Fight of the decade?

By Alejandro Lichauco

ANALYSIS

05/08/2008

GMA has survived and outlived just about every book under the political sun thrown against her by those who want her out — from corruption, illegitimacy and impeachment to hunger and the food crisis.

No administration in living memory has been exposed and subjected to the kind and range of political assault as this government has been, and yet it continues to stay in the face of the overwhelming popular rage against it. The people’s rage that brought the Marcos and Estrada government down is nothing compared to the rage directed at this regime, and yet it stays.

From where does its staying power come? From a number of factors but the two most obvious are (1) an impotent opposition and (2) the support that she continues to command from the military as a whole.

The impotence of the opposition has been highlighted by the food and hunger crisis. Everyone is complaining about that and complaining about it even more than they complain about corruption and this government’s perceived illegitimacy. That crisis should be the opposition’s supreme moment — the moment when the opposition displays its quality and mettle by providing the nation with a comprehensive explanation of how the crisis came about and an equally comprehensive proposal of how that crisis may be brought to an end.

But the opposition apparently doesn’t have anything to say about the most important crisis ever to have overtaken the nation. By this time, the opposition should have presented a resolution articulating its views on the crisis and how it proposes to end it or even just relieve it. But nothing.

At the very least, the opposition should have presented a resolution by now calling on Congress to meet in extraordinary session solely to deliberate on the crisis and to come out with an alternative economic program in response to it.

That was exactly what Congress did in 1968, when, at the initiative of the House under the leadership of then Speaker Jose Laurel Jr., Congress met in special session to pass House Joint Resolution 2 in response to the economic crisis that raged then. That document presented a comprehensive indictment of the policies then being pursued by the Marcos government and proposed a set of alternative policies which explicitly repudiated the economic policies of the Marcos government. It was nothing less than a congressional revolt against the ongoing policies of the Marcos government and one may add that it was the first of its kind in the history of this country.

That’s the sort of political action that the public expects from this Congress — or at least from the opposition today.

What would it cost for the leadership of the opposition to at least call for an extraordinary session of Congress for the purpose of deliberating on the food and hunger crisis and crafting an alternative approach to that crisis?

But nothing. It seems that the best which the opposition can think about is to revive the moves for Congress to amend the Constitution for the purpose of converting the country into a federal state.

And so, with that kind of opposition, GMA can only stay — corrupt and illegitimate as her regime might be.

Which explains the second factor behind GMA’s staying power. And that is the continued support she commands from the military in the face of the overwhelming popular rage against her government. The military is aware that it can’t govern and so better to support the sitting administration than withdraw support from it and invite sheer chaos. The military by now should be perfectly aware that the opposition can’t govern either and that ousting GMA therefore isn’t the answer to the problem of governance.

Time and again, one hears the familiar response of the military to those who are pushing a military takeover. And that response simply is that there isn’t any plausible alternative in sight and that the military doesn’t want to commit the same mistake that it committed when it replaced Erap with GMA.

To the question then posed by the title of this piece, the answer would seem to be that the AFP will continue to support GMA in the face of the overwhelming popular rage against her, in the face of the hunger and even creeping starvation, as long as the leadership of the military doesn’t see any credible alternative to GMA.

Of course, nothing can prevent the military leadership from eventually deciding to remove GMA and a useless, unproductive opposition as well and either to govern directly, as the military has done in Thailand and as the military did in South Korea and Indonesia or install a group of civilians who would govern with the military.

At the moment, however, that doesn’t seem likely unless the popular rage against GMA becomes so overwhelmingly irresistible as to compel the military leadership either to act on its own and govern directly or install a civilian government of its choice, on the perception that because of the hunger and ceaseless increase in prices, the people will accept whatever the military decides rather than continue living with GMA and the political pros increasingly perceived to have made a mess of things or who have no answer to the mess.

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