The frenzy earlier in the year on possibly amending the constitution has died down. The focus is now on the midterm elections, including how the political feud between the administration of President Ferdinand Marcos, Jr. and the Duterte family might play out at the ballet box. It makes for good headlines and an interesting storyline: up to possibly three Duterte family members being elected to senate, challenging Marcos and those they blame for the attacks on them and their allies, and setting up the battle in 2028 between Vice-President Sara Duterte and the administration proxy. There would be some economic consequences soon after the 2025 midterms. Wary of a significant shift in policy and personnel in a few years’ time should the Dutertes emerge victorious, family conglomerates and foreign investors could slow down their investments in the second half of Marcos’ term.
The shorthand explanation for this phenomenon is that personalities dominate our politics. Our electorate chooses candidates based on who is most familiar or well-known, which is why some candidates for the senate put up posters a year or more ahead of the elections, because they can exploit a loophole that everyone knows is a loophole. Or why the most popular athletes, celebrities, and radio personalities have a good chance of making it to the highest positions in the land.
The other way is by exploiting the perceptions of a connection, no matter how distant, unreliable, or even unreal. If Pedro, the city councilor, is the cousin of my neighbor, and Pedro claims to know the son-in-law of a politician’s nephew’s driver, then maybe I should support whoever Pedro endorses, on the off chance that my neighbor can approach Pedro should I need something down the road. That, of course, is an exaggeration, but which is also why politicians recognize that local leaders can be invaluable in distributing largesse and organizing local networks that deliver votes.
After the elections, alliances are built around the short-term goals of gaining access to government funds — which is the reason for the multitude of deputy speakers in the House of Representatives, and why principled, consistent opposition is rare. Meanwhile, promises made during elections or an administration’s term hardly have any consequences for a politician’s career.
Paradoxically, many of the debates and discussions around Cha-cha highlighted how its main goal was to amend the economic provisions of the constitution to encourage economic growth. The justification seemed almost apologetic for such an important process, because attempting to do more would deem the process to failure.
But ask any Filipino, and they will give a different answer: the reason our economy is not flourishing, or why politics does not seem to deliver in terms of building a better outlook for them or their families, is that our politics is dysfunctional. Politicians are rarely punished for not fulfilling their campaign promises. A sitting president can paint the rosiest outlook, cater to powerful friends, or make the most outlandish promises, and their party or political allies will not suffer any measurable political consequences in subsequent elections. Bureaucratic or political malfeasances, whether through negligence, corruption, or in catering to vested interests to the public’s detriment, is only punished inconsistently, if at all. Politics and policy are shaped by access, not the fear of being voted out during elections.
Some of the solutions to this fundamental complaint about our system requires that we reexamine whether we should shift to a parliamentary form of government, remove presidential term limits, elect senators at a sub-national level or abandon the party-list system. Because we must address the question of why political accountability is weak, and whether the solution starts with reformulating the constitutional design of government. After all, a president constrained to one term has limited incentives to deliver on an administration’s campaign promises. Or maybe consider the analysis of Adam Przeworski, a professor emeritus of politics at NYU, who argues that the American system of presidentialism has worked only effectively in the United States. Why this is the case is for a future column, but it is an issue that deserves consideration because we adopted the presidential system of government with its concept of fixed-term elections as a historical accident of having been colonized by the United States more than a century ago. In his excellent book, The Crisis of the Middle-Class Constitution, the legal scholar Ganesh Sitaraman argues that the US’ founding fathers designed a constitution when America was relatively unequal, and therefore it was not designed to address inequality of power or wealth in the young country. In contrast, that was exactly the problem we had when our first constitution was being designed. Much land was in the hands of wealthy Spanish families or their local allies, and obviously institutions would evolve in terms of protecting those powers, benefits, and relationship.
Opening up the constitution is a difficult thing. It can lead to intense disputes, draws immense political attention domestically and abroad and is highly unpredictable. The process can result in a worse constitution, possibly just as much, as in something better. But the despondence that people feel today about politicians’ lack of accountability, the prevalence of corruption and the inability of the system to build a better outlook cause many to leave for abroad, even at the terrible cost of familial separation. There is no greater condemnation by a citizenry of a system’s failure than their desire to leave the country of their birth because of lack of hope.
The poor are faulted for voting into power incompetent leaders and corrupt politicians. But elites fail to see something else: former President Rodrigo Duterte won because of this frustration. He threatened to shake up Philippine politics — to kick the chair out from under complacent and complicit bureaucrats, make institutions deliver public goods (particularly in law and order), weaken oligarchs, and change long-standing political alliances that only benefited the elites. Whether or not he really had this intention or knew how to fulfill it can be debated, but many Filipinos who voted for him and support him until today believe this to be the urgent need of politics.
Politics, political parties, and alliances are built along social cleavages. Philippine elites had become complacent in thinking they could define these cleavages and manipulate them along artificial lines. Duterte shook them from that complacency because he promised to deliver on the grievances that people had about power, opportunity, and voice, but the lesson had not been learned. Our problem is not with the personalities in power; they are the side-effects of the failings of the system to deliver real political accountability, and for this reason a reassessment of the design of the political system is needed. The Duterte presidency was not an accident of history, but the result of it.
Any attempt to reopen the constitution after the midterms will, however, be criticized as possibly being an effort by the Marcos administration to eliminate term limits so that the president can run again. One solution is to have a constitutional convention whose term and final output will be delivered after only the next elections. But the issues with our constitution and how our system is designed both politically and socially need to be brought out into the public light and debated, warts and all, risks and all, not be the subject of some opaque signature drive or be treated as an aside.
Bob Herrera-Lim is a political analyst who advises investors globally. He is also a fellow for the Foundation for Economic Freedom.
