Post Election notes

 Today I’m heading back to Manila to compile the report with the other PIOM delegations, and then returning to the U.S. on Sunday. I don’t think there was any national-level credibility-shattering fraud. We observed fairly placid polls, at least by Philippine standards. The people I’ve talked to so far report the same. So far, the press seems to be corroborating my own observations.

 
There have been incidents of post-election violence. A bit north of here, in Mindanao’s Compostela Valley, its terribly unequal plantation belt, NPA guerillas killed 4 soldiers and 2 poll workers who were transporting memory chips. Call it the AES-era analogue of burning a ballot box. I’m curious if there anything particular at stake in Maragusan, or if the attack was simply an NPA show of force.

We’ve been hosted by a Philippine NGO, the People’s Movement for Change, or Pagbabago. I asked them what they thought about the election. Firstly, they believed the Aquino victory was anticipated. Second, Arroyo is going to retain substantial power, in part through her appointments to the judiciary and in part by the fact that her allies will likely retain control of Congress.  They also think that U.S. backing of Aquino was key to the outcome. That came as a surprise. They claimed (IMHO plausibly) that the U.S. Embassy set up meetings between Aquino and various domestic and foreign players, which secured the funds and vote banks needed to cement victory. It is true that the candidates regularly met Embassy officials.

If the national election outcome was foreordained — and if little substantive is likely to change with the new administration, given that its social base is basically the same as th old government   — then what is the point of monitoring the polls? The best answer is that there is value in documenting all the pre-election nastiness that goes down out the rural areas. Hopefully, it will draw international attention to the intimidation that routinely occurs in non-election times.

Comments

[Doug M.]

First, let me say that this is a great series. I've really enjoyed it and I hope you have more to say.

Second, I think there's another aspect, and that's the expectations game. I've seen a lot of this in Africa. If elections are consistently dirty and regularly stolen, people get used to that. If, on the other hand, there's a string of clean-ish elections, people get used to that too. I don't know if some political scientist has tried to quantify this, but it does seem to be a real effect.

So helping to make an election clean -- or at least cleaner than the last one -- can have effects that go beyond documenting the nastiness. All of this is very context-sensitive, but on average you're likely to be raising the bar, even if just a little.

Doug M.

[Men Sta. Ana]

For Suresh,

I wish I had met you during your stay in the Philippines. I belong to a group called Action for Economic Reforms (www.aer.ph). Your observations are stimulating and even amusing (especially the one about the guerillas wearing Crocs; what indeed explains this?). The Philippine situation is very complex and the post-election tasks to rebuild institutions are gargantuan, but am hopeful that reforms, even if incremental, will happen under the administration of President-elect Aquino. I do not subscribe to the Pagbabago analysis, which exaggerates the role of outside forces. Noynoy Aquino won convincingly, despite the many barriers he faced. I wish we could continue exchanging ideas re the Philippine political economy. Men Sta. Ana