IN the first presidential election of the Commonwealth, General Emilio Aguinaldo, head of the First Philippine Republic, challenged the candidacies of Manuel Quezon and Sergio Osmeña Sr. He lost. But the fact that the anachrontic leader won one of every three votes seemed to prove that the grievances that caused the Philippine Revolution were not being redressed and that the political party system had not gained public confidence. The incandescent issue then was whether independence was to be restored immediately or after ten more years of American tutelage. At that crucial point of our history, it was evident that the issue was being manipulated by foreign vested interests and their home-grown lackeys. Alarmingly, none of the existing political parties had an economic platform which could have guaranteed the stability of absolute political emancipation.
Juan Sumulong of the Democrata Party warned that political parties represented only "Philippine plutocracy" which included the "intelligentsia" and not include the needy, lower classes who had no representation, no voice or vote, in the formulation of government policies. Social justice was a battle cry along with the abolition of land tenure and share-cropping which, since Spanish colonial times, kept the majority of the population oppressed. Politicians advocated the minimum wage, an eight-hour work day and labor unions but no one seriously opposed biased trade acts and agricultural policies that smothered the birth of an economic system that could have nurtured Philippine national interests.
In his last speech in 1960, at the University of the Philippines, the late Senator Claro M. Recto outlined the history of our political party system. He minced no words:" The gravest sin of Philippine politicking was the gross neglect to exert efforts towards economic emancipation. So obsessed were the politicians with their power struggles and the doling out of the spoils of office that, either they did not foresee or, having foreseen, they completely neglected the economic problems of independence. Politics, with its enlivened election campaigns and its dispensation of patronage, became a national sport which distracted and amused the people, in the same manner that bread and circuses distracted and amused the Roman populace which did not mind whether it was Nero or Cincinnatus, or Caligula or Marcus Aurelius, who was their Caesar. In our case, while the more fortunate of us were living in comfort and luxury with the fat proceeds of our privileged agricultural exports and the holding of high government positions, the nation was slowly being consigned to perpetual economic slavery." (Vintage Recto, Renato Constantino, ed. Foundation for Nationalist Studies, Inc. 1986.)
During the first election of the Commonwealth, many of our politicians secretly sought the continuation of American colonial rule even as they openly espoused immediate and absolute independence. It seems that we inherited that congenital duplicity which is probably why our contemporary political party system is a jurassic, neo-colonial apparatus. (gemma 601@yahoo.com)
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