In his 1958 novel “The Leopard,” author Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa wrote that “everything needs to change, so everything can stay the same.” If ever there was a literary quote that perfectly summed up the 2019 senatorial elections in the Philippines, it was Lampedusa’s.
Any and every national election, presidential or congressional, is supposed to be a template for change at least to a certain extent. The bottom line for such exercises in democracy is the potential for new blood being injected into the political body and the guarantee that the people’s will is done.
The 2019 senatorial election is a typical specimen of how those expectations become a contradiction in terms. Typical that is, for the Philippines.
Firstly, the idea that the people’s will is being done through this most recent election is misleading. Yes, voters are given their democratic right to pick and choose their favored candidates for local and national office. But they do so in the shadow of oppressive political machines and their freewheeling culture of media manipulation, political patronage, and financial corruption. This most undemocratic of combinations can appear to be as unscrupulous as it is opaque. However, it has served the powerful interests who have deeply invested in its perpetuation and expansion. Those powerful interests I speak of are the political and economic elites.
The socio-political reality for Filipinos going back to its colonial period under the Spanish is that not a decade has gone by when they have not been subjected to the monopolistic tendencies of the country’s political and economic elite. In fact, we should call the Philippines for what it essentially is in terms of power relationships: in almost every respect an oligarchy.
Correspondingly, the Philippine elites have possessively commanded the nation’s economic and political systems and thus have directly influenced how the masses think and feel. For the average Filipino voter, he or she does not have free will as much as they have been basically sublimated into electing a usually popular or recognizable victor---regardless of their qualifications---who is beholden in some predetermined way to the elite.
This specific elite electoral angle is part of a historic, well-financed, and highly-sophisticated influence campaign that has paid off major dividends for its beneficiaries. It has kept the economic and political elites on top of the power hierarchy and enabled them to stand and prosper in a closed world of self-referentialism, dynastic succession, and structural dominance.
What about the 2019 fresh faces that are coming onto the Philippine political scene? Surely the stunning electoral wins of such “giant slayers”---as one online publication labeled them---as Vico Sotto, Isko Moreno, Benjamin Magalong just to name a few, gives Filipinos reasons to be optimistic.
These so-called giant slayers were barely given a chance to upset their establishment opponents. But so they did, thereby giving Filipinos hope that there was perhaps some light at the end of the political tunnel, that the 2019 midterm elections could be hailed as the beginning of real change for representative democracy in the Philippines.
Remember however, the quote at the start of this article: “everything needs to change, so everything can stay the same.” In the context of the Philippines and its history, Lampedusa’s quote means that while on the surface the 2019 midterms have ushered in several new faces and infused revitalizing political blood, they have left the old management in place to reinforce elite rule. In short, the 2019 midterms have made it less likely that reform-minded Filipinos will see a fundamentally transparent, meritocratic, bottom-up society for the foreseeable future.
Filipinos can celebrate the Morenos, the Sottos, and the Magalongs of the post-2019 midterm Philippine political world who have put the idea of change front and center. But they should remember the old saying: “Be careful what you ask for. You might just get it.”
It was comparatively easy to win their respective insurgent campaigns. But now these political climbers have to govern effectively in order to bring about necessary and lasting change. And they must do so in the face of reactionary headwinds generated by the economic and political elites who will do anything and everything in their power to prevent their success.
The odds are not exactly in the reformists’ favor. But I wish them the best of luck anyway.
ALLEN GABORRO
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