Game of Thrones ‘democracy’
Four days after the Philippine Congress — headed by an unabashed Duterte apologist — voted to strike down the franchise renewal application of broadcasting giant ABS-CBN, Rodrigo Roa Duterte spoke and claimed ‘victory’ for his administration:
Kaya [kung] ako mamatay, mahulog ‘yung eroplano, putangina, I am very happy. Alam mo bakit? Sabi ko without declaring martial law, I dismantled the oligarchy that controlled the economy of the Filipino people. Sinira ko ‘yung mga tao na humahawak sa ekonomiya at umiipit. At hindi nagbabayad.
His fanatics, ever loyal to him and his ‘creed,’ lapped it up and amplified the false narrative that the denial of the network’s franchise renewal is neither a dent on the Philippine economy nor a cloaked assault on press freedom, but a blowback on the oligarchy.
To say otherwise betokened complicity to oligarchic abuse.
What now occurs in the ‘House of the People,’ however, sheds light on a contradiction.
Barely three months since the House of Representatives voted 70 against 11 to deny with finality ABS-CBN’s franchise, another sarswela is heating up within the chamber’s ‘august’ halls — between two legislators, backed with lieutenants who are exceptional in brown-nosing, who are vying for the House’s throne.
Lord Allan Velasco and Alan Peter Cayetano placed Victorian qualities (of sycophancy) on their individual pursuits to outrace and outdo each other in the gallop for the House Speakership.
Cayetano had his unwavering, unflappable loyalty to Duterte as his main ticket for the position, while Velasco earned the graces of Duterte’s political party (PDP-Laban), Duterte’s daughter Sara, and Duterte’s ally and patron Gloria Arroyo.
In statistical terms, both had claimed to ‘have the numbers,’ implying that a good number of representatives ‘decided’ to back either of them to lead the House. Congressman Mike Defensor, a Cayetano ally and one of the legislators who staunchly led the ABS-CBN franchise denial on the premise that a vote against the franchise augured ‘a vote to stop the oligarchy,’ illustrated this further:
… the speakership is not an appointed decision, it was a collective decision. Alan Cayetano got 266 votes so that responsibility is not only a responsibility to the President or to anyone who he made a gentleman’s agreement with or to all of us who comprise Congress so the person who would want to lead the House should also assert himself and lead Congress.
‘That responsibility is not only a responsibility to the President…’
This ‘responsibility’ not only led to Duterte clinching an amiable ‘gentleman’s agreement’ to pacify his two stooges in the House, but also reached an extent where Duterte was forced to enjoin the two candidates in a negotiation in Malacañang amidst a pandemic, and where three Cayetanos — two legislators and one senator — hosted a private meeting with Duterte to settle and tilt the speakership rift, evidently, to their favor.
Question: should the President even meddle within the House’s speakership battle?
In the first place, one basic lecture on politics and governance would tell anyone that the legislature is a separate and co-equal branch of government.
In the government’s own Official Gazette, the delineations are clear: under the Philippine republican democracy with a presidential form of government, “power is equally divided among its three branches: executive, legislative, and judicial.”
The 1987 Constitution is also clear about the ‘co-equal’ branches of government.
Moreover, the Gazette entry continued, one basic corollary in this presidential form of government is the principle of separation of powers.
The official definition of this much-vaunted political principle does not include a Chief Executive’s ‘responsibility’ to mediate any squabbles over the Speakership, as Defensor implied.
In hindsight, the same House of Representatives that so grotesquely denied the franchise of a network because it purportedly encapsulated the oligarchy’s rule in this country now figures in an overtly dramatic, time-consuming, and tax-funded hogwash to choose who among the two competing Duterte loyalists — backed by well-oiled political machineries, hailing and abetted by equally loyal ‘representatives’ who also came from that same set of caciques whose class ABS-CBN allegedly embodied — should take over the leadership throne of a supposedly co-equal branch of government working under the auspices of ‘separation of powers.’
A classic Game of Thrones narrative set against the backdrop of Filipino ‘democratic’ politics.
Cayetano and Velasco did not come from ordinary, marginalized families — and neither their supporters. Regardless of the Constitution’s clear definition of co-equal branches of government, both of them brokered a ‘gentleman’s agreement’ of a 15–21 term-sharing deal for the speakership under the watch and dictates of a budding dictator in Malacañang, the Executive’s seat: President Duterte himself.
This is how the Philippines’ supposed democracy unfolds itself in the time of Dutertismo.
But paltry altercations between politicians and elected officials over high positions in government with a beholden thrust on the current president is not unique to Duterte and the Cayetano-Velasco ‘tug of war.’
Other than the term-sharing bargain, a pact never seen before in the House of Representatives, two (or three) groveling figures aiming to be in the sitting president’s good graces to pull in a better chance of obtaining, say, the House speakership has always been a familiar scene in a country touting itself to be a ‘republican democracy.’
Furthermore, placing the impetus of choice for leadership positions in the legislative under the influence, possible support, or dictates of Malacañang’s current boarder is an indictment on how democratic the country’s political system actually is, a clear contradiction from the spirit of the democratic fibers that supposedly shroud the co-equal branches of our government, and a stark distortion of democracy itself as Filipinos know it.
Yet, this kalakaran does not start or end with Duterte and his regime.
The broad strokes within the Cayetano-Velasco fratricidal war for the throne traces itself to the very roots of the political system that exists even in the era of tokhang, the system that political scientist Benedict Anderson himself called ‘cacique democracy.’
Political scientist Dante C. Simbulan eloquently capsulized the contradictions of Philippine democracy with these lines from The Modern Principalia, the book that sprang from his 1963 doctoral dissertation on the ‘socio-economic’ elite of the country:
This is the kind of “democracy” that the oligarchy and their apologists often say we have in the Philippines. It is a “democracy” devoid of substance, a façade conveniently used by the elite to camouflage their monopoly of power, a democracy of the plutocrats or the wealthy few, if there is such a thing.
Our democracy’s claim to fame lies within the realm of civil, political rights — which Duterte even tramples upon with a browbeating measure of insolence — and not with what is actually democracy’s main tenet: the notion of power that lies within the people.
Even with the oft-repeated claim that the globe’s longstanding ‘democracy,’ the United States (with the institution of its democracy in 1776), ‘bequeathed’ the notion of democratic governance to Asia’s first democracy ironically upon the penetration of a colonial power into a newly-freed nation of colonial subjects, the people who constituted, steered, and monopolized that similar democracy hailed from Simbulan’s plutocrats — not from those who lived on poverty’s edge.
Since the dawn of colonialism in this archipelago, it has always been the principalia — the class wrought by wealth, and the power that comes with those riches — who successfully coveted positions of great prestige within society, political or not. Even religious power, especially under the Spanish friars’ close watch, relied on societal stature.
As a neocolonial state besieged by two imperialist powers in the age of ‘neoliberal globalization,’ nothing has changed, even with what sociologist Nicole Curato elucidated in A Duterte Reader as the “disruption and perpetuation” of elite democracy by the rise of Dutertismo.
Of course, the ‘elite’ encompasses even the outside of political boundaries. In Elite: An Anthology, Filipino-Chinese author Caroline Hau denotes:
“Elite” correlates wealth, power, influence, status, education, ethnicity, leadership, talent, and lifestyle. Their sources of wealth, power, and prestige may differ, and they may have multiple, competing interests.
In short, the purported ‘democracy’ that runs through the cloth of Philippine democracy is that of a plutocratic, elitist nature, where the concept of edge emanates from one’s social privileges, rank, or clout brought about by class, wealth, and power.
It is the same cacique democracy that distorted the constitutional division of Malacañang and Batasang Pambansa, the notion which perpetuated the wicked notion that the president could and should intervene in matters involving a supposed co-equal branch of government, and which gave birth to the rise and contradictions unfolding within the Duterte regime itself — all because the reliance of such fragile democracy to maintain itself is shaken by the elite, the plutocrats, the ruling class — the same social class where the Dutertes, Velasco, Cayetano, Arroyo and half of the House of Representatives and their allies all hailed from.
The folly of Philippine democracy, which not even two EDSA uprisings had ameliorated, is its very nature sewn from the cloth of the oligarchy.
Our ‘democracy’ is a pretentious system ran by the very same phantom it so passionately drives to overthrow: the specter of oligarchic (mis)rule, the same platform upon which the Cayetano-led House premised the denial of ABS-CBN’s franchise renewal only since a Lopez owned the network — notwithstanding the fact that the Congress and the regime that wants it shuttered also exemplifies (to the highest bidder) the oligarchic ghost it claims to exorcise.
While it appears ridiculous, embarrassing, and callous in the face of a raging pandemic and loss of livelihood for thousands, the Cayetano-Velasco Game of Thrones tussle for the speaker’s throne is merely emblematic of the rotten stench of oligarchic entitlement that, for so long, defined the route taken by this country’s ‘democratic’ system, even under a political dispensation that rode on the vow to diminish the oligarchy’s rule over this semi-colonial, semi-feudal nation.
The next scenes of this House drama are yet to unfold, but it ascertains one important truism about Philippine ‘republican democracy’: political power grows out of the pork barrel.
To break this ignominious spell of sham democracy, the people is left with no other recourse than seize back the very same power democracy so naturally inculcates within their grasp.
In order for Philippine democracy to rejuvenate itself, the tug-of-war for power should be waged by the citizenry against warring but united blocs of the oligarchy hell-bent on perpetuating themselves within their hierarchy within this democracy of contradictions.
The oligarchic die is cast.
