The usual way of looking at the 30-year period following the success of the Edsa Revolution, which the nation observes today, is the from-there-to-here approach: comparing how this country was on the day the Marcos family was flown to Hawaii with how it is on February 25, 2016. I think that that is not the most useful approach. I prefer the disaggregative approach, i.e., the approach that divides 1986-2016 into three 10-year periods and examines each of the periods from all standpoints.
First, the decade 1986-1996. This 10-year period encompassed the entire Presidency—first under the Freedom Constitution (1986-1988) and later under the 1987 Constitution (1988-1992)—of Corazon C. Aquino and two-thirds of the Presidency of Fidel V. Ramos. Cory Aquino’s Presidency was rendered very difficult by two sets of pressures. One set emanated from the need to replace an administrative structure and political system that has been in existence since September 21, 1972, when President Ferdinand E. Marcos placed this country under martial law. The other set of pressures stemmed from the feeling of the rebels against the Marcos military establishment, who called themselves RAM (Reform the Armed Forces of the Philippines Movement), that as the military component of the EDSA Revolution, they were entitled to share in the fruits of its victory.
The transition from martial law to a restored democracy involved sweeping and fractious changes in personnel and policy at all levels of the bureaucracy and the political system. Nothing could be more illustrative of this fact than the forced resignation of all the members of the Supreme Court, except two. The firm belief of the Aquino revolutionary government that the time had come to uncouple the military establishment from the nation’s politics and to send the generals and their troops back to the barracks gave rise to no less than seven—two major and five minor—attempts against the life of the Cory Aquino government.
These pressures, coupled with the onset of an energy crisis caused in part by the downgrading of the martial-law Ministry of Energy, made the Aquino administration’s life a six-year period fraught with strife and instability.
In 1996, Fidel V. Ramos was two-thirds into his term as President. The head of the martial-law Philippine Constabulary-Integrated National Police had won the 1992 election with only close to almost 24 percent of the vote, but, using his long exposure to politics and his long experience as a soldier, he managed to cobble together a government under the banner of his Lakas-NUCD Party. Senator Joseph Ejercito Estrada, the former mayor of San Juan, had won election as Vice-President.
FVR, as he came to be known, had promised the electorate that he would hit the ground running, and that he did. The Ramos Presidency quickly solved the energy shortages—though not always on terms that were considered advantageous to the government and the consumers—and he got his administration launched on an other-infrastructure program based on the BoT (build-operate-transfer) program. Thanks to his military style of doing things—staff work, strict deadlines etc.—Fidel Ramos managed to get many things done during his six years in office. In time, given the Philippine political culture, FVR made Lakas the most powerful political party. All in all, the period 1992-1996 was a period of political stability and economic accomplishment.
In the 1998 election Vice-President Estrada won over the Speaker of the House of Representatives, Jose de Venecia, by the biggest winning margin ever achieved by a Presidential candidate in the Philippines. The idol of the masa, President Estrada resolutely went against the Muslim rebels and effectively destroyed their military infrastructure. Unfortunately, Estrada was impeached on the basis of a charge of betrayal of public trust and, following a judicial coup d’etat, was driven from office. The remainder of his term was served by Vice President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo, who ran for President in 2004. Doubts about the constitutionality of her assumption of the Presidency rendered unstable Gloria Arroyo’s first years in Malacañang.
In 2006, Gloria Arroyo was into the third year of a Presidency that most Filipinos believed to have been won in the 2004 election by her main opponent, the movie idol Fernando Poe Jr. Among other indications, her taped conversations with a Mindanao-assigned Commission on Elections official, Virgilio “Garci” Garcillano—for which she issued a nationally televised “I am sorry” statement—virtually put an end to the credibility of Gloria Arroyo’s Presidency. There were extra-legal attempts to remove her from office before the end of her disputed term, but her departure from Malacañang had to await the May 2010 election.
Manuel Roxas II was widely expected to be the Liberal Party standard bearer in May 2010, but the former Secretary of Trade and Industry was prevailed upon to give way to President Cory Aquino’s son, Senator Noy Aquino, because of his persistent low poll-survey rating. Aquino was not the clear leader in the three-way race—the other candidates were former President Estrada and Senator Manuel Villar—but the outpouring of public sentiment over the August 2009 demise of his mother put Noy Aquino over the top.
The five and a half years since the 2010 election is, as the cliché goes, a matter of history. On Day One, Noy Aquino declared that he would run his Presidency on the basis of a daang matuwid. The Philippine economy has done comparatively well under his watch, GDP having grown at an average annual rate of 5.8 percent.
On February 25, 2016, exactly 30 years after that glorious day on Edsa, the nation is nearly in the homestretch of the 2016 election. Roxas and four other candidates are vying for the Presidency of the Republic.
How this country will be on February 25, 2026 will largely depend on who the Filipino people will place in Malacañang on May 9.
E-mail: rudyromero777@yahoo.com