By Fiona Katauskas
MANILA — On May 8, after months of often bizarre pageantry and promises, voters will elect officials for thousands of offices, from town councillors to provincial governors to senators and congresspeople.
Among the candidates for the 17,000 offices, one finds the biggest names in the Philippines — often people with no political experience whatsoever. One of the major parties presents senatorial hopefuls such as Baby Arenas, a glamorous darling of the social pages, whose prefix has suddenly been changed from "socialite" to "social worker", and basketball star Fernandez.
Running for provincial vice-governor is the "bad boy of the Philippines' cinema", heart-throb Robin Padilla, who is on trial for assault. A host of beauty queens and minor celebrities vie for other offices. Says Oscar Feliciano, congressional candidate for Laguna, "Fame and popularity in everyday life are political assets — oh, and it helps if you can sing and dance."
Indeed, singing and dancing form a major part of political campaigning. In lieu of actual policies, candidates campaign by touring their electorates with huge entertainment extravaganzas. These free concerts include famous pop and movie stars, female and transvestite beauty pageants and celebrity endorsements.
Thousands of free promotional T-shirts, jackets and baseball hats are distributed, and vehicles rigged with huge public address systems blast out the merits of the candidates to the tune of "La Bamba", "Galveston" or "Oklahoma", depending on the number of syllables in the candidate's name.
Even more bizarre is the reappearance of some of the more infamous faces of Philippines history. Two generations of Marcoses are back: Imelda Marcos is running for office in Leyte, and her son, Ferdinand "Bong Bong" Marcos II is a senatorial candidate who has been greeted like a teen idol on tour, maintaining that his father "was not a dictator".
Gregario "Gringo" Honasan, leader of the last two coup attempts against Cory Aquino is on the same ticket, presenting himself as a cross between a pious family man and Rambo. Honasan let slip in an interview that, were he to lose, there are still 10 RAM (Reformed Armed Forces Movement) paramilitary units in Metro Manila which would support him in the event of "electoral cheating".
Filipino politicians are almost all elite traditional politicians or trapos who come from a small number of dynastic families, who can afford the massive campaign expenses and to whom many Filipinos defer because of their social position.
Trapos also consolidate their power by taking advantage of utang na loob, translated roughly as "debt of gratitude". This is the basis of the system of political patronage whereby a politician does a small personal favour for poor and ill-educated members of the constituency, like visiting their homes, attending a son's graduation or providing medicine for a sick child. The debt lasts a lifetime and is repaid with votes.
The practice also works on a larger scale. Politicians (especially on a national level) can get away with doing very little in a legislative sense but undertaking minor public works to show they are working for the electorate. All over the country are bus shelters, shrubberies, walkways and short stretches of paved road with plaques crediting their existence to the magnanimity of Senator X or Congressman Y.
For the two months prior to the elections there is a ban on public employees being hired or public works being initiated, but the period before this is one of frenzied hiring and construction in public places. Many of these works are abandoned midway, the implicit message being that they will be completed on re-election of the patron.
However, vote-buying is not always so politely done. Filipinos often talk of the "G, G and G" (guns, goons and gold) factor in politics. Many trapos, especially those locally based, operate as warlords with private armies of goons who will ensure that all eligible voters register (some areas have voter registration rates of over 100%), then ensure that people remember how to vote.
The recent devolution of police and military power to provincial and local officials has enabled trapos to enlist government forces for their personal support. COMELEC (the government monitoring agency) estimates that there are more than 200 private armies operating throughout the election. Despite a gun ban, there have been 10 officially acknowledged political murders in the pre-election period, including that of congressman Tito Espinoso outside the House of Representatives in Manila.