ANALYSIS

By Alejandro Lichauco
03/26/2009

Political pros looking forward and maneuvering for elections 2010 should take note of certain developments recently which appear to herald the approach of convulsive events that could wipe out the entire political system — and, with that elections and the political pros.

One is the story whose title — “Clergy enter politics because of current system in gov’t — Rosales” — commanded top space in the Bulletin’s issue on Tuesday, March 4. The story reports the head of the nation’s preeminent diocese, Manila Archbishop Gaudencio Cardinal Rosales, as saying that “members of the clergy are being forced to enter politics because of the current political system that drives people to hopelessness.”

Elaborating, the Cardinal said that “The people are already tired of what has been happening in the country. Whoever we place there, it’s still the same type of people, only with a different face.”

This is the first time, to the knowledge of this writer, that a preeminent leader of the Catholic clergy directly assailed the political system itself and didn’t confine his attack on individual politicians or leaders. They are all the same, the Cardinal maintained. And they are all the same, of course, because of the very political system to whom they owe their elections.

Even as the Bulletin carried the Rosales attack on the system, the PDI, in its issue of the same day, March 24, carried an editorial on what it called “The failure of the trapos.” It was an unmitigated attack on the quality of the nation’s political leaders. In essence, the editorial’s theme was that the country can’t pin its hopes for change on the trapos and had better start looking elsewhere for the kind of leadership it needs.

Actually, the attack on the political system — and elections under the system started with the declaration of military nationalists called the Bagong Katipunan. Several years ago, the underground military group called for the suspension of elections and the reconstruction of the nation’s political system on the ground that the political system and elections conducted under it are rotten to the core and could only worsen the problem of poverty, graft and corruption. They said this in a declaration which appears in their Web site Sundalo.bravehost.com.

So there you are. You have military nationalists and reformers, a preeminent member of the clergy and influential member of media harping on the same theme: The trapos are behind the national sickness and therefore must go along with the political system that produces them.

I don’t know what you would read in these declarations but it seems to this writer that the views expressed — by elements in the military, church and media — on the failure of the political system and elections to provide the nation with the leadership it needs reflect what in fact is widespread popular sentiment and disenchantment with the very political system itself.

So rotten is the system, Cardinal Rosales is saying, that people are beginning to turn to the clergy for political leadership. And that, the good Cardinal should have added, is just as bad. You can run an angel or a saint in these elections and in time he will be acting like a trapo because the political system will make him so.

If then the assault on the political system itself waged by Cardinal Rosales and the Bagong Katipunan and on the trapos by the PDI is representative of popular opinion, then the project known as elections 2010 could be in trouble and what we could possibly be facing is a repeat of Edsa I under which civilian power, combined with military power, to abolish the then existing political system along with the then existing Constitution and the then existing Congress installed a revolutionary government which ruled without a Congress, without a Constitution and without the trapos.

Another Edsa I and a revolutionary or extra-constitutional government but with the lessons of Edsa I behind and in front of it?

To this writer’s mind that is what the preeminent Cardinal from Manila, an eminent member of media and an underground military nationalist organization are actually calling for — whether they intended it or not.

What do you think? Another Edsa I, this time with military idealists on the saddle?