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One country, too many political parties, none to seriously support
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One country, too many political parties, none to seriously support

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It is no longer sensible to take at face value Deng Xiaoping’s quaint formulation of the system for governing Hong Kong after Britain handed the Crown colony to China in 1997. Too much has happened and too many hopes have been dashed for the dream of democracy. flourish with the communist takeover.

“One country, two systems” is the constitutional principle used by the People’s Republic of China to describe the government of the special administrative regions of Hong Kong and Macau.

Deng Xiaoping developed the concept. It was formulated in the early 1980s during negotiations for the handover of Hong Kong between China and Britain. It provided that there would be only one China but that each region would retain its own economic and administrative system.

Since the handover and especially in recent years, former Hong Kong governors and many Hong Kong citizens have protested the loss of rights and many freedoms due to an authoritarian order. No one now believes that Hong Kong is on the path to real democracy.

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As Bill Hutton wrote in “The Writing on the Wall” (Free Press, New York, 2006), the situation is what it is because “the Chinese want to enjoy all the benefits of capitalism without running the risk of democracy. The system that the communists have created is structurally unstable.

EDSA Revolution

In some ways, what happened in the Philippines after the overthrow of President Ferdinand E. Marcos in 1986 in the EDSA Revolution (which Filipinos describe as a revolution, coup, revolt, uprising or mutiny) mirrors the events in Hong Kong. Kong. after the 1997 transfer.

The Philippines and its leaders have been groping for the last 38 years for the levers of a true and functioning democracy. President Corazon C. Aquino and her fervent supporters believed that what happened at EDSA was a miracle. (Some, including several Jesuits, even went so far as to petition the Pope to canonize Cory and certify EDSA as a miracle.) Cory’s sainthood, like the ill-fated campaign to get him a Nobel Prize, was delusional and provoked only ridicule. . At the other extreme, critics and opponents of Cory’s pole vault to the presidency worked assiduously to debunk claims of a revolution and a miracle.

The country has had seven presidents since Cory, but throughout that time it has worked to create a constitutional government and a functioning democracy. It has oscillated between populism and technocratic government; has fallen hostage to pig politics, which was exiled during martial law and the new society.

And now, the nation is back to square one with another Marcos, Ferdinand Jr., at the helm.

Political party system in operation

In a sense, what the nation needs most today, as the 2025 elections approach, is a functioning political party system, with serious and organized political parties.

From a history of competitive political parties within a functional two-party system, the country has drifted into a desert or no man’s land where parties could not grow.

According to democratic theory, political parties are the primary means by which citizens control their government. It is through the parties that elections are organized so that citizens can vote for the candidates of their choice.

Political theorists and political scientists consider parties to be the central institutions of democratic government because they perform essential functions in democratic politics, such as 1) organizing political life; 2) recruit and develop political talent as candidates for public office; 3) organize the government; 4) focus responsibility on government action; 5) develop topics and educate the public; 6) synthesize interests; and 7) simplify the electoral system by selecting candidates.

While Philippine political parties declined considerably during the martial law period of 1972 to 1981, when the country briefly moved to one-party government, after the EDSA revolt and democratic resurgence, it took some time before they could organize. new political parties and gain support at the national level. .

Today, with Marcos Jr. halfway through his term, the country faces a major realignment and reorganization of political parties ahead of the May 2025 elections.

President Marcos was elected without a serious and organized political vehicle; it only had a coalition of parties and groups cobbled together in a group loosely called Uniteam.

Now Uniteam no longer exists; The Marcos administration, the opposition and independent groups uniformly face the challenge of building a cohesive and effective national coalition to contest the thousands of government seats at stake. What is at stake is control of both houses of Congress and more than 3,000 executive positions in local governments, from provinces to cities and municipalities.

Ironically, it is the lowly parties in the party list system that appear most organized for the 2025 elections, as they target seats in the House of Representatives.

The cancer of Philippine politics

German academic and political scientist Andreas Ufen and other scholars have been fierce in accusing Philippine politics of spreading the political disease of “Filipinization” to the Third World. But some of our most respected and accredited scholars and historians have been harsher with their verdict on the Philippine political party system.

Onofre D. Corpuz, former Secretary of Education and author of the definitive history of the Philippines, “The Roots of the Filipino Nation” (Aklahi Press, Quezon City, 1989), scathingly observed: “The cancer of Philippine politics was the parties; the system was, and has been since 1907, almost devoid of nationalism; since 1946 it was not guided by even a hint of social ethics except opportunism.”

The nation cannot escape Johnny Gatbonton’s parting advice on “Our Dysfunctional Political System.” He wrote:

“Rebuilding our party system must become our central political task. We will need to re-establish norms and practices such as conventions within which our parties can compete.

“We must put our political system on a stable footing; and the Supreme Court has put us on the right path by banning all varieties of the pork barrel.

“We must do something about the multitude of ‘parties’ that have formed from the careless drafting of the 1987 Charter. We have stumbled upon a Constitution that mixes features of two-party and multi-party systems.

“We have lost almost all semblance of the relative stability that had resulted from the alternation in power of nationalists and liberals in post-independence politics.

“We can’t help but do a lot of serious and thoughtful constitutional engineering.”

But how do we rebuild our party system? Where do we start? Do we reform the entire political system, including the Constitution?

It is not surprising that other countries too, including some advanced democracies, have been consumed by the challenge of reforming their political and party systems to better adapt them to contemporary times.

For example, France, which ushered in revolutionary change with the French Revolution of 1789, has constantly revised and rewritten its constitution more than 30 times and may do so again due to the far-right’s surprise victory in this year’s elections.

In the case of our own democratic politics, I am of the view that nothing will be more effective than radical reform and improvement of the Philippine party system. To fully understand this reform, it makes sense to rebuild or reconstruct the party system.

The nation cannot survive and prosper if its best-organized parties exist primarily in the party-list system and its most important offices are contested primarily by the parties of family political dynasties.

That is why constitutional reform is imperative and should occupy first place on the agenda of the XX Congress.


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