It’s back to the future in the Philippines. Benigno Aquino III has surfed to the presidency on the crest of a wave of nostalgia for the episodes more than 20 years ago when his parents put the Philippines at the centre of the world attention. His mother and father, Benigno Junior and Corazon, were the main characters in scenes that fundamentally changed the course of Philippine history. I am a “martial law baby” who grew up in exile in London. My parents had managed to get out of the Philippines before the late strongman President Ferdinand Marcos’ wife Imelda could have my mother imprisoned for writing a biography of her. For my generation the shock of seeing Benigno III’s father assassinated in a pool of blood on the tarmac of Manila International Airport is a kind of emotional bookend. It was the beginning of the end of the conjugal dictatorship. The other emotional bookend was the wonder of Corazon’s rise to the presidency after a non-violent uprising combined with a military rebellion forced the Marcoses to leave the country in 1986, hounded out by fury over their denial of human rights to the people and plunder of the nation’s coffers.
Benigno Aquino III, known as Noynoy, is the only son of the formidable Aquino couple. His campaign’s capitalized on his parents’ reputation and the allegations of corruption against the now deeply unpopular current President Gloria Arroyo. He’s campaigned on a slogan that without corruption there will be no poverty. Already at least one economist has questioned whether there really is any link but that’s been politically irrelevant in the context of these elections.
Aquino and his campaign have criss-crossed the country singing the songs that she and her supporters used to sing to try to recreate the emotions of 1986. On his campaign there have been crowds of supporters wearing yellow, his mother’s trademark colour, in reference to the old song “Tie a Yellow Ribbon”. He’s got an uneventful record as a congressman, so much so that the joke on the street is that his top qualifications are his parents. But that’s where anger and disappointment at the current regime comes in. The majority of voters in the Philippines apparently want a less controversial leader like Corazon Aquino - one with integrity who has nothing to do with Arroyo.
So they waited in queues, sometimes kilometers long, to vote on a blisteringly hot day across the Philippines’ more than 7,000 islands. Throughout election day, the local radio and television interviewed ordinary Philippine voters who waited for hours to choose their candidates for more than 17,000 posts local and national. Some complained and stayed, others complained and left. At a precinct in the former shoe manufacturing area of Marikina near the capital Manila, a friend described a kind of fiesta atmosphere with entrepreneurs setting up shop to sell drinks and snacks to families settled in for the tedious, sweaty wait. But elsewhere, another friend said he arrived with trepidation, drinks and towels in his backpack, only to find no-one there so it took a snappy 5 minutes to vote.
Philippine voters in every corner of the country refused to be put off by the new technology and in some cases outright intimidation. If you put those scenes in regional context it was a bracing sight. Nearly all the other countries in South East Asia have limited democracies but here on Monday it was a celebration of the right to vote for a candidate of your choice.
Aside from Aquino, that’s also meant a political comeback for the Marcos family. Imelda of the many shoes will be clicking her heels into Congress. Her son will serve as a Senator under the administration of the son of his father’s greatest opponent who was shot dead for his trouble. But about half the voters in the country are under 25 and never experienced the Marcos regime. There are also those for whom local loyalties to the Marcos clan are more important than their secret Swiss bank accounts or the thousands who were tortured or “disappeared” during their rule.
We did many of our live reports from the Associated Press office in Malate and other foreign reporters trooped in and out to file their reports via satellite too. Among them, a young Chinese reporter from the main state television station who was trying her best to understand what was going on and which bits were newsworthy for her audience of hundreds of millions of people who don’t get to muddle through a democratic process. I wonder what her reports were like.
