President Arroyo's lost (political) adolescence

President Arroyo's lost (political) adolescence

By Amando Doronila

MANILA: The presidency of Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo is being hardened in the crucible of a succession of crises and demands for economic reforms seldom experienced by any other president since Manuel L. Quezon.

Four months into her presidency, Arroyo has already surmounted a rebellion of the poor manipulated by counterfeit pro-masa leaders, a legal challenge to her legitimacy by deposed President Joseph Estrada and his corps of clueless lawyers, and a setback in her first reform initiative in pressing a lame-duck Congress to pass the Omnibus Power Bill.

The failure of the power bill to clear the bicameral conference committee -- the stage where usually loose ends of House and Senate versions of the bill are hammered out -- came amid the more nasty rebellion from the Abu Sayyaf expressed in the terroristic abduction of 21 hostages from the Dos Palmas Beach Resort in Palawan.

No Filipino president has been assaulted by a similar wave of challenges in such a short a time, and these tests will show whether or not Arroyo has the nerves of steel and the will to overcome them. The Abu Sayyaf kidnapping sent tourism, at best an anemic industry, to its knees and has knocked back efforts to revive the economy that has been bouncing from one crisis to the next since the 1997 Asian financial meltdown.

So far, the President has taken these blows on the chin. She has responded to rebellions with tough ripostes. She has dispersed the rebellion with "maximum tolerance" although some would say the Armed Forces and the Philippine National Police should have been tougher and that she should have rounded up those demagogues who agitated the mobs to storm the Palace in the midst of the attack.

Instead of succumbing to rebellion and terrorist menaces, she has not hesitated to use the instruments of state power to crush them and defend the integrity of the Philippine state. The Philippine presidency is acknowledged to be one of the worlds most powerful presidencies, which are constrained in the exercise of power by their democratic framework. The issue facing President Arroyo is how much space she has in dealing with these challenges while staying within the democratic rules. I believe that she has not pushed the limits of these powers.

President Corazon Aquino was assailed by seven coup attempts, the last of which in December 1989 nearly toppled her government, but during her first year after taking power in February 1986, Aquino presided over a revolutionary government exercising emergency powers.

President Arroyo has no such weapons in her arsenal. She has therefore been forced to be pragmatic, conceding to the inordinate demands of Estrada for extraordinary privileges on his detention in order to calm restiveness among the benighted poor he has betrayed.

She realizes that leadership is about compromise, about reducing exposure to threats from many fronts, and about when to do battle.

The crises have forced her to make crucial decisions with but little time for contemplation. To use a metaphor, her crises in the presidency during the past four months have forced her to lose her political adolescence and to leap into adulthood.

After her setback on the power bill, Arroyo can still try again to have it passed during the regular session of the 11th Congress after ironing out the kinks that appeared in the last special session, and apply the weight of the presidency for the passage of the legislation.

Her father, president Diosdado Arroyo, working with a hostile opposition-controlled Congress, called the legislature seven times to a special session to push through his land reform act. If the power bill goes to the 12th Congress, it is likely to be riddled with new amendments from new members of Congress eager to have a piece of the cake.

Despite the constraints on the presidency in the system of checks and balances, the President sits on a reservoir of tradition and presidential power which she can tap to defend the state, stabilize her administration and push reform initiatives. I cite the valedictory of Claro M. Recto, president of the 1935 Constitutional Convention on the powers and mystique of the presidency. He said:

"During the debate on Executive Power it was the almost unanimous opinion that we have invested the Executive with rather extraordinary prerogatives. There is much truth in this assertion. But it is because we cannot be insensible to the events that are transpiring around ... we have seen how dictatorships have served as the last refuge of peoples when their parliaments fail and they are already powerless to save themselves from misgovernment and chaos.

"Learning our lessons from this truth and history, and determined to spare our people the evils of dictatorship and anarchy, we have thought it prudent to establish an executive power, which, subject to the fiscalization of the Assembly, and of public opinion, will not only know how to govern, but will actually govern with a firm and steady hand, unembarrassed by vexatious interference by other departments, or by holy alliances with this and that social group.

Thus, possessed with the necessary gifts of honesty and competence, this Executive will be able to give his people an orderly and progressive government, without need of usurping or abdicating powers, and cunning subterfuge will not avail to extenuate his failure before the bar of public opinion."

The 1935, the 1973 and the 1987 Constitutions incorporated and implicitly recognized the latent authoritarian tendencies of Filipino society. The caudillo, Manuel Quezon, drew inspiration from these tradition and tendencies. Quezon incarnated the activist presidency envisaged by the Constitution. In the exercise of his agenda-setting powers, he was the source of 98 percent of laws enacted by the Commonwealth government.

President Arroyo is fortified by an armory of powers and strongman tradition of the presidency. She has only scratched the surface of these powers. In the defense of her administration and of her capacity to mount reform initiatives, she has weapons. She should not hesitate to use them.

-- Philippine Daily Inquirer/Asia News Network