Like a dose of ole time religion, the NP and LP renaissance is an indictment of the present.
The majority of Filipino voters today, have no recollection of the time when the Nacionalista and Liberal parties vied for power. The most they may know is that the Nacionalistas (NP) were founded in 1907, the Liberals (LP) in 1945 (originally as a faction of the NP in preparation for the first postwar election in 1946), and that most of our past presidents were affiliated with one or the other party (Quezon, Osmena, Magsaysay, Garcia and Marcos for the NP; Roxas, Quirino and Macapagal for the LP).
They may also hear, from their elders, and from time to time, that the period from 1946-1972 (the NP had dominated electoral politics from 1907-1941) when the NP and LP dominated the political landscape, were relatively stable and prosperous years. Quite a number of Filipino voters today can’t even recall the years 1978-86, when Marcos’ KBL reigned supreme; and as for the post-EDSA years, Aquino’s LDP and Estrada’s LaMMP lacked staying power; only the Lakas-CMD formed during the Ramos administration has shown staying power, though it’s been raided by President Arroyo’s pet party, Kampi.
And yet compared to Kampi, LaMMP, and the LDP, the premartial law LP and NP have some claim to having produced statesmen, and for surviving up to the present. This accounts for the “nostalgia,” as one political analyst calls it, that has propelled both parties to being considered viable contenders for the distinction of being the next administration party, in 2010. This is a possibility that may seem out of all proportion to the present standing of those parties. After all, the same analyst pointed out, pound-for-pound, the best-organized and best-funded party remains Lakas-CMD. And the president’s very own Kampi is still waiting in the wings, fattening up on its umbilical cord to the Palace.
A reversion to nostalgia for the NP-LP contests prior to martial law, for the two party system instead of the post-EDSA multiparty system, is as much a rejection of everything that’s taken place since 1986, as it is a desperate desire to relive the days when the Philippines was still a promising place, instead of a plundered nation bereft of anything except the hot air of political promises. Like all forms of nostalgia, it’s based as much on a distorted sense of the past, as it reflects a general dissatisfaction with the present.
The NP and LP of today are a far cry from what they were in their heyday; they are also a far cry from the depths to which they had sunk, not so long ago — and the remarkable thing is, precisely, this public-relations rehabilitation.
When Ferdinand Marcos imposed martial law on Sept. 23, 1972 (antedating it, for good luck, to Sept. 21), the Liberal Party was one of the political organizations that bore the brunt of the dictatorship’s tyranny: The first politician arrested was Benigno Aquino, Jr., one of the leading contenders for the presidency in 1973.
Opposition politicians met in different houses after Ninoy Aquino’s arrest, but more to console than conspire. In one of those meetings, the idea of convening a special session of Congress to declare Proclamation 1081 null and void was brought up. The following day the Legislative Building was occupied by troops who “dismantled the offices, carting away equipment, tables and chairs.” Someone had squealed or the room was bugged.
The first decade of martial law saw the political opposition — in contrast to the Communist insurgency — the hardest hit by martial law. Writing after EDSA, Rigoberto Tiglao said “The [political opposition’s] highly personalized structures, based primarily on the expectation of material gain, were suddenly deprived of access to fuel for their machines. They faded rapidly, collapsed even, in the face of arrests, cooptation, and initially severe restrictions. The parties’ fate thus contributed to the illusion, reported by the foreign press as late as 1973, that there was no significant opposition to the New Society.”
The party in power, the Nacionalista Party, to which Marcos belonged, seemed headed for good times with martial law. Except its leadership had been angling to replace Marcos, with the 1973 elections in mind. Marcos did not want to go, or if he had to, preferred to have his wife succeed him: This, the NP chieftains did not like one bit. Marcos, therefore, at the moment he became dictator and not just president, owed no politician — neither the opposition LP, or his own NP — any favors, or any real debt of gratitude. Indeed, he proclaimed that both parties had been among the more unsavory features of the “Old Society” that his “New Society” had replaced.
Marcos’ most effective weapon against the politicians was their own cupidity. He paid them off (aside from congressmen and senators, who were all out of a job with the proclamation of martial law) by making it clear their stay in office was strictly his choice. And in 1978, recruited them into the Kilusang Bagong Lipunan — a super party based on the Kalibapi during the Japanese occupation. The surviving rump of the Liberal Party still opposed to Marcos wasn’t even consulted. The Nacionalistas were treated slightly better: Instead of being merged into the KBL, Marcos accepted former Speaker Jose B. Laurel, Jr.’s proposal that it be allowed “go to sleep.”
Having been impotent to prevent martial law, and their members on the whole having supported the New Society, neither the NP or LP had much to offer the public. Marcos’ own choice was his own creation, the KBL; whether or not participating in the dictatorship’s farcical elections would be counterproductive, was a debate that further splintered whatever vestiges of both premartial law parties were left.
A new party, LABAN, under the chairmanship of Lorenzo Tanada, with Ninoy Aquino as its star candidate, ended up being the vehicle to contest the 1978 parliamentary elections. Then, on Jan. 29, 1981, when Marcos announced he would seek “re-election,” the remaining LP oppositionists had to band together with the revived (Laurel wing) NP and ex-KBL under the banner of UNIDO. UNIDO called for a boycott. Marcos had to revive his wing of the Nacionalista Party, and put forward a retired and aged ex-defense secretary as his opponent, and then cheated anyway. Only in the snap elections of 1986 did the UNIDO go head-to-head with Marcos’ KBL.
Doy Laurel hoped to turn UNIDO into the administration party of Cory Aquino’s new government. His ambition was thwarted. Ramon Mitra, Jr. created a new administration coalition, Laban ng Demokrating Pilipino. When he lost the presidential race in 1992, the party withered and President Ramos’ newly-created Lakas-CMD grew fat; it withered during the Estrada years but his early replacement allowed it to regain lost political poundage. But it had failed to elect a president in 1998; the Arroyo coalitions of 2001, 2004, and 2007 bore different names; and it lacks a viable candidate for the presidency in 2010.
The NP, on the other hand, has Senate President Manuel Villar, Jr., who was “given” the party by Doy Laurel as he lay dying. The LP, on the other hand, derived some luster from having been on the right side of history during the dictatorship, and for being a small, but significant, political party in partnership with every administration since 1987. Its candidate is widely expected to be Sen. Manuel Roxas II. The two Manuels are, in a sense, the owners of franchises by dint of their family fortunes: Self-made in Villar’s case, inherited in the case of Roxas.
They are also the beneficiaries of what I’d describe as a combination of nostalgia and the residue of the past heydays of the parties they now head. The NP and LP have endured long enough to have identities that are, in a sense, institutional. In a nation where so much has changed, and so little endured, the very existence of the two parties is a feat in itself. And they have something that shouldn’t be underestimated. The remnants of once formidable, but still noteworthy, political bailiwicks. The LP retains a vestigial influence in the Southern Visayas and Southern Tagalog; the NP, in Western Visayas and Northern Tagalog. All vote-rich regions still. And both parties can, with some justice, claim that they don’t bear primary responsibility for the chaotic present.
