Editorial
Potemkin democracy
FACT: THE year Ferdinand Marcos was elected president of the Philippines was also the year neighboring country Singapore became an independent country. This was 1965.
When Marcos took over Malacañang, the exchange rate was P2 for one US dollar. The Philippines in the 1960s, it has often been said, was next only to Japan as the most progressive country in Asia.
That was the time when the Korean peninsula lay in ruins after a devastating civil war. Malaysia and Indonesia were infant nations only then emerging from European colonial rule. And Singapore, as its eventual leader Lee Kwan Yew likes to point out, was a tiny, backwater fishing village with no natural resources, barely functioning social institutions and a volatile ethnic mix.
Why recall these seeming trivia just one day after the country celebrated the 25th anniversary of its most historic achievement in living memory: the 1986 People Power Revolution that ousted Marcos after a 20-year reign? Chiefly because, taking offense at the sense of occasion and remembrance the country was granting the Edsa revolt on its quarter-century mark, Marcos’ son and namesake, Sen. Ferdinand “Bongbong” Marcos Jr., let loose with the observation that had his father not been driven out of power and his plans for the country thus scuttled, the Philippines would have become “another Singapore” by now. The senator uttered the statement with a straight face, so we can presume that he was serious.
The statement can be interpreted in two ways: One, Marcos Jr. has no idea that before his father ran the country to the ground, the Philippines was, in fact, ahead of Singapore. Two, he meant exactly what he said: Marcos did have plans to turn the country into “another Singapore”—the tiny, backwater fishing village of long ago—hence the Philippines’ tailspin from Asian powerhouse to Asian basket case in two decades of Marcos-style “benevolent dictatorship.”
Twenty-five years ago, in the yellow glow of Edsa, the national hilarity ensuing from Marcos Jr.’s words would have been deafening. Today, his gauntlet has been met, by and large, with a shrug. That is as good an indication as any of the long way the nation has come from the promise, euphoria and moral clarity of those resplendent, heady days.
It has been a long, dispiriting descent—made more vexing by the feeling that the trek only seems to be going around in circles. After Edsa, the Marcos-era ills didn’t flee with the dictator. They merely changed spots—or, more crudely, changed hands, and continued thriving.
“Aside from democracy, little has changed in this Southeast Asian nation of 94 million,” the Washington Post recently wrote. “It remains mired in corruption, appalling poverty, rural backwardness, chronic inequality, long-running Marxist and Muslim insurgencies and chaotic politics. A restive military often tries to undermine civilian rule.”
In other words, we dropped the ball. We failed to follow through. Judging from what we drove Marcos out for and what we now chronically complain about, the changes we were supposed to have done after the partying never seemed to have gotten off the ground. Or if they did, they soon got deflated after we lost interest—a deadlier curse, because, after Marcos, it only made scoundrels more shameless and enabled their greater mischief.
Edsa’s unfulfilled promise has lasted 25 years, and counting—wasted on and trivialized by feckless leaders who have successively failed the Filipino people; by administrations that have pillaged the coffers with an alacrity even Marcos, with his penchant for the appearance of legality, would have found grasping; and, crushingly, by a nation that, so soon after regaining its courage and pride—in a most spectacular way, and before a cheering global audience—would lose that inspiration, revert to what’s easy and mediocre, and then find itself progressively despairing at the stasis.
If what the country fought for at Edsa remains a mirage, if all we can show 25 years after that singular moment is that once-reviled people like Marcos Jr., his unrepentant mother and their perfumed pack are now back in the good graces of the country they had trashed so unapologetically not so long ago, then, let’s face it, the Philippines hasn’t achieved much.
What we have now, so far, is a Potemkin democracy—all façade, hollow core. There’s Edsa’s unfinished business for all to see.
