Manolo Quezon is #TheExplainer Newsletter - A Tale of Three Presidents
The Davao Mayor after paying her fellowship dues to allies and signing up with Lakas-CMD, has returned to Davao to attend to the flooding there. The fog of war is especially thick as tensions and expectations are reaching fever-pitch, with the deadline for candidacy substitutions on Monday, November 15.
My impression is that if there remain ongoing negotiations, they are deadlocked. This can be gleaned from interviews of Ferdinand Jr.'s cousin, Martin Romauldez, however much members of the President's inner circle who are in the Marcos camp, claim otherwise. From left field, because originating in what seems to be the least-plugged-in of the ruling coalition partners (the ruling party itself, PDP-Laban, which has been the target of Sarah Duterte's moves often enough), came a "term-sharing" scheme which Marcos Jr. shot down.
There remains speculation about what Senator Pacquiao might announce, and whether the weekend will remain a time for waiting to see what happens on Monday.
Where we are
A slightly expanded version of a thread from yesterday. First, some contextual thoughts. Three things "new" over the past 25 years:
The old way: to be out of power meant accepting new power arrangement, thus burying hatchet.Arrest of Estrada ended that. Where Western notions of institutions and impartial law don’t run deep, we may have to look to how ridos end which seems the old way.
It’s the new middle class made by the Marcos pressure valve of human exports, who achieved middle class status without the socialization of the old middle class, and the remnants of the old middle class alienated by challenges of modernity, discovering their electoral clout.
It seems Imelda Marcos is no longer particularly active in determining the future prospects of her son; former President Ramos is no longer politically active, period. The Estradas are much-diminished and the political heirs of President Estrada are both pursuing candidacies for the senate but without the family having that one political essential, a bailiwick: it seems they have permanently lost San Juan. This leaves Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo the paramount political elder in the ruling coalition: even the President, it seems, for his own good, has to recognize and accept his daughter has her own people and methods.
Where we seem to be. While every ruling coalition will have its fair share of longstanding leaders, it also means a rearrangement of the pecking order. The rearrangement that happened in 2016 was unprecedented, because the ascendancy of Duterte wasn't accompanied by a long period of socialization with the big national players: his interactions with them had been on a subordinate, purely local, level up to his election to the presidency. Just like a big, and to my mind, the most dynamic, portion of his constituency, the President, his people, his family, and a big chunk of his supporters, do not know, do not care for, and frankly resent and dismiss, the many informal rules on behavior that becoming part of the national leadership usually entails.
So if the faces of the ruling coalition, we shouldn’t fail to forget, included a new paramount family, the hierarchy is reconfigured the ones who do best are those who recognize it and demonstrate they know it.
Each President manages differently but there are types of President and that includes those who freely delegate their powers to those they consider able and useful subordinates. Thus factions are created, and the President had two major ones within the ranks of the old reliables. There was a fundamental divide, between ideologues (Evasco) and pragmatists (Go).
Everyone else had to pick sides, between Go and Evasco though in the end one faction from the old reliables won the behind the scenes battle for the soul of the administration, fought out through executive orders. That faction was Go's, and he won the battle of executive issuances through his ace in the hole: control of access to the President, which the President's own children by his first marriage would come to resent.
Which brings us to another faction, a faction of one: the President’s daughter, as his sons aren't independently powerful.
When the Speaker of the House grew drunk with influence and bragged even the President had better watch out as he could impeach him and worse, started to try to exert influence in Davao, she acted.
We know what famously happened, the first time in our political history the selection of a Speaker was done without presidential knowledge or approval. Here it was as much a matter of stabilizing the ruling coalition as it was the elimination of a subordinate (Alvarez).
The alliance that was demonstrated then persisted until Arroyo’s term was up; after that a safe Speaker was selected. But she’s back and it’s here that her methodical style contrasted with PDP-Laban’s bumbling methods for securing the succession.
In the present reshuffle the ones out are the old hands and close lieutenants of the President, as his daughter has taken center stage elbowing aside his advisers and formal party affiliation. Marcos Jr for his part is experiencing what his dad did to Diosdado Macapagal.
Here the two ladies, Arroyo and Duterte, seem to be the political adults in the room, recognizing they have a shared interest in maintaining the ruling coalition’s hold on power without risking an opposition win or just as bad, a Marcos Restoration which would involve settling scores for the Marcoses.
At the very least the leverage of the President and his family is restored after being bumbled away by PDP-Laban with sarisfaction of putting Go in his place and forcing if it comes to that a hefty accomodation by the Marcoses. Or if not, taking the wind out of the Marcoses sails.
And that’s where we seem to be as of this moment with three days to go before the battle lines are finally clearly drawn.
A tale of three Presidents
Which brings up the story of how Vice-President Macapagal defeated President Garcia wit help from Emmanuel Pelaez, how Garcia helped Senate President Marcos defeat Emmanuel Pelaez so he (Marcos) could run against President Macapagal.
From "The Philippines: Prelude to Elections," by Richard Butwell, in Asian Survey, Vol. 5, No. 1, A Survey of Asia in 1964: Part I (Jan., 1965), pp. 43-48
Senate President Ferdinand E. Marcos was President of the Liberal Party (LP), of which Philippine President Diosdado Macapagal is the leading member, when 1964 began. By November Senator Marcos had been nominated by the opposition Nacionalista Party (NP) to oppose Macapagal, who is seeking reelection in 1965. The most formidable challenge faced by Senator Marcos in his quest for the NP nomination came from another ex-Liberal, Vice President Emmanuel Pelaez. Senator Raul Manglapus, another member of the United Opposition (the Liberals and the Grand Alliance) which fought President Carlos P. Garcia in 1961, has left the LP and has sought to form a "third force" to challenge what he terms a "two-faction one-party system." A fourth ranking Liberal leader also had serious differences with President Macapagal before the year ended but has not so far left the party. This was Speaker of the House of Representatives, Cornelio T. Villareal, who walked out of the LP convention November 28, apparently to protest Macapagal's failure to select him as his 1965 Vice-Presidential running mate.
An indication of the color of the political year ahead came early January with the formal re-affiiation of Vice President Pelaez with the Nacionalista Party. Pelaez had first been a Liberal, then a Naclonalista and finally had re-joined the Liberals in 1959. In 1961 be was Macapagal’s Vice-Presidential running-mate, and had contributed to the defeat of the incumbent Nacionalista President Garcia. Garcia did not forget this fact and his support was one of several factors in the 777-444 defeat Marcos inflicted on Pelaez at the 1964 NP nominating convention on November 2.
The immediate occasion for the break between Pelaez and Macapagal in 1963 had been a statement by a spokesman for the President that Pelaez, generally regarded as an unusually honest politician, had received money from deported American millionnaire Harry Stonehill, central figure In a scandal which broke early in the Macapagal administration, Senator Marcos had also been accused by Macapagal but did not spit with him at this time.
Marcos had withdrawn in favor of Macapagal in the struggle for the 1961 Liberal Party Presidential nomination and had hopes of becoming the party's standard-bearer in 1965 in view of Macapagal's pledge not to seek reelection. Tensions clearly heightened between the two men, however, as It became increasingly apparent that Macapagal would seek a second term. In April Macapagal obtained an amendment of Liberal Party rules to allow him to assume the Presidency of the party whenever he desired; Marcos left the Liberals and immediately joined the Nacionalistas. Seven months later, Marcos was the NP Presidential nominee.