For Filipinos to turn towards a more democratic national vision in the upcoming May 2022 presidential election, they must first glance back at history and restore the fading memory of the 1986 People Power revolt that toppled the Marcos dictatorship.
George Santayana’s well-worn maxim that the past will come back to haunt us if we don’t pay heed to it meaningfully applies to the Philippines. Failure to remember the abuses and venality of the Marcos regime has become a defining challenge for Filipinos as they struggle to preserve and strengthen democracy in their country.
There are two rationales why People Power has tumbled from its early optimism for lasting change to its estrangement from the hearts and minds of wide swaths of Philippine society. One is that the passage of time (36 years) has effaced much of the Filipino people’s collective evocation of that singular event.
A second rationale is the disillusion arising from the trail of disappointment left behind in the years following People Power. Once the enthusiasm of Marcos’s overthrow wore off, the realities of governing the Philippines came on twice as strong for the liberal democrats headed by Corazon Aquino.
For a dozen reasons, some of them unpremeditated, some of them calculated, the liberal democrats could not live up to People Power’s promise. Those liberal democrats made the mistake of assuming that People Power and all the possibilities it was supposed to entail were historical inevitabilities.
In the Philippines, the stubborn continuum of the country’s structural weaknesses in the thirty years since People Power showed that there was a thin line between democracy and authoritarianism. Hence, the 2016 election of Rodrigo Duterte thrust Philippine democracy in the rear-view mirror for much of his administration.
Now that Filipinos are mercifully approaching the end of the Duterte government they are faced with the decision of a generation: to replenish and restore the organic unity and solidarity of a democratic Philippines or succumb to the malaise of a corrupt, autocratic, personalistic, and repressive governance.
To put it simply, Filipinos have no choice. This coming May, it’s democracy or bust. To regress backwards into the moral void of authoritarianism is for Filipinos to sit by and watch their country decompose into a sorry state they thought they would never experience again.
In a word, there is absolutely no place for any shape or form of authoritarianism in the Philippines. That is why Filipinos must not allow themselves to be fooled by all the colorful signs, slogans, banners, and speeches made by certain aspiring candidates who are concealing their anti-democratic colors from the voting public.
The most notable culprit dressed in sheep’s clothing is Bongbong Marcos, the juvenile delinquent child of the former dictator, Ferdinand Marcos. What Bongbong lacks in political savvy and skill he tries to make up for it with youthful countenance and name brand recognition amongst Marcos loyalists and other Filipinos who are oblivious of the family’s deplorable political past.
If there were any justice, the overindulged and mendacious son should not be able to ascend in the footsteps of his kleptocratic father. And yet, here we are, the undeserving political heir to a dictator may be just a few months from being able to continue on from where his felonious father left off as president.
Those Filipinos old enough to remember the Marcos dictatorship can testify to the dire state of affairs in which Ferdinand Marcos shamelessly put the interests of himself and his family before the country’s. Under his reign, the Philippines was beset by widespread poverty, human rights violations, political polarization, greed and graft in various institutions, and the suppression of basic democratic civil rights.
Filipinos cannot put another Marcos in power. They cannot see the constitutional finality of the bloody Duterte presidency only to permit a travesty of a politician in Bongbong Marcos to assume the highest office in the land. For Marcos to replace Duterte is the same as taking one step forward and three steps back.
The resurrection of the Marcos family is the reason why the popular miracle of People Power cannot be left unappreciated and neglected despite its shortcomings and imperfections.
The People Power phenomenon taught Filipinos that they don’t have to be defined by pain, suffering, frustration, and acquiescence. From that extraordinary episode they learned that they themselves can do something exemplary and constructive about their condition.
Ultimately, the starry-eyed spectacle of People Power accentuated Filipinos’ national identity. This transformational event was an inspirational gesture of autonomy; it proved that Filipinos’ themes were finally their own once again, that they could take the fate of their country into their own hands and not be so easily subject to outsider influence or manipulation.
Indeed, there was little that any outsider could do but watch the locals play out the drama that was of their own creation. The late, great national artist Nick Joaquin wrote, as People Power unraveled itself before his very eyes, “For once we were not only in on the making of history, but we ourselves were making the history.”
ALLEN GABORRO
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