"Scions will spawn the seeds of destruction. And beyond that, the electorate will tire of them, even if the process sometimes takes what seems to be an eternity."
One of the perennial issues about our political system and practice is the proliferation of political dynasties.
I remember having enumerated in a column written for another newspaper sometime in 2008, entitled “A Gaggle of Dynasties,” about the political families who have monopolized political power in their respective provinces, from the Abads of Batanes to the Matbas and Jaafars of Tawi-Tawi.
I tried the same enumeration while doing nothing much last Holy Week, and saw that the family names have not changed much from province to province, North to South.
The issue came back to mind when last Sunday, a friend sent me a cellphone-taken video of the very public spat between a sitting mayor and her brother, a former mayor, in the presence of their father, a former mayor and vice-president at that.
It must have profoundly pained the patriarch who sired the dynasty—and it showed in his face.
For a decade or so running, a similar family feud happened in Camarines Sur, between father and son, thence grandfather and grandson. It seems that in this round of elections, peace within the family was brought about by the grandson now facing the son of a former ally during the political struggle against the dictatorship when present governor’s grandfather and present congressman’s father were very close allies, running under the Unido banner of Tito Doy Laurel, and making a sweep of the Batasan elections in the province against the administration. Which dynasty will prevail?
Again these days, we see two brothers, scions both of a former president turned mayor of the premier city of the country, battling it out for a seat in the Senate. The surveys of the second week of April show that one or the other will be slugging it out to be in the bottom two of the 12-man slate up for grabs.
I have seen another privately commissioned survey done a few days before that shows the same, but with the incumbent having a very, very thin edge over the older brother who wants to return to the Senate he served for two terms.
In another dynasty, this time in the North, a most senior former senator seeks to regain his seat, hoping to keep alive the family name among the hierarchy of what he calls the “leader class” after a son tried and lost in previous elections and seems to have lost his taste for politics.
The “leader class” will always want to keep themselves in the political limelight, and with it, access to and control of the levers of power and privilege.
It is difficult to make judgments and write about this in public since I happen to know the families, having been associated with them in my long experience as a “political technician.”
Yet as sure as the sun rises and sets, dynasties will rise and fall. If not in this lifetime, in another generation. The bloodline, unlike during the defunct era of the “divine right of kings” where ruling dynasties lasted centuries, is now subject to the vagaries of an emerging political maturity.
Dynastic scions will spawn the seeds of destruction. And beyond that, the electorate will tire of them, even if the process sometimes takes what seems to be an eternity.
What makes the process of such desired maturity evolve much too slow in this benighted land is the multiplicity of “political parties” which are no more than mere flags of personal or family convenience.
In effect, the Constitution of 1987, which allowed multiple parties in a presidential form has abetted, nay, created this politics of personalities rather than politics of true party platforms.
Add to this the existence of the party-list system as provided for in the Constitution, but which Congress and the Supreme Court have defined in such a manner that they have become just another flag of convenience, another vehicle for dynastic privilege, instead of a means to democratize the “leader class.”
The other day, Paul Hutchcroft, a political science professor at the Australian National University said much about the same in an interview where he observed that the “1987 Constitution effectively guarantees the perpetuation of weak political parties.”
“Within this system, everybody, regardless if they are part of the same team or different team are competing against each other… [instead of] being part of a larger party that puts together a coherent program for all the candidates running under that ticket,” Hutchcroft observed in an ANC Morning Edition interview by Christian Espiritu.
“A stronger national party system orients candidate towards larger national issues,” he added.
President Duterte in the remainder of his term may well consider revising the political system, not necessarily to replace the current unitary with a federal set-up that may be too difficult to operationalize just yet given our plethora of dynasties, which his daughter Mayor Inday Sara rued as “warlords” in Mindanao.
Reverting to a two-party system instead of the current flags of political convenience that revolve around the ambition of personalities and families may be the first big step to return sanity into our “democrazy.”
Real parties select candidates in a democratic manner, through conventions or primaries, instead of a leader merely anointing his successor, much like in the feudal manor.
It allows those outside the “leader class” defined as family to aspire and eventually to convince peers within the party to choose him or her.
This is a gift, a legacy that the president could bequeath to his people even without his dream of federalism.
