President Arroyo will not be able to easily ride out this crisis of confidence because she is perceived to be directly responsible for a deeper economic and political crisis besetting the country.
By Antonio Tujan Jr.
IBON Research Director
Posted by Bulatlat
IBON Features – President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo was grossly mistaken if she thought that she could ride out the electoral protests when she stole the elections in 2004. She is again grossly mistaken to think that she could ride out the current bigger protests. This time she is facing the combination of the political crisis created by the failed 2004 elections and the general mass unrest over economic and political issues.
Some quarters claim that President Arroyo mishandled the jueteng scandal and the Hello Garci tapes. But her administration had tried to handle these issues as best it could, the point, however, is that no matter how well it handles these issues, evidence can no longer be suppressed and the past has come back to haunt her regime.
Arroyo had already been implicated in previous jueteng scandals even before she came to Malacañang starting with her Pampanga connections that current accusations could not easily be dismissed from the people’s perception. On the other hand, jueteng is a permanent feature of the political economy of Philippine government that enforcement authorities from the President down to the mayors and police chiefs are easily suspect. Thus jueteng is a standard issue against the incumbent in the course of factional battles.
‘Flashing the badge’ of authority
But the Arroyo government’s penchant for “flashing the badge” of authority in dismissing the jueteng issue takes the cake in hiding behind usurped power from the glare of accountability and demand for transparency. This is the line of action her police officials took in declaring jueteng as no longer existent in the Congressional inquiry. This is the same recourse that Arroyo took in refusing to acknowledge the Hello Garci tapes.
”Flashing the badge” is not the track of incompetence but the only recourse left for the guilty in the face of evidence and public opinion.
The tactic of “flashing the badge” only works for the disempowered or the supporters, but since March, IBON surveys have shown that the majority of Filipinos already want Arroyo out. Subsequent surveys by other outfits confirm this worsening trend for President Arroyo. These survey results should have warned her that “flashing the badge” when the jueteng and Hello Garci scandals broke out would fail terribly. But Arroyo hardly ever listens to surveys just as she hardly ever listens to the people.
Forced to publicly accept that the Hello Garci tapes were indeed genuine, Arroyo takes another favored track of “flashing the badge” — “I am the President and let me continue my good work.” What she does not realize, or would like people to forget, is that Hello Garci is not about jueteng or a Monica Lewinsky scandal or a Watergate. The issue goes to the heart of her legitimacy as President– an issue that had long been under question and remains unresolved legally or politically. Legally, because the Supreme Court simply dumped the petition of Fernando Poe’s widow, and politically because the opposition continues to ride on the public opinion shown in the surveys that Poe won the election.
The other, deeper crisis
But Arroyo will not be able to easily ride out this crisis of confidence because she is perceived to be directly responsible for a deeper economic and political crisis besetting the country. The masses are in dire straits in the face of increasing joblessness, shrinking incomes, and higher costs of living. Mass starvation and severe malnutrition, especially in the countryside and among the displaced, is an emerging phenomenon in several areas of the country. The thinning ranks of the middle class are increasingly threatened with shrinking incomes and inflation eating into their fixed salaries. Businessmen groan under the impact of globalization and foreign competition in the face of economic crisis, but blame politics for their woes instead of the policies implemented by Arroyo and previous administrations under IMF-World Bank prescriptions.
In an attempt to derail popular opposition, the authorities have been behind a massive plot of assassinations of leaders of people’s organizations, cause-oriented groups, feisty media practitioners, human rights lawyers and socially active religious leaders. The timing of the assassinations has coincided with the upsurge of opposition and threat of a people power uprising against Arroyo from the death of Fernando Poe in December last year to the present. These are meant to send a clear message that even church leaders, media practitioners and lawyers perceived to be defenders of the people and of civil liberties are not immune from attack and should therefore just shut up.
As usual, Arroyo acted as though such monstrosity to democracy does not exist until she was challenged to respond to successive killings of journalists. But the popular opposition was not derailed in having to secure its leaders and attend to the increasing numbers of victims, but also was not cowed by these developments. The reemerging civil liberties movement that is as strong or even stronger than the civil liberties opposition to Marcos’s suspension of the writ of habeas corpus is now a key component to a broader movement against the Arroyo regime.
Bleak future
At this point it would seem that Arroyo faces a bleak future. The issue of her electoral legitimacy cannot be easily sidelined because of a broader support created by more than a year of economic protests by people’s movements led by Bayan, KMU, KMP, Gabriela and others. It cannot easily be sidelined because she has sharpened the conflict with attacks on popular opposition thus giving birth to a stronger civil liberties movement. IBON Features / Posted by Bulatlat
