The 2016 presidential election has two similarities with the 1992 election. One similarity is the number of candidates for the position of president of the Philippines. The other similarity has to do with the blessing given by the outgoing Chief Executive to one of the contestants.
There were seven candidates in the presidential election held 24 years ago. They were Ramon Mitra (the Speaker of the House of Representatives), Fidel Ramos (the Secretary of National Defense), Jovito Salonga (the Senate President), Miriam Defensor-Santiago, Eduardo Cojuangco Jr., Salvador Laurel and Imelda Romualdez-Marcos. With the recent approval by the Supreme Court of Grace Poe’s petition, there are five candidates for president in this year’s election.
The 1992 and 2016 elections are the two post-World War II elections with the largest number of candidates. The number of candidates in 1992 is explained by the fact that the presidential election of that year was the first real election since the 1971 election. The fact that there are five candidates in this year’s contest is less easily explained. Even a mere city mayor was led to believe that the political clime was right for a presidential run by a local official.
In the 1992 election, the three front-runners were Ramon Mitra (who trounced Fidel Ramos for the LDP nomination), Miriam Defensor-Santiago and Eduardo Conjuangco Jr. Mitra and Santiago were in the thick of contemporary politics because of the high legislative positions that they held and the possibilities for budgetary largesse that those positions offered. Cojuangco was known to have abundant financial resources of his own.
In the 2016 presidential election the three front-runners—if one is to go by the series of poll opinion surveys—are Grace Poe, Jejomar Binay and Mar Roxas. Poe and Binay are seesawing for the No.1 spot, whereas there is a consistent worrisomely significant gap between Roxas and the two front-runners.
Fidel Ramos clearly needed a game-changing development if he was to prevail against the political and financial resources of his opponents. That development came on Jan. 25, 1992, President Cory Aquino’s birthday.
Cory Aquino remained very popular five years after the Edsa Revolution, and any candidate’s hand that Cory Aquino raised—“Cory’s Choice” —was said to be sure to win. Cory had promised that on her birthday she would announce her choice as her successor. On that fateful day in 1992, she announced that Fidel Ramos was her choice for the presidency. Salonga and Mitra—two of her closest allies in the long struggle against Ferdinand Marcos—felt crushed. The rest, as the cliché goes, is history.
This brings me to the second similarity between the 1992 election and this year’s election. Fidel Ramos desperately needed Cory Aquino’s blessing—basbas in Filipino – if he were to remain in contention in the 1992 presidential election. He had hardly any political and financial resources to speak of—other than a band of hardy enthusiasts who organized the Lakas Tao (later Lakas-NUCD-UMDC) Party for him—but with Cory Aquino’s basbas he would have more than a fighting chance to get to Malacañang. Political historians and analysts are convinced that without Cory’s blessing Ramos’s candidacy would have ended in defeat at the hands of a very popular Miriam Santiago and a politically powerful Ramon Mitra.
Last year it was Mar Roxas’s turn, to desperately need a basbas: that of Cory Aquino’s son PNoy. Roxas has in fact received PNoy’s blessing. Morally speaking, PNoy really had no choice, considering that Roxas had given way to him as Liberal Party standard-bearer in the 2010 election.
One question bears asking, though. Will President Aquino’s blessing work wonders for Mar Roxas in 2016 like the earlier President Aquino’s blessing worked wonders for Fidel Ramos in 1992? Being “Cory ‘s Choice” did it for Fidel Ramos 24 years ago. Will being “Noynoy’s Choice” spell the difference for Mar Roxas?
Time – less than two months – will tell.
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