A symptom of a bigger problem
“Substitution is not a problem; it is a symptom of a bigger problem.” This was the candid answer of Atty. Ona Caritos, the Executive Director of the Legal Network for Truthful Elections (LENTE), in an interview during the Open Forum Rule of Law Edition last Friday, November 19, 2021.
It has been the stand of the Bohol Tribune that substitution is a privilege granted by law to political parties, and this privilege should not be deprived from legitimate political parties.
The bigger problem that Atty. Caritos is referring to is our political party system in the Philippines. Days before the November 15 deadline for substitution, we saw a spectacle of politicians jumping from one party to another to join the substitution folly.
It is quite unthinkable for our candidates to abandon their political parties for the sake of substitution. Carl Lande, the author of the article “The Political Party System in the Philippines” in 1967, wrote that political parties in the Philippines used to follow a two-party system. People associated themselves either as the Nacionalistas and the Liberals, as these parties dominated the political scene during the postwar era. Margins between the strengths of the major parties were substantial but not extreme. The major parties traded power at frequent intervals.
According to the article, party switching was common at that time and intra-party solidarity was weak as shown by “rebel candidates” who ran for a position as independent candidate or under another party after failing to get the official nomination of his original party.
Today, the problematic political party system has gotten worse. Nathan Quimpo quoted by the Asia Foundation’s Strong Patronage, Weak Parties Briefer, succinctly describes the problem in this manner: “Far from being stable, programmatic entities, [Philippine political parties have] proved to be not much more than convenient vehicles of patronage that can be set up, merged with others, split, resurrected, regurgitated, reconstituted, renamed, repackaged, recycled, or flushed down the toilet at any time.”
The Briefer strongly emphasized that the quality of democracy can be undermined by the weakness of political parties and the lack of political competition. These conditions put poor and marginalized citizens at a disadvantage.
Indeed, Philippine elections have become a circus where candidates who can put up a well-funded campaign to build an image that captures the people’s imagination of a good leader are the ones who get elected. But the leaders elected under this system often practice patronage politics, a situation in which a person is rewarded for supporting a particular politician, such as campaigning, funding, or voting for them.
Patronage politics is a vicious cycle. Moneyed people and some corporations lobby for their own agenda by supporting a candidate who in turn is compelled to give in to his funders’ demands to maintain his position or to perpetuate himself in power.
While some blame our culture as the major contributing factor to the despicable system, institutional deficiencies have been pointed out as the cause for the many historical shortcomings in our electoral system. Political reformers have often voiced the need for measures that help both to undermine systems of patronage and to promote stronger political parties (Asia Foundation Briefer). Unless our candidates make a solemn commitment to change this system and honor this commitment once elected to office, the unfortunate spectacle in the past weeks is bound to be repeated in the coming decades.