug. 21, 1971. Two grenades were lobbed onto the stage which carried the weight of the entire Liberal slate, excluding Ninoy Aquino. Thankfully no candidate died, although several were hurt; and Jovito Salonga, the most badly wounded—his body peppered by more than a hundred pieces of sharpnel—cheated death only by the skin of his teeth. It would be one of this country’s richest ironies—some might even say, it is proof of the existence of God—that Salonga, whom no one thought would live long from his near-fatal wounds, has outlived most of his contemporaries. Everybody naturally attributed the villainous deed to the villainous Ferdinand Marcos.

Its result was the massacre of the administration party, the Nacionalista, at the polls. Only one Nacionalista senatorial candidate managed to squeeze through. Salonga, who never campaigned as he was recovering from his wounds in a hospital well up to election time in November, ended up No. 1. Salonga, of course, had been a consistent top performer in senatorial elections, but his prodigious lead over all the others had sympathy vote writ large all over it. As well indeed as the runaway victory of the Liberal Party candidates.

As far as I know, only twice in our postwar history have we transcended the so-called “personality” or “ward” or “trapo“ politics and voted on the basis of principle rather than money or charisma. That was the first, the “snap elections” of February 1986 was the second. It takes that intense a drama or shocking a tragedy to lift us off our rut, or up our butt. After that, Marcos seriously began to lay down the brickwork for martial law, which had hitherto just been one of his options. He realized that even if he could change the Charter to allow him to run again, his future at the polls—given particularly that Ninoy waited in the wings—was dim.

The parallels are there for history to repeat itself, this time as blessing rather than as curse. The elections of 1971 were about Marcos, the elections of 2007 will be about Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo. Both were/are preceded by an event that has rocked or shocked a nation that is no stranger to violently shifting tectonic political plates or to political Halloween, or Friday the 13th—take your pick of B horror movies. The elections of 1971 were preceded by the Plaza Miranda bombing, the elections of 2007 are preceded by the “Hello Garci” tape.

There are differences, of course. The interval between the mayhem is longer today than it was then—close to a couple of years this time as compared to only a few months then. And true enough, this country’s memory is short. And as drama or shock value goes, few things can top bombing a stage that’s propping up pretty much the entire opposition slate. It looked almost like the ending of “The Godfather,” with Michael Corleone wiping out his Family’s enemies to a man. But as gravity goes, the “Hello Garci” tape goes deeper than the bombing of Plaza Miranda. Marcos was at least the legitimate president when he was presumed to have committed the crime of trying to vaporize his enemies. Gloria is not: Her crime precisely is not being so.

The people may have gotten exhausted from having exerted themselves once too often to get rid of a bad president, they’ve reconciled themselves with just trying to survive a fake one. But they haven’t stopped being pissed off. Never mind the surveys, just go to your local neighborhood store or wet market and listen to the talk there. And this forgetful country has no lack of reminders of what exactly the “Hello Garci” tape means. The bones of the dead are piling up, the abuses (such as attempting to unseat the completely legitimate mayor of Makati) are coming faster, and as everyone knows—this one the Social Weather Stations has given a patina of scientific truth—the poor are hungry. You steal votes, you’ll steal food.

It takes passion and energy for people to go out into the streets to oust a tyrant or a fake leader. It takes only, to paraphrase Claudio, a public eager for restitution and justice to drag carcass to the nearest polling booth to blot out a scourge in their lives. The 2007 elections will be about GMA in exactly the same way that the 1971 elections were about Marcos. We count the votes right, they will have the same results.

As I said, that is one very big if. But that’s another story, best left for tomorrow.

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We’re back in Makati. Stop the Killings Bar Tour, 7th leg, Tuesday, Nov. 7, Capones, G/F Fraser Place, Valero St., Salcedo Village. Lyn Sherman, Session Road, and Mojofly will sing your blues away.

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