Amid one of the country’s most divisive elections, President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. promised the electorate unity. 

But this vow is called into question by the ouster of Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo from the deputy speaker seat, a mass resignation within Duterte-led Partido Demokratiko Pilipino–Lakas ng Bayan (PDP-Laban) over accusations of Duterte maligning the House of Representatives, and the shoot down of the vice president’s request for P650 million in confidential and intelligence funds (CIF).

Marcos’s promise of a “unifying brand of leadership” has been plucked apart piece by piece, by no less than his supposed allies. But infighting is par for the course in a political terrain where politicians treat bureaucratic posts as inheritable positions for greater economic gain. 

Turncoat Tactics

In a political arena where actors weigh unity based on how much they benefit from it, the developments in November 2023 came as no surprise. 

The transactional nature of the Duterte-Marcos collaboration underlies its fragility. As the top presidential pick in the preelection surveys, Sara Duterte was subject to the courtship of the Marcoses, eager to expand their base from Ilocos Norte to the Dutertes’ Davao bailiwick. The collaboration is a caricature of what political scientist Julio Teehankee believes is the character of the national election: open season for clientelistic partnerships between big-name families.

Teehankee contends that such partnerships are weak at the core because both camps are looking out solely for their own interests. Fractures started to form in January 2022, when Duterte floated aspirations to head national defense but was then made education secretary.

Such cracks between the two clans continued with Marcos’s declaration that the government would study the prospect of rejoining the International Criminal Court (ICC) as his allies in Congress urged the country’s cooperation in ICC’s probe of Rodrigo Duterte’s crimes. Rubbing salt in the wound of this festering unity, the resumption of peace talks between the government and the National Democratic Front of the Philippines was denounced by the vice president, following her father’s legacy of heightened counterinsurgency.

These rifts were concretized by the vice president’s resignation from Lakas-CMD, led by Marcos’s cousin Martin Romualdez, after Arroyo’s deputy speakership post was relinquished in May. In November, a month after Duterte called the House rotten for stripping his daughter of her requested CIF, a mass exodus of former PDP-Laban lawmakers brought Lakas-CMD’s numbers to over 90. More than 30 politicians also jumped ship to Marcos-lead Partido Federal ng Pilipinas (PFP).

Congress’s current condition has remained thus since the 1960s. East Asian studies professor Carl Landé described the Philippine political landscape as deficient in intraparty solidarity, owing to an “identicalness” in leadership and platforms among parties. “We don’t have [political] parties, we have factions,” said Sol Iglesias, assistant professor of political science at UP Diliman.

This rampant turncoatism, where political butterflies flutter from party to party, benefits a cabal of affluent families. 

From the Estates to the Elections

The sparring between the clans was an exposition of the role the chambers serve at present: It is a battlefield for the propertied elite.

Currently, 70 percent of Congress hail from political clans. The last four presidents descended from political families. Five out of seven of the major national parties have a dynasty member at the top post. Dynasties, thus, have become the main unit of political competition, Iglesias said. 

This setup is traceable to the Spanish colonization when principality was granted to the indigenous elite, with the right to hold public office passed on across generations. This symbiosis between property ownership and political dominion persists until today: the Estradas of the Nationalist People’s Coalition, the Marcos-Romualdez clan who helm PFP and Lakas-CMD, and the Dutertes who lead PDP-Laban, all have under their name more than a hundred properties collectively. 

The prevailing governance structure enables the political reign of the propertied class and dilutes policymaking, making the bureaucracy a mere conduit for the preservation of the elite’s wealth and that of their patrons. This is typified by Marcos’s appointment of corporate magnate Francisco Tiu Laurel Jr., among the president’s top campaign donors, as his agriculture secretary. This, while no headway is made for genuine agrarian reform in a majority landlord-controlled Congress.

When the elite organizes parties as mere political capital devoid of ideologies, the players in Congress follow suit–thus, the endless shifting to and fro parties. “[Lawmakers’] considerations and interests are not mediated by a political party, even though parties are, of course, meant to channel different ways to get the best governance,” Iglesias said. 

Without ideologies governing political parties, Philippine elections are largely personality-driven, depriving constituents of programmatic choices. Citizens are made to choose not between competing ideologies and systematic platforms, but among personalities hailing from the same clans in parties used as mere machineries for greater political sway. 

Reform Roadmap

The crumbling of Marcos’s unity is less a bad omen than a jumping point for lasting reform.

When titans clash, the public is the first to feel the shockwaves. The mass falling-out has put issues such as the jeepney phaseout and cost of living crisis on the back burner. 

The opposition has been quick to capitalize on the holes in Congress’s unity and fill the vacuum such squabbling consequently leaves in public service, which Iglesias lauds: “They sustained the intellectual and analytical questioning of the OVP [following the hearings on the veep’s CIF request].”  

This is just a cog, however, in the opposition’s counterattacks. Resistance pushing for party reform has materialized in legislation since the 1980s, but no such bill has been adopted into law. This is simply true to form, according to political science professor Jean Encinas-Franco in her 2009 study: “[N]o matter the intent of the bill to level the playing field, [the sitting government] would not want to change the rules of the game they are so used to playing.”

Minimizing constitutional changes and abolishing the three-seat cap for winning party-lists every election are just two measures forwarded by the UP Center for Integrative and Development Studies in its 2023 discussion paper. Central to its proposal is that any stab at party reform must be spurred by strong public support, thus the need for a strong synergy with civil society.

Unity is what girded Marcos’s accession to the presidency. The erosion of that unity, however, is no cause for worry because it was a brand of unity reserved solely for the propertied elite. Instead, it is a call to action; civil society and the opposition share in a role to wrest back the unity of a nation that bickering factions and warring families have long sequestered. ●