Contemporary South Africa has massive problems including appallingly high crime rates and unemployment/underemployment levels of over forty percent! However, what South Africa does have going for it, despite these severe socio-economic problems, is a strong attachment to democracy. South Africans cherish their right to vote in democratic multi-party elections which seems to ensure that this nation’s problems will ultimately be resolved by democratic means.

This attachment to democracy exists even though most of South Africans did not have the right to vote until April 1994. Perhaps it is this historical denial of suffrage on racial grounds which has endowed the current universal right to vote with such a strong sanctity that South Africans will not countenance this right being taken away from them.

It is for this reason that it was so important that South Africans were able to vote in universal elections in April 1994 when this constitutional right commenced on its path to becoming so engrained. However, the April 1994 elections almost never took place. This was because Joe Slovo (1926 to 1995) the white leader of the South African Communist Party (SACP) nearly succeeded in provoking the far right into staging a military coup that would subsequently and consequently provoke a revolution from below.

Such a revolution would probably have succeeded in establishing South Africa as a Marxist-Leninist state even though communism had become so discredited nearly five years earlier (1989) with Eastern and Central European nations throwing off such regimes. That an arch-strategist such as Joe Slovo failed in provoking a military coup and a subsequent revolution was due to the tactical, cool level headedness of a white retired army general, Constand Viljoen (1933 to 2020)[1].

The establishment of a communist South Africa would have been a triumph for Cuba’s despotic leader Fidel Castro (1926 to 2017). The Cuban dictator had previously succeeded in the 1970s in crucially helping to facilitate communist regimes in Angola and Mozambique in southern Africa. For Castro, the establishment of a communist South Africa would have been the culmination of an objective which he and fellow totalitarian revolutionary Ernesto ‘Che’ Guevara (1928 to 1967) had so assiduously worked toward, since the 1960s.

 Revolutionary Contexts: Cuba and South Africa Compared

This following sectional overview of Cuba’s pre-1959 political context is undertaken to help convey the level of political sophistication which would be replicated nearly two generations later when the Cuban communist backed Joe Slovo similarly moved to sabotage national elections from occurring in South Africa in 1994. The fact that the 1994 elections did take place is illustrative of how voting in democratic elections can prevent a revolution from occurring.

It should also be pointed out that Fidel Castro had himself also previously succeeded in manipulating the then former Cuban president, Fulgencio Batista, into staging a military coup in Cuba in March 1952 so that he (Castro) could consequently instigate a revolution on that Island which culminated in this would be dictator coming to power in January 1959. The cornerstone of Castro’s success in generating this revolution was his solemn and unambiguous promise that he would hold democratic elections once the revolution was successful. Ironically, the success of Castro’s 1959 revolution has ensured that since then Cubans were thereafter never able to vote in democratic elections.

Pre-communist Cuba, similar to contemporary South Africa had deep seated problems. Indeed, Cuba had had a revolution in 1933 in which the dictator Gerado Machado had been removed from power.  The post-1933 political context in Cuba was complex but in essence the revolutionary strongman who emerged, Fulgencio Batista (1901 to 1973) successfully conciliated the opposition by holding elections to a constituent assembly in 1939.

The constituent assembly drew up the democratic constitution of 1940 which thereafter became deeply revered by most Cubans. It was under this constitution that Batista was democratically elected president in 1940. President Bastia received considerable kudos amongst Cubans for not only respecting this constitution by stepping down as president when his presidential term expired in 1944, but for also for ceding power to the opposition Autentico Party which had unexpectantly won the elections that year.

Alas, the nearly eight years of Autentico Party misrule in Cuba (1944 to 1952) were exceedingly corrupt. Disenchantment with Autentico Party corruption reached a peak in August 1951 when the opposition senator, Eddy Chibbas committed suicide when he was unable to substantiate allegations of corruption against a government minister. The outrage which ensued was directed against the ruling party so that one of the opposition presidential candidates, Roberto Agramonte who belonged to Chibbas’s Ortodoxo Party had a strong chance of winning the June 1952 presidential election.

Indeed, Agramonte probably would have won the June 1952 elections had Batista not returned to power in March that year via a military coup. That Batista returned to power in this coup was due to Castro’s pre-election machinations. Castro (who was then an Ortodoxo candidate for Congress) between December 1951 and February 1952 made credible allegations of corruption against the outgoing presidential administration of Prio Socarras which ironically were published in the Batistano newspaper Alerta. Castro even went before the Supreme Court to make allegations of corruption directly against President Prio.

The future Cuban dictator (i.e. Castro) correctly calculated that President Prio, who had become addicted to wealth and luxury, would not want to risk the opposition Ortodoxo Party coming to power on an anti-corruption platform. However, due to a 1943 election code it was impossible for President Prio to rig the elections in favour of the Autentico Party’s presidential candidate Carlos Hevia. Nor could President Prio suspend the constitution to perpetuate himself in power for to have done so the president knew would have sparked a revolution against him.

The wily Castro also knew that the above cited options were closed off to President Prio. However, Castro was aware that President Prio could arrange for an avowed opponent of his in the person of Fulgencio Batista (who was then also running for president in the 1952 elections) to return to power via a military coup with President Prio’s covert connivance. Although Batista’s return to power meant that President Prio would have to temporarily go into exile he knew that due to the pre-arranged nature of the 1952 coup that his assets would be left untouched and that he would not be prosecuted for corruption.

The near bloodlessness of the March 10^th, 1952 coup was testament to the fact that President Prio had helped engineer his own overthrow. This secret collusion between Batista and Prio with regard to the 1952 coup might not have been fatal to Cuban democracy had this event not fitted in with Castro’s grand strategy of preparing the groundwork for his revolutionary route to power so that he could proceed to establish a totalitarian regime.

How Castro subsequently exploited the 1952 coup to facilitate his revolutionary rise to power will not be detailed in this article. Nevertheless, the overall point needs to be made that by denying the Cuban people a vote in the scheduled June 1952 elections the March coup created the pre-conditions for Castro to come to power via a revolution.

As flawed as the Cuban political establishment was in the early 1950s, Cuba’s steep socio-economic problems would not have led to a revolution had there been no democratic disruption. That such a disruption occurred was due to Castro’s strategic genius not only in instigating the 1952 coup but also in exploiting the subsequent conditions to generate a revolution by January 1959. Joe Slovo with a similar degree of manipulative skill would move in 1994 to engineer events so that a revolution would ensue by provoking a right-wing military coup to prevent the scheduled April elections from proceeding.

The ANC Moves to a Revolutionary Context

Indeed, Castro demonstrated his similar capacity for political foresight by envisioning the potential to establish future totalitarian regimes in Africa by initially guiding anti-colonial resistance movements in Portuguese Africa and the anti-racist movement in white minority ruled South Africa in the 1960s.It was the Sharpeville Massacre in South Africa in March 1960 which marked a turning point for the anti-apartheid movement away from the non-violent approach which had previously been adopted by the African National Congress (ANC) under the leadership of the Zulu chief, Albert Luthuli (1897 to 1967).

De facto leadership of the ANC following the 1960 Sharpeville Massacre passed to Nelson Mandela in June 1961 when he founded the armed wing of that organisation called the Umkhonto we Sizwe (‘Spear of the Nation’). Umkhonto we Sizwe was crushed by 1963 by which time Nelson Mandela had been captured and sentenced to life imprisonment.

The most prominent ANC activist who had escaped detention was Oliver Tambo who headed this anti-apartheid organisation in exile. It was in exile following the success of the clampdown by South Africa’s security forces that the ANC was restructured in the early 1960s with the active counsel of Fidel Castro and Che Guevara. These two totalitarian revolutionaries ensured that the ANC’s alliance with the SACP (which dated back to 1946) was consolidated so that communist influence became predominant within the ANC.

A major base of communist influence within the ANC at a grassroots level in South Africa during the apartheid era was amongst urban based Zulus in Natal Province. This was partly because of the harsh nature of industrial laws which denied (until the Wiehahn Commission in the 1970s) basic labour rights to non-white South Africans. This substantial support for SACP in Natal Province’s urban areas amongst Zulus was countered in rural areas where traditional tribal structures were well entrenched and reverence for the institution of the Zulu monarchy remained strong.

Zulu support in rural areas for their monarchy was manifested by the prevailing influence of the Inkatha Party (later the Inkatha Freedom Party, IFP) which was founded and led by Chief Mangosuthu Buthelezi. Chief Buthelezi’s Inkatha Party controlled the Kwa Zulu (Zululand) Bantustan (Homeland), which was created in the 1970s, as a one-party-state.

The apartheid regime was unable however to establish other black homelands which had genuine support amongst the Xhosa ethnic group (which Nelson Mandela belonged to) as most Xhosas were supporters of the ANC. SACP influence within the ANC in Xhosa areas was less structured and pervasive as it was in urban Zulu areas, but it was still there.

To counter support for the ANC /SACP amongst the Xhosas and other ethnic groups the apartheid regime in the 1970s established so-called ‘independent’ homelands which were scattered across South Africa. The ‘independent’ homelands were Bophuthatswana, Ciskei, Transkei and Venda as well as a ‘self-governing’ homeland of Qwa Qwa.

The 1984 Constitution Produces Political Polarization

Having utterly failed to garner any support amongst non-Zulu black South Africans by creating these homelands the apartheid regime in 1984 promulgated a nominally multi-racial constitution which notionally extended full civic (including voting) rights to Coloured and Asian South Africans. A tricameral parliament was created respectively representing whites and the other two aforementioned communities. The real and lasting innovating dimension of the 1984 Constitution was the establishment of an immensely powerful executive presidency which was first held by PW Botha (1916 to 2006) who had previously (since 1978) led South Africa as prime minister.

The promulgation of the 1984 Constitution precipitated a massive anti-government civil disobedience campaign which was directed by an ANC front organisation, the United Democratic Front (UDF). The harsh response by the apartheid regime to this civil disobedience campaign fuelled an international campaign to place international economic sanctions against South Africa. It therefore seemed that South Africa was heading for a violent revolution which would probably result in a Marxist-Leninist regime.

The political polarization which ensued as a result of the civil disobedience campaign was such that in the May 1987 elections there was a shift to the right by the white electorate. This was manifested by the Conservative Party (a 1982 National Party breakaway party established to oppose the extension of political rights to Coloureds and Asians) displacing the liberal Progressive Federal Party (PFP) as the official parliamentary opposition.

The racist Conservative Party would have won the September 1989 elections had the popular Foreign Minister Pik Botha not succeeded in persuading enough white liberal Anglo voters to transfer their support from the Democratic Party (the successor to the PFP) to the National Party. Paradoxically, had the National Party continued to perpetuate white minority rule the probable result would have been that the Conservative Party would have won the next minority election.

The realization that white minority rule itself was not a viable option was appreciated by F W De Clerk who had succeeded PW Botha as president in August 1989.  De Clerk’s ascension to the South African presidency had been assured in January 1989 when the National Party’s parliamentary caucus had chosen him to succeed PW Botha as party leader after Botha was severely affected by a stroke.

Although De Clerk would be instrumental in bringing apartheid to an end, he was not in a National Party context from that party’s relatively ‘liberal’ wing. Rather he was from the pragmatic predominantly centrist faction of the National Party. Indeed, PW Botha for all his intense anti-communism and authoritarian personality was actually (in a National Party context) a party liberal. Under his presidency, petty apartheid had been abolished with inter racial sex and marriage being permitted.

PW Botha was probably intelligent enough to realize that the National Party’s introduction of apartheid following its election to power in 1948 had, with the benefit of hindsight, been a mistake. However, PW Botha himself was wary of majority party rule on the basis that he feared that a communist takeover of South Africa would have resulted.

Francois Mitterand Counters Fidel Castro

The statesman who had the political nous to stymie Fidel Castro’s objective of establishing a communist South Africa was the then French president, Francois Mitterand (1916 to 1996). Mitterand as the under-secretary for African affairs in France’s Fourth Republic in the 1950s had orientated a generation of Francophone leaders away from the French Communist Party’s (PCF) orbit toward pro-western regimes and their ideologies when independence was granted in the 1960s.

Furthermore, Mitterand had displayed remarkable political skill in the 1970s to ensure that his French Socialist Party (PS) supplanted the PCF as the main party on the left, therefore helping to consolidate French democracy following Charles De Gaulle’s departure as president in 1969.

It was at Mitterand’s instigation that the South African government commenced secret negotiations with Nelson Mandela between 1987 and 1989 on the issue of majority rule. The major anxiety that Nelson Mandela had to address when negotiating with the South African government was how to ensure that the SACP did not utilize the ANC as a Trojan Horse by which to come to power should the right to vote be extended to all South African adults.

Nelson Mandela undertook to his captors to apply the operational principles which Francois Mitterand advocated to keep the South African communists in check should majority rule be conceded. The application of these Mitterand operational principles was illustrated in the 2009 film Invictus where President Nelson Mandela retains most of De Clerk’s presidential staff and bodyguards to the amazement of his close associates. Actions such as this were more than gestures because they enabled President Mandela to utilize pre-existing power networks to keep SACP at bay without having to disassociate from that party.

Convinced of Nelson Mandela’s sincerity about keeping the SACP in check, President De Clerk in his state of the nation address in February 1990 announced Nelson Mandela’s unconditional release later that month as well as the immediate unbanning of the ANC and SACP. These dramatic actions on President De Clerk’s part marked the commencement of a turbulent four-year transition to majority rule culminating in Nelson Mandela being elected and inaugurated as president of South Africa in May 1994.

One of the major obstacles which was overcome in this four year period between 1990 and 1994 was white consent for majority rule with a white’s only referendum held on the issue in March 1992 in which the over sixty-eight percent of the electorate voted in the affirmative. Nevertheless, there were still major obstacles to be overcome, particularly regarding inter-Zulu violence between the IFP and SACP during this time.

Despite the continuing violence, Nelson Mandela and FW De Clerk were jointly awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in December 1993. Although Nelson Mandela and President FW De Clerk were worthy recipients of the Nobel Peace Prize, this prize for 1993 should perhaps also have included President Francois Mitterand because his strategic advice and mediation had crucially laid the groundwork for the ending of apartheid.

 

 

Potential Barriers to Majority Rule:  The Formation of the so called ‘Freedom Alliance’

However, the real test of whether peace would ensue in South Africa was whether democratic elections would be held in April 1994. A major potential obstacle toward holding those elections arose with the formation in October 1993 of the Freedom Alliance, which was composed of the Conservative Party, the IFP as well as the homeland governments of Bophuthatswana and Ciskei.

Also included in the Freedom Alliance was the Afrikaans Volksfront (AVF) which contained over twenty Afrikaans organisations. The AVF was chaired by Constand Viljoen who emerged as one of the most important leaders in the Freedom Alliance. His importance was derived from the fact that as a retired commander of the South African Defence Force (SADF), Constand Viljoen could potentially utilize his still strong influence within the armed forces and the police to stage a military coup to prevent the April 1994 elections from proceeding.

To help encourage this eventuality (i.e. a military coup) to occur, SACP leader Joe Slovo moved to instigate the overthrow of the regime of Lucas Mangope of Bophuthatswana in March 1994 in order to provoke a national right-wing military coup response. Had such a coup occurred the succeeding national government probably would have been multi-racial in that it would have been composed of members from the Freedom Alliance.

However, the overwhelming majority of South Africans would inevitably have rejected such a government therefore leading to a massive revolt by the African population which could not have been put down without bloodshed on a considerable scale. Indeed, even had such a coup succeeded in the short term, in the long term such a government would eventually have succumbed to a violent revolution resulting in a probable Marxist-Leninist totalitarian regime for South Africa.

The scenario which confronted South Africa in 1994 was similar to the situation which Cuba faced in 1952 where Fidel Castro also manipulated pre-election events so that Fulgencio Batista staged a coup in response. The disappointment that many Cubans felt about not being able to vote in the 1952 elections ultimately laid the groundwork for Castro’s January 1959 revolution.

High Stakes Political Chess: Joe Slovo versus Constand Viljoen

Similarly, Joe Slovo by having masses of ANC supporters converge on Bophuthatswana’s capital Mmabatho in early March 1994, tried to provoke the highly trained commanders of the Freedom Alliance to intervene so that a national coup would ensue. However, ill-trained and ill-disciplined white militiamen of the fascist Afrikaner Resistance Front (AWB) precipitately arrived in Mmabatho before Freedom Alliance troops had reached this homeland capital.

This precipitant action by the AWB caused a mutiny in the Bophuthatswana armed forces. Two AWB members were shot dead by Bophuthatswana security forces and this was shown on the nightly national news.

The De Clerk government reacted quickly to this deteriorating situation in Bophuthatswana by despatching a delegation of the Transitional Executive Council (TEC) to meet with President Mangope on March 12^th to have him formally re-incorporate this homeland into South Africa so that national elections could proceed there in April 1994. The rapidity with which Bophuthatswana was reincorporated into South Africa undermined the scope for a far-right national military coup to occur.

Another crucial factor which upended the prospect of a national military coup occurring was General Constand Viljoen’s swift action on March 16^th of submitting candidates of a new political party, the Freedom Front with the Independent Electoral Commission (IEC). By breaking with the AVF and the Freedom Alliance to register the Freedom Front, General Constand Viljoen in a masterstroke had appropriated the voting base of the boycotting Conservative Party while also ensuring that the far-right did not fall into Slovo’s trap of staging a national military coup.[2]

General Constand Viljoen’s decision to participate in South African national and provincial elections in April 1994 was a paradigm shift as this conveyed the far-right’s acceptance of the emerging new constitutional order. Indeed, as the politics of post-Franco Spain in the 1970s also demonstrated, that seemingly intractable national problems can often be overcome by the holding democratic national and regional elections.

Contemporary communist Cuba’s ruling nomenklatura could also extricate themselves from riding the tiger of being a dictatorship by holding multi-party elections to a constituent assembly to revise the Constitution of 1940. The benefit of conducting future elections to a constituent assembly is that Cuba’s ruling communists could gauge their legitimate bases of support without having to immediately cede executive power.

Last Minute Deals:  The IFP Enters the Electoral Fray

The importance of holding elections to resolve seemingly intractable problems was also shown in South Africa when the Kenyan academic Professor Washington Okumu persuaded his friend Chief Buthelezi to participate in the April 1994 national and provincial elections. The IFP’s agreement to participate in these elections was made on the basis that considerable autonomy would be granted to the new province of KwaZulu Natal and that if Chief Buthelezi’s party won ten percent or more of the national vote that it would be represented in the national cabinet.

The IFP’s last minute decision (April 15^th) to register and participate in the joint national and provincial April 27^th, 1994 elections was facilitated by the IEC’s decision to attach that party’s logo to the bottom of the national and provincial ballots. It should be pointed out at this juncture that South African voters in the 1994 elections were handed two ballot papers with which to vote- a national ballot and a provincial ballot.

Post-apartheid South Africa now has nine provinces and the decision to retain a federal system of government has been an important ingredient in that nation having a viable working democracy by preventing the concentration of power with the central government. By contrast contemporary Australia is faced with the prospect of Australian states being dismembered by a process known as ‘regionalization’ which would ultimately concentrate power in the national government.

It should not be forgotten that in the last days of the Gillard government in 2013 that legislation was passed authorising a referendum on local government recognition in the Australian constitution by which the regionalization process could be facilitated in the future. It would be an ironic pity that Australia might throw away a system of government that has served the nation so well while a nation such as South Africa which has fought so hard to become a majority democracy now appreciates the value of having a federal system of government.

The struggle to engineer a transition to majority democracy in South Africa was such that as historic as South Africa’s 1994 elections were, the provincial and national vote in KwaZulu Natal was probably rigged in favour of the IFP so that it won control of the new province and gained national cabinet representation with Chief Buthelezi subsequently serving as the federal Home Affairs Minister.

For Nelson Mandela, the political benefit of the IFP holding office in KwaZulu Natal was that this helped to keep the SACP in check because its base was in the ANC’s urban Zulu areas. Nelson Mandela therefore publicly and ‘paradoxically’ welcomed the IFP’s electoral success as being conducive to needed national unity.

In the overall April 27^th, 1994 national elections, the ANC predictably came first with just over sixty-two percent of the vote. While over ten percent of the successful national parliamentary candidates of the ANC were covert members of SACP the fact that the ANC had had a democratic national vote among its members in December 1993 to preselect its national candidates prevented the communists from dominating this party.

The National Party came in second with a respectable twenty percent of the vote followed by the IFP winning just over ten percent of the vote. The Freedom Front and the Democratic Party respectively garnered over two and one percent of the national vote in the 1994 poll among a relatively small minority of white voters.

Alternative History: What Could have Been Had the United Party Prevailed in 1948

While the Democratic Party’s national vote in the 1994 election was a low one it still gained parliamentary representation. During its coverage of the 1994 South African elections The Age newspaper in Melbourne Australia ran a series of short ‘talking head’ interviews with South African voters from various racial groups. Interestingly, one of those interviewed was a black man who said that in the ballot for the national government he would vote for the ANC but that he would cast his provincial vote for the Democratic Party on the basis that it was the only political party participating in the elections which really believed in democracy.

This anecdotal endorsement for the Democratic Party and the support that the Democratic Alliance (the successor to the Democratic Party) has received in the 2000s from a substantial minority of African voters illustrates that such a ‘wrong turn’ was taken in 1948 when the then white electorate voted in the National Party.

Counterfactually, South Africa could have evolved into a majority multi-racial democracy had the United Party under General Jan Smuts won the 1948 elections.  General Smuts (1870 to 1950) led a remarkable life in which he went from being a leading anti-British guerrilla leader during the Boer War (1899 to 1902) to be the founder in 1918 of Britain’s Royal Air Force (RAF) at the time of the First World War (1914 to 1918).

This statesman also wrote the Covenant of the League of Nations in 1919 and was the main author of the United Nations General Charter in 1945. While Jan Smuts was in an international context unquestionably a liberal, in a domestic South African context his role was more ambiguous. For Smuts the issue of race relations was not a question of white versus black but rather the need to achieve reconciliation between Afrikaners and white Anglos.

It was in pursuit of the above objective that Smuts supported the creation of the Union of South Africa as a dominion of the British Empire in 1910 in which the four provinces federated. [3] During the First World War General Smuts and Prime Minister Louis Botha took their nation into the Allied side, crushed a military coup attempt by pro-German elements within the armed forces and conquered German South West Africa (Namibia) in 1915.

Representing South Africa at the negotiations at the Treaty of Versailles in1919 where the victorious Allies imposed a peace treaty on a defeated Germany it was General Smuts who modified this treaty so that it was less harsh than was proposed by other members of the alliance (including Australia). Later that year (1919), General Smuts succeeded to the prime ministership of South Africa upon the death of Louis Botha.

General Smuts’ main innovation during his first prime ministership (1919 to 1924) was his unsuccessful attempt to bring in the self-governing neighbouring British colony of Southern Rhodesia (contemporary Zimbabwe) as a province of South Africa in 1922. This proposal was rejected in a referendum by Southern Rhodesia’s white electorate. This consequently deprived General Smuts of a potential extra voting base among white Anglos by which he might have been able to have held onto office. Instead he lost the 1924 elections.

The 1924 elections were won by a National Party/Labour Party coalition led by J. B.M. Herzog which pursued racist policies such as shutting out African workers from skilled work in the mining sector so that this employment could be reserved exclusively for whites. Realizing that it was inevitable that Africans were eventually going to urbanize and that it was going to be impossible to exclude them permanently from industry, Jan Smuts during his time as federal parliamentary Opposition Leader (1924 to 1933) formulated the concept of apartheid.[4]

Jan Smuts conceptualized apartheid as a system where industrial and urban development would occur separately among the different races of South Africa. From Smuts’ perspective apartheid was a liberal policy because it recognised that there would be industrial and urban development amongst the African majority. In fact, Smut’s outlook was essentially racist because he could not (at this point until the 1940s) envisage that blacks, whites, Coloureds and Asians could integrate in a context where there would be majority rule.

Ironically, the concept of apartheid would after 1948 be appropriated and utilized by the National Party government of D. F. Malan to perpetuate white minority rule based upon an obsessively rigorous and systematic policy of racial separation. However, for Jan Smuts the issue of race was one in which the objective was to achieve reconciliation between Afrikaners and white Anglos so that his mindset did not at this stage envisage majority rule.

Jan Smut’s then relatively narrow mindset was reflected by taking his South Africa Party into coalition government with Hertzog’s National Party in 1933 to help solve the steep economic challenges which confronted the nation due to the onset of the Great Depression. While Smut’s South Africa Party and a majority of the National Party merged in 1934 to form the United Party an intransigent minority of the National Party continued on under the leadership of F. W. Malan.

Co-operation between Jan Smuts and J.B. M. Hertzog however became impossible due to the outbreak of the Second World War in September 1939 as the latter favoured South African neutrality due to his pro-Nazi sympathies. The South African parliament’s vote in September 1939 to enter the Second World War on the Allied side led to Hertzog’s resignation and Smut’s return to power as prime minister as head of pro-Allied coalition government composed of the United Party, the Labour Party and the Dominion Party.

Lost Opportunities:  The Potential for Earlier Democratic Reform

The second Smuts government (1939 to 1948) achieved much during the Second World War as South Africa made an important contribution to the Allied war effort with South African troops serving with distinction in Ethiopia, Somalia, Libya, Madagascar, Greece, and Italy. Despite opposition by a militant minority of Afrikaners to the war effort, South African industry was efficiently converted to war production needs and in 1943 the Smuts led coalition was returned to power in a landslide election victory.

As an important allied power during the Second World War there was of course no question about South Africa joining the United Nations (UN) in 1945 as a founder member. However, during South Africa’s membership of the UN between 1945 and 1948 under United Party rule, the government of Jan Smuts was most put out by criticism of its racial segregation policies in the UN General Assembly.[5]

As a brilliant man who was susceptible to international criticism an argument could consequently be made that if South Africa had retained the United Party government in 1948 that by the 1960s this nation would already have given way to black majority rule.

The main indicator that the above scenario would have come to fruition was the United Party government’s plan to have a massive post-war influx of migration from Britain, Italy and Greece so that when black majority government was granted by the 1960s the ratio between black and white would have been that for every white there were two blacks instead of the then ratio of six to one .

J.M Hofmeyr:  The Great ‘could have been’ of South African History

Another indicator of the United Party’s possible liberal intentions was a post-war plan to extend social services to all races as envisaged by Jan Smuts’ overworked deputy, J.M. Hofmeyr (1894 to 1948). Among the string of Hofmeyr’s portfolio responsibilities was that of Immigration Minister.  Indeed, Hofmeyr in opposition to the National Party had supported Jewish migration to South Africa in the 1930s and proposed to undertake a massive programme of post-war immigration. Due to overwork and perhaps because of his intense disappointment that the United Party had lost the May 1948 general election, J.M. Hofmeyr unfortunately died in December 1948.

Contemporary South Africa needs national ministers of the calibre of J.M. Hofmeyr to serve in portfolios such as education and training as well as urban development so as to lift millions of South African blacks out of poverty. Putting massive resources (both material and human) into South Africa’s education and training systems will prove to be the antidote to systematic inequality which apartheid bequeathed. Furthermore, the provision of microcredit to spur on the growth of small business generated employment should also be a national priority because this has the potential to be poverty circuit breaker.

The advocacy of these above cited policies might not have been necessary, had the National Party not won the 1948 elections. Indeed, the 1948 general election victory of the National Party (in which Jan Smuts lost his seat) was a surprise. This upset can be attributed in part to the 1946 census results which indicated that over forty percent of black Africans were urbanized which consequently frightened enough Afrikaners to shift their vote to the National Party to deliver this racist party victory.

A Myriad of Party Splits

Had the United Party instead won the 1948 election this party would have gained the electoral support of new white migrants who would then have provided a continuing electoral support for the ruling party to eventually enable it to transition to black majority rule. As it was the ambiguous stance which the United Party adopted in opposition in relation to apartheid precipitated four major splits within this party over the next thirty years.

It was in 1954 that the racist element within the United Party broke away to form the Conservative Party, which is not to be confused with the party of the same name which was founded in 1982 following a split within the National Party. A liberal element within the United Party broke away in 1959 to form the Progressive Party and for years its sole member of Parliament was the courageous Helen Suzman (1917 to 2009).

In 1975 other liberal members of the United Party again departed to form the Reform Party which later that year merged with the Progressive Party to establish the Progressive Reform Party. This new party in 1977 joined with the continuing liberal elements within the United Party to become the PFP which became the main white parliamentary opposition party. The PFP in turn merged with two minor white liberal parties in 1989 to found the Democratic Party in that year.

The Democratic Party (which following the 1999 South African general election emerged as the major parliamentary opposition party) merged with the Democratic Alliance (DA) in 2003. Since then the DA has been South Africa’s main opposition party. Indeed, between 2015 and 2019 the DA was led by a black African, Mmusi Maimane, which illustrated the potential for this party to become a viable alternative to the ruling ANC.

The overview of the above cited political machinations concerning party formation is illustrative of the counter factual perspective that had the United Party won the 1948 general election there could have been a more peaceful transition to black majority rule earlier than ultimately occurred (possibly by the 1960s).

As it was there was still a transition to black majority rule in the 1990s, which was more hazardous resulting from the spectre of a Marxist-Leninist takeover of South Africa. However, as a result of the courage, foresight and magnanimous wisdom of Nelson Mandela as well as the positive political skills of FW De Clerk and Francois Mitterand, South Africa transitioned to majority rule in 1994. Furthermore, Constand Viljoen’s refusal to fall for the Castro/Slovo trap of staging a national right-wing military coup in March 1994 was also instrumental in ensuring that there was ultimately a transition to a majority democracy.

MagazineWithout voting there can be no Democracy

Overall, the moral of South Africa’s story between 1910 and 1994 is that if you deny people the right to vote then a revolution will become inevitable. Seemingly intractable problems can usually be overcome if people are granted the right to vote. Even though contemporary post-apartheid South Africa faces profoundly serious problems such as deep-seated poverty, these challenges can eventually be overcome because the people have the right to elect their representatives at a federal and a provincial level.[6]

 

[1] The role of Abraham (‘Braam’) Viljoen, Constand’s identical twin brother in influencing him, might have been a factor in ensuring that the far-fight did not fall into the Castro/Slovo trap of staging a military coup. Braam Viljoen was a prominent liberal academic.

[2] The AVF and the Conservative Party were wedded to the futile idea of creating an ill-defined Afrikaner homeland or Volkstaat.

[3] Unfortunately, General Smuts initially, and thankfully unsuccessfully, advocated that this new dominion be a unitary state. 

[4] Apartheid is Afrikaans for ‘apartness’ but has often been translated into English as ‘separate development’. 

[5] South Africa was expelled from the UN in 1968.

[6] Land reform is one of the issues which confronts post-apartheid South Africa.  The smart approach to this issue would be to allow white farmers to continue to own and manage their farms so long black farm workers are well remunerated and their working conditions are decent.  In this context, South African trade unions have an important role to play.

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This article by Dr. David Bennett argues why President Ferdinand E Marcos probably had Benigno Aquino assassinated. The ramifications of this assassination are reviewed with regard to the transition to the post-Marcos era in which, for all the shifting of alliances and subsequent new political formations, an enduring Filipino elite has maintained its ascendancy due to its capacity to adapt.

It will be argued that this political sophistication by the elite has not been matched by a willingness by most Filipino governments to undertake needed socio-economic reform. The analysis concludes that the Philippines is now facing a major challenge to its democracy with the prospect of President Rodrigo Duterte’s possibly entering an alliance with Communist China.

The credibility of the Marcos regime’s denial that it had instigated the assassination of Benigno (‘Ninoy’) Aquino in August 1983 was premised on the argument that President Ferdinand E. Marcos was a brilliant man who would not have been so unwise as to have ordered his chief rival’s murder because the ensuing unrest could only endanger his government. However, it will be argued in this article that President Marcos could have had Ninoy Aquino assassinated because he was looking to secure his family’s interests after his own death.

The succession model which President Marcos envisaged in 1983 was be succeeded as national leader by Salvador (‘Doy’) Laurel who was at that time notionally opposed to the Marcos administration. The 1983 Aquino assassination eliminated Laurel’s main rival within the opposition camp and the political dynamics which President Marcos then engineered were such that by late 1985 Ninoy’s widow Corazon (‘Cory’) Aquino was compelled to name Laurel as her running mate for the February 1986 snap presidential election  which was run under the banner of Laurel’s party, the United Nationalist Democratic Organization (UNIDO).

By running as UNIDO’s 1986 presidential standard bearer, Cory Aquino had ensured that this party would be accorded the legal status of Dominant Opposition Party (DOP). Consequently, and subsequently, UNIDO as the DOP could field poll watchers for the May 1986 local government elections which would give it an advantage over other opposition parties. According to President Marcos’ game plan UNIDO would then be allowed, almost enabled, to win most of the posts in the May 1986 local government elections.

It was believed that a UNIDO victory in the May 1986 local government elections would have served the immediate purpose of placating domestic and international outrage over Marcos having rigged his February 1986 re-election.  Furthermore, President Marcos would then have been able to subsequently enter into a power sharing arrangement with Doy Laurel by later naming him prime minister.  President Marcos probably would have made it look as though this appointment was made under American pressure.  To further sweeten this arrangement Marcos had named as his running mate, Arturo Tolentino, in late 1985.

Tolentino was a respected constitutional lawyer and a politician whom Marcos had given the latitude to criticise him so that he was the president’s leading internal critic within the ruling Kilusang Bagong Kipunan (KBL, New Society Movement) party.  Because Marcos was widely rumoured to be seriously ill  and even expected to die during his 1986 to 1992 presidential term, much of the  public would have grudgingly accepted Marcos retaining office on the basis that Tolentino would probably have succeeded to the presidency.

However, to placate Doy Laurel, but really to ensure that power ultimately passed to Marcos’ main crony Eduardo (‘Danding’) Cojuangco, President Marcos would have, during a hypothetical renewed presidential term, have rescinded his constitutional right to rule by decree. While this would have notionally ensured that the Philippines transitioned to a parliamentary system with the prime minister (Laurel) then holding pre-eminent office, power really would have passed to Cojuangco. This is because with a national coalition government in place, Laurel’s UNIDO party would have merged with the KBL (which would have still had a parliamentary majority based on the May 1984 legislative election results) to form a new ruling party.

Such a ruling party would have been (in political science terms) a Dominant Ruling Party (DRP) and therefor would have held a position similar to that which Japan’s Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) had once held. Power in the new DRP would in reality, have passed to Danding Cojuangco (who died in June 2020) due to the leverage he would have exercised as then Chairman of the San Miguel beverage company.

San Miguel is the Philippines only multi-national company. Danding had become company Chairman in March 1985 following a corporate coup which was instigated with the backing of the Marcos regime in January 1984. The coup led the way for the Romualdez family of First Lady Imelda Marcos to eventually acquire twenty percent of the shares in the multi-national. President Marcos envisaged that the San Miguel conglomerate would occupy a position akin to that of the Japanese Keiretsu. The Keiretsu network of companies have informal but strong links to the LDP and fulfil a complex and shadowy role in co-ordinating national economic and political power in Japan.

The reason that President Marcos’s masterplan did not come to fruition was because he deviated from his strategy. Following his rigged re-election in February 1986 President Marcos’s Army Chief of Staff, General Fabian Ver uncovered a coup plot which was planned by the Defence Minister Juan Ponce Enrile which involved an attack on the presidential palace in which the first family was to have been killed.

A trap was then set by General Ver to eliminate Enrile and his cohorts. This gave President Marcos the confidence and the apparent capacity to take the gamble of his life which was to purge General Fidel V Ramos who was his second cousin, and to re-impose martial law so as to secure his preferred succession plan, which was to have his wife Imelda later succeeding him to the presidency.

However, General Ramos as commander of the Philippine Military Constabulary had been the prime military operative who had facilitated President Marcos’s imposition of martial law in September 1972 which established the Marcos dictatorship. Therefore, the decision by Marcos to purge General Ramos was a huge gamble because of the well-honed tactical skills of this brilliant army general.

While President Marcos had become a dictator in September 1972 his power was not absolute.  The canny president knew that professionally inclined army officers would rally to General Ramos to block Imelda’s ascension to the presidency.  For that reason, Marcos went with the long-term strategy of paving the way for the Laurel ascension to the office of prime minister. Nevertheless, President Marcos still sought to have the option of by-passing Laurel and instead to assist in his wife’s accession to the presidency by naming General Fabian Ver as army chief of staff in 1981.

General Ver had established an extensive ultra-loyalist network within the armed forces which was inclined towards perpetuating the Marcos family’s rule on an absolute basis.  Consequently, when Defence Minister Enrile’s planned coup was uncovered by General Ver, President Marcos went with his preferred option of re-imposing martial law.

Unfortunately for President Marcos, Enrile discovered that a trap had been set for him, so he appealed to General Ramos to join him in rebelling against the regime. These two senior officials then took refuge respectively in military facilities, Camp Aguinaldo, and Camp Crame. At this point the military advantage was still with the Marcos regime. However, notified by the Catholic Church’s Radio Veritas, hundreds of thousands of Manila residents rallied to block a military attack on these two military installations.

President Marcos in a televised address on February 22^nd, 1986 publicly over-ruled General Ver who had appealed to him to launch an attack on the two military camps. By over-ruling General Ver the outgoing president not only spared the lives of thousands of demonstrators, but he also sent a subliminal message to General Ramos that he would give way to Cory Aquino to become the new Chief Executive, which occurred four days later with the Marcos family departing for exile.

That the Marcos regime had come to an end was a surprise due to the diabolical tactical and strategic genius of Ferdinand E Marcos. This president was a paradoxical mixture of caution and resolute action. These two contradictory tendencies on Marcos’s part were reconciled by his penchant for careful planning in which nearly every serious action which he undertook was gamed years in advance.

The Rise of Ferdinand Marcos

The rise of Ferdinand Marcos to power, which culminated in his inauguration as president in late December 1965, was due largely because of his often-covert alliance with the Laurel family. It was the patriarch of this family, Jose Laurel Senior (Snr), who as a judge had overturned Marcos’s conviction for murder in 1940.  It was also probably due to Laurel senior that Marcos was released by the Japanese from military prison in 1942. Jose Laurel Snr had ties to the occupying Japanese as he was president of a wartime collaborationist regime between 1943 and 1945.

Because of widespread socio-political discontent in the Philippines in the 1940s Jose Laurel Snr was able to recast himself as a patriot, so much so that President Elpidio Quirino had to rig his November 1949 election to a four-year term when he ran against Laurel. Such was [1]Laurel Snr’s popularity that his endorsement of Marcos (who had been elected as a congressman in 1949) for the Senate in the November 1959 race helped Marcos win election with what was then the nation’s largest plurality.

It was also due to Laurel Snr’s political heir, Jose (‘Pepito’) Laurel Jr’s support that Ferdinand Marcos was able to defect from the ruling Liberal Party to join the opposition Nacionalista Party in April 1964 and to win that party’s nomination in for president  November that year for the presidential election to be held in November 1965.

The Marcos victory in the November 1965 presidential election (in which he defeated incumbent president, Diosado Macapagal) was due to his astute management of campaign resources, a substantial part of which came from the powerful Lopez clan. Marcos selected Fernando Lopez to be his successful vice-presidential running mate in this campaign. The Marcos victory can also be attributed to the clientistic networks of the Nacionalista Party, the solidity of the bloc vote which came from Ferdinand Marcos’s Ilocano ethnic group, (which is based in northern Luzon) and the generally based uncommitted votes which the then very popular Imelda Marcos had garnered for her husband.

From the beginning of his presidency Marcos schemed to perpetuate himself in power by abolishing the constitutional provision which limited Philippine presidents to two consecutive terms. Legislation was therefore passed in 1967 mandating the election of a constitutional convention in 1970. Having probably rigged his November 1969 presidential re-election ( Marcos was the first Philippine president to win re-election), President Marcos then attempted to browbeat the Constitutional Convention which had convened in June 1971 to introduce a parliamentary system of government, which would result in the removal of the time limitation constraints on tenure in office.

The Philippines still free press exposed the president’s and first lady’s attempts to either bribe or cajole the Constitutional Convention delegates into introducing a parliamentary system. The November 1971 senate election results in which the opposition Liberal Partly won six of the eight contested senate seats was widely perceived as a repudiation of the Marcos agenda of circumventing the two consecutive term presidential limitation. Consequently, Marcos transitioned to extra-constitutional means to perpetuate his power which culminated with the imposition of martial law in September 1972.

The Marcos Dictatorship

The martial law regime was not viable in the long run for Ferdinand Marcos because, (as already noted), the balance of power within the military was then such that the armed forces would not consent to Imelda’s succession to the presidency. Therefore, Marcos opted for the Laurel strategy, integral to which was the institutionalization of the regime via a return to electoral politics.

Accordingly, Marcos moved to establish the basis by which a DRP could be established with the passing of the years.  The first step which Marcos took to institutionalize his regime was to convene a meeting of the Nacionalista Party Directorate (or party executive) in the Malacañang presidential palace in January 1978 at which he proposed that this party close down so that a new political party could be established in its place which was more in accord with his ‘new society’.

Pepito Laurel rose to speak at this January 1978 Nacionalista Party executive meeting to appeal to the president not to close-down this party but to instead establish an umbrella group to contest the upcoming national elections. That President Marcos agreed to Pepito Laurel’s proposal was misperceived to be his returning a favour to the man who was responsible for him winning the November 1964 Nacionalista Party presidential nomination.

However, President Marcos by agreeing to the umbrella proposal was really initiating his masterplan to pave the way for an eventual Laurel succession. Under this masterplan the Laurel’s Nacionalista Party ran under the KBL umbrella group in the April 1978 parliamentary elections and then broke with the KBL in August 1979 when it was declared a political party. As a result the Nacionalista Party won the January 1980 provincial elections in the Laurels’ home province of Batangas Province.

This January 1980 provincial election victory established the basis for the Laurels to form the UNIDO opposition umbrella group in August 1980. As outlined earlier in this article it was the subsequent strategy of the Marcos regime to establish UNIDO as a DRP so that Marcos could later dismount the tiger of being a dictator while still securing his family’s interests following his death. In the meantime, the Marcos regime had to deal with the electoral challenge which came from the Soc Dems (Social Democrats).

The Soc Dems

The Soc Dems were the opposition camp which emerged to oppose the Marcos regime. This opposition camp was strictly speaking not an opposition political party but rather an informal network which was supported by the Catholic order of Jesuit priests. The precursor to the Soc Dems was the political party founded by the Philippine statesman Raul Manglapus. He had founded the Philippine Progressive Party to contest the 1957 and the 1965 presidential elections. This third party was converted in 1967 into the non-party Christian Social Movement.

Pre-warned by America’s Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) of the Marcos Administration’s intention of imposing martial law, Manglapus fled to the United States in 1972 where he founded and headed the Movement for a Free Philippines (the MFP). Manglapus’s resident supporters in the Philippines founded the semi-legal and clandestine Philippine Democratic Socialist Party (PDSP) in 1972 which was led by Norberto (‘Bert’) Gonzales.

The PDSP operated with the support of the Federation of Free Workers (FFW) which was founded as an umbrella group of trade unions in 1950 with the support of the Catholic Church, once again as an anti-communist force. Marcos shrewdly permitted the FFW and the PDSP to operate due to their anti-communism.  Indeed, during the period of martial law (1972 to 1981) membership of Philippine trade unions actually increased.

Detaching operatives from the FFW, Marcos’s brilliant Minister for Labor, Blas Ople (a one-time Manglapus supporter) helped launch the Trade Union Congress of the Philippines (TUCP) in 1975. While the overall potency of organised labour in the Philippines has been limited because seventy percent of the workforce is in precarious employment, it remains one of the Marcos regime’s positive legacies that there are now viable and vigorous trade unions in this country.

Today the TUCP is the Philippines largest trade union federation ahead of the FFW and the pro-communist May First Labor Movement (KMU) which was founded in 1980. The KMU was and is unofficially connected to the Communist Party of the Philippines (CPP) which was founded in 1968.

Utilizing the popular front stratagem, the CPP assembled an array of left-wing organisations in 1973 to establish the National Democratic Front or Bayan (Country).  Bayan spawned a political camp known as the National Democrats or the ‘Nat Dems’. The Nat Dems and the Soc Dems often competed with each other to organise different sectoral work groups in the Philippines.

The Dynamics Underpinning the 1978 Elections

When national parliamentary elections were scheduled for the 27^th April, 1978, the Soc Dems (and to a lesser extent the Nat Dems) moved to underpin the opposition’s electoral tickets under different names which were put up respectively in each of the nation’s thirteen electoral regions as no single opposition party was formed to contest these elections. The absence of a single opposition party was aided by the decision of Liberal Party president, Gerry Roxas to boycott the 1978 elections.

The Liberal Party, along with the Nacionalista Party, had been one of the two dominant political parties in the Philippines between 1946 and 1972. These two parties were mainly family-based clans which held local government office. Some of these local government clans went back to the American colonial era in the early 1900s. Because only these two parties could name poll watchers on a nationwide basis, they were able to squeeze out third party candidates in the elections which were held between 1946 and 1971.

It was not uncommon for the different local clans to change their allegiance between these two parties while, paradoxically poorer voters acquired a sentimental attachment to one of the two traditional parties. When martial law was imposed in 1972 most local government officials whether Nacionalista or Liberal were allowed to remain in office so long as they gave their allegiance to the Marcos regime. Consequently, to oppose the KBL umbrella group in the April 1978 elections was to confront the might of the various clans which had previously underpinned both the Nacionalista and the Liberal parties.

The Marcos government in the period between the imposition of martial law in 1972 and the holding of the 1978 legislative elections had moved to bolster its power base.  A new unit of local government was established in 1975 to do this. Barangay local government councillors were appointed (since 1982 they have been elective). These Barangay councillors were initially appointed by the Marcos regime and by servicing people’s local needs they often created a sense of obligation to the national government at a grassroots level.

Support for the Marcos regime was also generated by the establishment in 1975 of the Katataag Barangay (KB) or village youth, which was the youth component of the Barangay councils. The young people who received training (if not indoctrination) as youth councillors also helped establish a basis of support for the regime which was often energetic. This thereby provided the Marcos government with a valuable and formidable de facto youth wing.

Coercive action by this government between 1972 and 1978 also served to bolster its powerbase. Overnight with the imposition of martial law in 1972 the power of the Lopez clan, which was then probably the Philippines most powerful and richest family, was, to say the least, curtailed. Forewarned by the CIA of the impending imposition of martial law, the Lopez family’s patriarch, Don Eugenio[2] who between 1966 and 1971 was arguably the strongman of the Marcos administration-fled in 1972 to the United States where he died in 1975. Furthermore, the position of vice-president, which was held by Don Eugenio’s younger brother, Fernando was abolished upon the imposition of martial law in 1972.

The main action taken against the Lopez clan was the regime backed takeover of its electricity utility company, Meralco. The control of this business eventually passed to Imelda’s brother Benjamin ‘Kokoy’ Romualdez. It should be pointed out at this juncture that the secret to Imelda’s power was her brother Kokoy. President Marcos justifiably had profound respect for Kokoy’s political genius so much so that a case can be put that Imelda was essentially a frontwoman for her brother and his coterie.

Not only was [3]Kokoy (who died in 2012) brilliant but the coterie of advisors that he assemble was probably the smartest political brains trust that ever existed in the Philippines. The post-regime electoral and political success of Ferdinand and Imelda’s politically active children, Ferdinand Jr (‘Bong Bong’) and Imee can be substantially attributed to the socio – political acumen of this brains trust.

To bolster the Romualdez clan’s political power it was probably Kokoy who persuaded his brother-in-law president to appoint Imelda as Governor of Metro Manila in July 1975. Simultaneous with this appointment was the dismissal of President Marcos’s Executive Secretary the brilliant Alejandro Melchor. The Melchor dismissal undermined the power of the able technocrats within the cabinet and placed Imelda in contention to succeed her husband as president.

The overall position of the Marcos regime had previously been bolstered by the very successful land reform program which had been commenced among rice farmers in Central Luzon in 1974. This agrarian reform had been undertaken at the behest and at the direction of the former communist leader Luis Taruc whom Marcos had released from prison as a result of a presidential pardon in 1968. Taruc had once headed the pro-Moscow Communist Party of the Philippines (PKP) which in 1974 had ended its insurgency and pledged its support to the Marcos regime.

This rapprochement was not surprising because in 1974 the wily and respected Philippine foreign minister, Carlos Romulo had established diplomatic relations with eastern bloc nations. While the Marcos regime was often portrayed by its left-wing detractors as the epitome of a venal neo-colonial lackey of the United States, this government actually enjoyed warm relations with Soviet bloc nations and Communist China (with whom diplomatic relations were established in 1975) right up until its demise in early 1986.

Opposition to the Marcos Regime

That it not to say that the Marcos regime still did not confront a formidable communist insurgency in the form of the New People’s Army (NPA). The NPA was founded in March 1969 as the armed wing of the CPP which was established as a then Maoist breakaway from the PKP in December 1968. There were peaks and troughs with regard to the Marcos regime’s successes in fighting the NPA. In 1976 the leadership apparatus of the CPP’s Manila-Rizal branch was captured in one foul swoop. However, the NPA had taken off again following the August 1983 Aquino assassination so that in 1985 the CIA had predicted that the rate of growth of the communist guerrillas was such that by 1989 they would be on a military par with the Armed Forces of the Philippines (AFP).

The other major guerrilla insurgency which confronted the Marcos regime was the Muslim or Moro successionist struggle in the Mindanao region. The factionalized Moro National Liberation Front (MNLF) was (and still is) the major secessionist group fighting for Mindanao independence. Secessionist rebellion on Mindanao broke out in 1973. As a result of the toughness of the cadre of officers which had graduated in the class of 1971 (centred round Colonel Gregory (‘Gringo’) Honasan) the MNLF was fought to a stalemate. Because of internal divisions within the MNLF over whether to accept the autonomy offered under the 1976 Tripoli Agreement, the effectiveness of this guerrilla force has since dissipated whilst still remaining disruptive.

While the Marcos regime become reliant upon the military to maintain its power, Marcos still realized that his government’s survival was predicated upon institutionalizing itself because the military would not countenance Imelda’s succession to the presidency. For this reason, Marcos tentatively opted for the Laurel succession strategy which commenced with the holding of legislative elections in April 1978.

As previously mentioned, there was no single opposition party which pitted itself against the KBL but rather regional based opposition slates which were primarily composed of or supported by the Soc Dems. The main opposition ticket was the Manila based Laban (‘Fight’) ticket which was headed by Ninoy Aquino. By agreeing to head the Laban ticket the imprisoned Aquino had essentially departed from the Liberal Party which was his former political base.

In 1978 the Liberal Party was headed by Gerry Roxas who was the son of former President Manuel Roxas who had founded this party in 1946. Gerry Roxas (who was rumoured to still be on friendly terms with President Marcos) realized that with most of the local government based clans (many of which had previously underpinned the Liberal Party) now being aligned with the KBL, that his continuing campaign for the Liberal Party had little chance of electoral success so that he opted for a boycott of the election.

Consequently, the 1978 poll was essentially a contest between the nation’s traditional clans who were supported by the massive resources of the Marcos regime (which included Barangay captains) against the Soc Dems. That is not to say that the Laban ticket did not contain diversity. Four Marxist Nat Dems (the so-called ‘Gang of Four’) ran with on the Laban ticket which was also supported by the strongly anti-communist Ferrer brothers. Incredibly, the Laban slate also included President Marcos’s pre-martial law fixer and his 1969 presidential candidate manager, Ernie Maceda!

The PDSP and the FFW played an important role in organising the Laban ticket’s campaign logistics, particularly the highly successful noise barrage which was held outside the military compound where Ninoy Aquino was held. The size and impact of this opposition demonstration on election eve was such that it was a warning to the Marcos regime that the Laban ticket would probably win. Accordingly, massive vote rigging was undertaken to ensure that the KBL slate[4] won all twenty-one of Central Luzon’s seats, including the five seats in Metro-Manila.

For good measure Bert Gonzales[5] arrest was subsequently ordered and the PDSP was officially banned. These draconian actions on the Marcos administration’s part were an indication that initial institutionalization of the regime was not then tantamount to political liberalization. However, to provide these elections with a veneer of credibility a bogus opposition slate (Pusyon Bisaya) based on the island of Cebu was allowed to win.

As for any diversity within the KBL itself (which included members of the soon to be absorbed PKP), it was stymied by President Marcos forming a Steering Committee by which he could regiment the KBL legislative caucus. But Marcos knew that the long-term survival of his regime was ultimately predicated upon pursuing the Laurel strategy. So, in keeping with this strategy, Marcos had Imelda gate crash a dinner which was held in August 1979 in honour of the former Senate President, Gil Puyat. At this function, Pepito Laurel made a speech which was critical of the Marcos regime and considered to be a direct challenge to President Marcos’s authority.

Accordingly, at the subsequent legislative caucus meeting of the KBL, Marcos had distributed rules for the KBL as a political party. Doy Laurel (Pepito Laurel’s younger brother, who had been elected as an Assemblyman for Batangas Province in the Southern Luzon electoral region) in an arguably pre-arranged action, rose to contest the KBL being declared a political party in lieu of it continuing as an umbrella group. The response to Laurel by Marcos was that he had always considered the KBL to be a political party. This presidential declaration paved the way for Doy Laurel to exit the KBL and in doing so take the Nacionalista Party with him into avowed opposition to the Marcos regime.

The 1980 Provincial Elections

To consolidate this conversion of the KBL into a political party, President Marcos then scheduled local government elections for the end of January 1980. In the opposite of what had occurred in 1978 Gerry Roxas announced that the Liberal Party would participate in these elections under the umbrella of the National Union for Liberation (NUL). The NUL was an alliance between the continuing Liberal Party and the various Soc Dem and Nat Dem groups which had participated in the 1978 legislative elections. The NUL however did not contest the provincial election in Batangas as the field was left open there for the Laurel wing of the Nacionalista Party to oppose the KBL in that province.

To solidify his political base which was challenged by Roxas’s participation in the 1980 poll, the still detained Ninoy Aquino announced the formation of the Lakas (Strength) Party which denoted its existence by advocating a boycott of these 1980 local government elections.

The canny Marcos sought to ensure that a balance was achieved in these election results in which the KBL overwhelmingly won while still conceding enough ground to the opposition so that they would not be put off from contesting future elections. Accordingly, the Laurels were allowed to win in Batangas Province.

To make it look as though that there was no collusion between the administration and the Laurels there was an encounter between the latter’s supporters and the military which was possibly staged. The military in the Laurel hometown of Tanauan attempted to remove the ballot boxes. In a forerunner of the dramatic people power scenes six years later in Manila, the military backed down when faced with the prospect of there being a massacre when confronted by demonstrators. Consequently, the ballots were counted as they were cast which ensured that the Nacionalista gubernatorial candidate Joey Laurel prevailed.

Even though the KBL was accredited with winning sixty-nine of the Philippines’ seventy-three provinces in the 1980 local government elections the dramatic victory of the Laurels in Batangas re-assured many Filipinos that the electoral route could still succeed. The NUL won the other three provinces with this umbrella electoral formation winning the province of Misamis Oriental in northern Mindanao including the city of Cagayan de Oro.

The NUL’s mayoral candidate for Cagayan de Oro was Aquilino Pimentel who was a lawyer and a leading Soc Dem who then worked for the Catholic Bishop’s Conference. Pimentel had run with the Laban ticket in Manila in 1978 while some of his supporters on Mindanao had helped form the Mindanao Alliance in those elections.

It was Pimentel’s Mindanao based supporters who in 1979 formed the Philippine Democratic Party (PDP). The PDP was the second formal Soc Dem political party(after the Philippine Progressive Party) to be founded and while this party was impeccably anti-Marcos, the shrewd president probably still appreciated that allowing his opponents some electoral success undermined the potential for a violent revolution.

Nevertheless, some disgruntled Soc Dem and Nat Dems supported urban guerrilla action following the 1980 local government elections with the most prominent organization being the Light a Fire Movement which was instigated by Steve Psinakis, the American Greek son-in-law of the late Don Eugenio Lopez. The Marcos regime’s response was swift and effective.  A brutal and effective counter-offensive was carried out in the early 1980s by the National Intelligence and Security Authority (NISA) which ended this urban resistance.

Despite this successful repression, President Marcos realized that the Laurel strategy still needed to be undertaken to ensure that his family’s interests were protected in the long run. Therefore, Ninoy Aquino was released from captivity in May 1980 and allowed to depart for the United States for heart surgery. The benefit to Marcos of the Aquino absence was that the Laurels could continue to organise opposition to the regime.

A major step was taken in organising opposition to the Marcos administration when the UNIDO opposition umbrella organisation was formed in August 1980 at the instigation of Pepito Laurel and Gerry Roxas who initially served as co-presidents of this grouping.  The power of the Laurels within UNIDO stemmed from the prestige they had acquired from winning Batangas.  Gerry Roxas’s power within UNIDO was derived from the support he received from Soc Dems and Nat Dems who had followed him into this new opposition organisation.

It was due to the opposition of the Soc Dems and the Nat Dems that UNIDO did not put up a presidential candidate in the June[6] 16^th, 1981 presidential election even though Doy Laurel was reputedly keen to run. Prior to this presidential election, martial law had been lifted in January of that year and a referendum (which UNIDO participated in by advocating a ‘No’ vote) was also held that April which gave Marcos the constitutional right to rule by decree.

Having gained the right to rule by decree, President Marcos relinquished the position of prime minister in April 1981 which he had held since the Batasang Pambansa (National Assembly) had convened in 1978. The respected Finance Minister Cesar Virata was then elevated to the position of prime minister which, given Marcos’s new constitutional right to rule by decree, became subordinate to the presidency under the 1973 constitution.

The Opposition Reorganises

Even though President Marcos had completed the institutionalization of his regime by 1981 he had still not given up on resorting to repression to bolster his position, particularly with regard to pursuing the Laurel strategy. In a masterstroke Marcos had Jovito Salonga exiled in March 1981 to the United States. This was a shrewd move by Marcos because Salonga, a former Liberal Party senator, had a strong following amongst the Soc Dems and Nat Dems who were within UNIDO.

Marcos correctly anticipated that when the ailing Gerry Roxas died (which happened in April 1982) and that with Salonga in exile, the Soc Dems and Nat Dems would leave UNIDO thereby strengthening the position of the Laurels within that organization. This scenario did come to pass so the question emerged as to where the Soc Dems would go politically following the departure of Gerry Roxas[7] and the exile of Jovito Salonga from the leadership of UNIDO in 1981?

The answer to the above question was that many Soc Dems went into a new political party which was formed in 1982 called the PDP-Laban.  This new party was a merger (or a ‘combine’) between the Mindanao based PDP and the Manila based Laban (which was formally or interchangeably known as ‘Lakas’). The formation of the PDP-Laban was a considerable boost for the exiled Ninoy Aquino because this gave him a base among the Soc Dems.

As a Soc Dem party, the PDP-Laban was a decentralist political party which was avowedly a bottom up political party with its national leadership supposedly following the direction of its branches. The chairman of the PDP-Laban was Aquilino Pimentel while the general-secretary was Ninoy Aquino’s brother-in-law Jose ‘Peping’ Cojuangco. This leadership pairing between Pimentel and Cojuangco was really reflective of the ‘combine’ between the sidelined elite of the opposition (or ‘trapo’ politicians) who came from the Laban component of this party and the Soc Dems who came from he PDP.

Because trapo politicians such as Peping Cojuangco were bereft of local government positions (in 1982 ninety percent of local government positions were held by the KBL) they needed the human resource support which came from the Soc Dem PDP. As always President Marcos kept a keen eye on developments within the opposition camp. It should be pointed out (as events in February 1986 would show) that Marcos was not necessarily welded to the Laurel strategy. This was apparent in 1983 when Marcos despatched his wife Imelda to the United States to negotiate a deal with Ninoy Aquino by which his trapo supporters would detach from the Soc Dems to enter into an alliance with the Marcos administration!

At their May 1983 meeting[8] in New York, Imelda offered Ninoy a deal by which members of Laban could run as ‘guest candidates’ of the KBL in the May 1984 legislative elections. Under the Philippines then electoral system, provinces served as electoral regions in which there could be multi-member electorates. Consequently, in a province such as Cavite which in 1984 elected six members to the National Assembly, the KBL could hypothetically have run four candidates of its own while placing two members of Laban on its electoral list.

Had Ninoy Aquino agreed to Imelda’s proposal the KBL would have achieved the status of a DPR similar to Japan’s Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) where the opposition Liberal Party had been brought into the fold by going on the government’s electoral list in 1955. Had a similar scenario come to pass with regard to Laban teaming up with the KBL then it was conceivable that Ninoy Aquino might have become a future prime minister of the Philippines.

Alternatively, given President Marcos’s tendency for reneging on political agreements/arrangements it was also a viable scenario that had Ninoy Aquino entered into an agreement with the regime that he would have foregone his main political asset which was his credibility as the government’s principal opponent. It was therefore not surprising that Ninoy Aquino refused Imelda’s 1983 offer of an electoral pact.

Despite this credibility, Ninoy Aquino’s political base was under threat in 1983 unless he returned to the Philippines to participate in the May 1984 legislative elections. This was because due to his exile in the United States, Doy Laurel was consolidating his position as the principal opposition leader to the Marcos regime.  Similarly, Pimentel might very well have reinforced his position within the PDP-Laban at Ninoy Aquino’s expense. Furthermore, the Philippine Liberal Party’s executive, in keeping with the late Gerry Roxas’s bequest, had in 1982 passed over Ninoy Aquino to confer its presidency upon the exiled Jovito Salonga.

The Assassination of Ninoy Aquino

With the stakes so high Ninoy Aquino attempted to return to the Philippines on August 21^st, 1983[9]. Escorted by military officers from the plane Ninoy Aquino was shot dead as he stepped onto the tarmac of Manila International Airport. The official version that a lone gunman, Ronaldo Gulman, shot Ninoy Aquino before himself being shot by the escorting military officers was not credible considering the high level of security at that airport at the time.

Nevertheless, President Marcos’s alibi that no-one more than himself regretted the assassination had a degree of credence because few people thought that someone as brilliant as Marcos could have been so foolish as to order his main opponent’s murder due to the widespread unrest that would ensue. Indeed, the unrest which resulted was massive and was reflected by over two million people attending Ninoy Aquino’s September 1983 funeral!

The Aquino assassination drew parallels with the gunning down in January 1978 of Nicaraguan opposition leader Pedro Chamorro[10] which led to the Marxist Sandinistas coming to power in July 1979. For many political observers, the question then was not as to whether the Marcos regime would subsequently fall but whether it would be succeeded by the moderate opposition or by the radical left in a scenario similar to Nicaragua.

However, President Marcos, having probably instigated the Aquino assassination, had anticipated that massive unrest would ensue, so he moved with all the superlative pollical skill that he possessed to ride out the storm. The interesting aspect of the ensuing narrative is that Marcos nearly pulled off the impossible challenge of politically surviving the consequent political upheaval.

The 1984 Legislative Elections

The first major post-assassination challenge which President Marcos faced were the May 14^th, 1984 legislative elections. In these elections the Philippine president had to maintain his massive parliamentary majority but in doing so also ensure that the Filipino retained sufficient faith in the electoral process so that they would not instead resort to a revolution.  For the short-term President Marcos was to succeed in meeting these apparently contradictory objectives by exploiting disunity within the ranks of the moderate opposition.

For the moderate anti-Marcos opposition, the challenge was whether to participate in the May 1984 poll. Naturally, the Laurel led UNIDO was all for participation but the Soc Dems were themselves internally divided. The main Soc Dem political party at this time was the PDP-Laban and its initial inclination was to boycott the 1984 election. A resolution was therefore passed at its January 1984 inaugural congress endorsing a motion to boycott the upcoming legislative elections.

There was nevertheless, in keeping with the PDP-Laban’s decentralist raison d’etre, an escape clause within the boycott motion which allowed for party branches to participate if they so desired. Benigno Aquino’s widow, Cory’s public declaration advocating opposition participation in the 1984 election had the effect of inducing a raft of PDP-Laban branches declaring their willingness to run.

It should be pointed out at this juncture that Cory Aquino was no political neophyte when it came to politics. She had previously been one of the Laban ticket’s chief organisers and campaigners during the 1978 legislative election. Cory Aquino’s subsequent campaigning for the 1984 legislative election saw her emerge as the Soc Dems’ choice to be the future presidential standard bearer instead of her brother-in-law, Agapito (’Butz’) Aquino who had ‘missed the boat’ because he had advocated a boycott.

PDP-Laban candidates ran as guest candidates of UNIDO in a minority of that organisation’s election slates. This PDP-Laban participation was welcome to the Laurels because the majority of the Liberal Party’s executive at the behest of the exiled Salonga advocated a boycott of the 1984 election.

The strategic benefit to the exiled Salonga of a Liberal Party boycott was that it enabled his party to renew its base of support among those Soc Dem groups which were advocating a boycott. Following the death of Gerry Roxas in 1982 and the consequent withdrawal of Soc Dems from the Liberal Party component of UNIDO, the Liberals had become virtually moribund.

Former Philippine president, Diosado Macapagal, in a reversal of his past participation stance in the 1978 and the 1980 elections, similarly advocated a boycott of the 1984 poll. For the deeply anti-communist Macapagal the benefit of a poll boycott was not only to provide a basis to renew the Liberal Party via engaging with pro-boycott Soc Dems but also to prevent the boycott movement from being monopolized by far-left Nat Dems.

There were however within Liberal Party’s ranks a strong Trapo component which was naturally inclined toward electoral participation. Therefore, in late January 1984 the pro-participation minority on the Liberal Party Executive led by former senator, Eva Kalaw and Johnny Osmena broke away to form a separate wing of this party which would also supply UNIDO with guest candidates for the 1984 poll.

Potential divisions within the KBL concerning the 1984 poll were of course not over whether to participate but with regard to the pre-selection of candidates. In January that year Marcos, accompanied by Imelda, convened a meeting in the resort city of Baguio of key KBL officials, including local government incumbents to decide on the composition of that party’s electoral slates. It was astutely arranged for those who were passed over for candidate selection to run either as independents or to run with the tame-cat Roy wing of the Nacionalista Party which, in some key electoral regions was granted the right instead of UNIDO to name poll watchers.

To generate a feeling of excitement and anticipation for the 1984 poll, President Marcos following the pre-selection of KBL candidates, staged a massive proclamation event in Manila in February for his party’s Central Luzon slate (which encompassed the capital). At this proclamation rally, the well-drilled crowd (estimated at over two-hundred thousand, with many thought to be Metro-Manila City employees) there was a chant for Imelda to head the KBL slate. A tearful Imelda demurely declined to head the slate and with that refusal a subliminal signal was sent to UNIDO that it would be allowed to win in Metro-Manila.

For President Marcos, the benefit of allowing a UNIDO victory in Manila was that it would dampen any uproar that would ensue from his regime rigging the May 1984 legislative elections. Consequently, to manipulate expectations Marcos publicly declared that the opposition would only win six of Central Luzon’s twenty-one seats.  This prediction was publicly countered by Imelda who asserted that the opposition would not win any seats in that electoral region. 

It was therefore considered to be an amazing result by the Philippine public when it was UNIDO which actually won fifteen of Central Luzon’s twenty-one seats, with four of the five Metro-Manila seats also going to the opposition. To further encourage electoral participation when a snap presidential poll was held in the future, the Laurels were allowed to prevail in their home province of Batangas in the 1984 poll.

Furthermore, the leading Trapo politician within the PDP-Laban, Ramon Mitra, was allowed to win on Palawan Island so as to reinforce pro-participation sentiment within that party. After a court dispute Aquilino Pimentel was eventually accorded (in late 1985) a seat in the National Assembly so as to also reinforce the PDP-Laban’s orientation toward future electoral politics.

The only electoral region where the rigging of the 1984 poll resulted in substantial unrest was in Cebu City where riots broke out. This was not surprising because Cebu island was sentimentally a stronghold of the extensive Osmena clan. The Marcos regime was able to placate the Osmenas by covertly undertaking that they would be allowed to retake the Cebu region when local government elections were held in 1986.

Overall, these key electoral concessions to the UNIDO led opposition generated sufficient faith in the electoral process that Marcos was confident to continue with his Laurel strategy, which was needed, given the extensive post-assassination inspired opposition to his regime. Across Filipino cities there were sustained substantial demonstrations against the government and the NPA guerrilla insurgency expanded in the countryside at an alarming rate with communist terrorism spreading to urban centres.

Even within the KBL there seemed to be discontent. To head off a potential move by apparently disgruntled KBL legislators to team up with UNIDO post the 1984 elections to make Arturo Tolentino Speaker of the National Assembly, he was appointed Foreign Minister only to be dismissed the following year in March because he had challenged the president’s constitutional right to rule by decree.

The position of Speaker (which was then first in line to the presidency) instead went to one of Imelda’s and Kokoy’s closest political allies, Nicanor Yniguez.  It was Yniguez who successfully rallied KBL legislators to defeat an in-committee motion to impeach the president in August 1985 when graft and corruption was alleged by UNIDO MPs on a massive scale. Nevertheless, the KBL dominated National Assembly still passed a motion calling for greater police restraint against demonstrators.

This legislative rebuke against President Marcos seemed to indicate that he was losing control of the overall political situation. However, there was an alternative scenario in play in which the wily Marcos was trying to endow the KBL legislators with a degree of credibility for when they later merged with UNIDO to form a DRP after a ‘snap’ presidential election which was planned to take place in early 1986.  For Marcos, the calling of a snap presidential poll in February 1986 would be the masterstroke by which he could ride out the post-assassination storm.

The Agrava Commission’s Report

Before the snap 1986 poll could be held, Marcos first had to manipulate events concerning the investigation into the Aquino assassination. In October 1983, a five-person investigation board was appointed by President Marcos headed by a then respected judge, Corazon Agrava. The majority findings delivered in October 1984 held that that General Ver should be tried for complicity in the assassination. Such an outcome should have been devastating to the Marcos regime.

However, President Marcos delayed the release of the report and judiciously leaked the commission’s findings so that the impact of the findings were undermined. The president then accentuated the divisions on the investigation panel between its Chairwoman Corazon Agrava and the other four majority members of the panel who found that General Ver was complicit in the assassination conspiracy.

Marcos therefore gave greater public credence to Chairwoman Agrava’s minority report findings that General Ver was not a conspirator in the Aquino assassination. Nevertheless, the president was still obliged to stand General Ver down as he and another twenty-four co-conspirators were placed on trial before the special anti-corruption court, the Sandiganbayan.

During General Ver’s subsequent leave of absence (October 1984 to December 1985) his place as AFP chief of staff was taken on an acting basis by General Ramos. While General Ramos was prepared to block any extra-constitutional attempt to have Imelda succeed to the presidency, he was opposed at that time to staging a military coup. The same could not be said of the then defence minister, Juan Ponce Enrile.

During the 1984 election campaign Enrile declared his preparedness to run for president should the president and the first lady forgo running themselves for that office. This profession of loyalty belied the fact that Enrile was plotting among a network of young ambitious officers which became known as Reform the Armed Forces Movement (RAM).

The RAM officers were led by the charismatic Colonel Gringo Honasan who was Enrile’s chief of security. This cadre of military personnel was battle hardened due to their experiences in fighting in the 1970s against the Moro successionists and they were indoctrinated with the regime’s official Filipino Ideology which was actually ghost written by Luis Taruc.

Preparing for a Snap Election

Confronted by two guerrilla insurgencies, widespread urban unrest, an economic malaise and a potentially disloyal element within the officer corps it seemed that the Marcos regime was headed for a fall. It was therefore considered imperative for Marcos to continue with his Laurel strategy if he were to survive and ultimately prevail.

Integral to the facilitation of the Laurel strategy was for Marcos to call a snap presidential poll quickly followed by local government elections. Given the prominence that she had gained when campaigning during the 1984 elections Marcos realized that Cory Aquino would probably be the candidate who opposed him in a snap election. It was therefore imperative for Marcos that Cory Aquino be compelled to run as the UNIDO presidential candidate with Doy Laurel as her vice-presidential running mate[11] so that UNIDO could subsequently name the presidential poll watchers for the local government elections in 1986.

To help that this strategy came to pass, UNIDO held a ten thousand delegate presidential convention in June 1985 at Rizal Stadium[12]. At this gathering Doy Laurel was nominated as this party’s presidential candidate.  Despite this impressive show of support, Doy had still not won over the Soc Dems who remained sceptical, if not hostile toward him.

If Marcos’s Laurel strategy was to work, he had to orientate the Soc Dems toward electoral participation. Accordingly, Marcos allowed the West German Christian Democrats’ Konrad Adenauer Foundation to establish an office in Manila in 1984 so that they could help organise the supporters of the still exiled Raul Manglapus into a new political party called the National Union of Christian Democrats (NUCD).

To further encourage the Soc Dems to organise for the 1986 snap presidential election, the Marcos regime permitted the FFW to organise Bandila as a social democratic equivalent (and rival) umbrella group to the Nat Dems’ Bayan. Anticipating that Jovito Salonga would change his previous boycott stance to support Cory Aquino for president, Marcos allowed this former Liberal Party identity to return to the Philippines in January 1985.

The 1986 ‘Snap Election’

Cory Aquino had declared her willingness to run for president if a snap presidential election was called and if over a million signatures were collected on her behalf. These pre-conditions were met with one million and three hundred thousand signatures collected and Marcos calling a snap presidential poll in early late November 1985 for February 7^th, 1986.

Much of the foreign press and future historians attributed the Marcos decision to call an early presidential election as a result of pressure from the Reagan administration. This was not the case as the Reagan administration (contrary to the general perception that it was pro-Marcos due to its desire to maintain US military bases in the Philippines) wished to ease the Philippine president out of office or at the very least block Imelda’s succession to the presidency.

US ambassador Stephen Bosworth was a clever diplomat who knew that if Marcos did badly in the scheduled January 1986 local government elections that his capacity to hold onto office for the June 1987 presidential election would be severely if not fatally undermined. To outmanoeuvre Ambassador Bosworth, Marcos met with US Senator Paul Laxalt in October 1985. The purpose of the Laxalt visit was to lobby the Philippine president not to reinstate General Ver[13] as army chief of staff should he be acquitted.

President Marcos then made it look as though it was Laxalt’s idea that a snap presidential poll be held so that he could say that he had the United States’ imprimatur to hold the snap election which he had really planned years in an advance.

One person who probably understood Marcos’s game plan was Cory Aquin’s brother Peping Cojuangco. He realized that if his sister ran with UNIDO that that party would be subsequently allowed to name poll watchers and win the May 1986 local government elections[14] which was a necessary prelude to a new Marcos-Laurel government being formed.

Cory Aquino therefore initially and adamantly refused Doy Laurel’s offer to run as the UNIDO presidential standard bearer and with her brother’s encouragement tried to run as the presidential candidate of the newly registered Lakas ng Bayan. This was a new party, which was specially registered for the 1986 poll to accommodate the various Soc Dem parties and groupings. To further complicate matters both Salonga and Pimentel manoeuvred to be named Cory Aquino’s running mate should she not team up with Laurel in running with UNIDO.

However, Peping Cojuangco knew that if his sister did run as the UNIDO party that Doy Laurel could split the opposition vote to allow Marcos to legitimately win re-election. It was therefore a major defeat for the Aquino/Cojuangco camp when Cory Aquino agreed to be the UNIDO presidential standard bearer and have Doy Laurel as her running mate.

Cory Aquino was still in a position to mount a major challenge against the Marcos administration. Emotions remained strong across the nation in the wake of Ninoy Aquino’s assassination. The campaign that she and Doy Laurel ran was based on this emotion as hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of Filipinos turned out in rallies between December 1985 and February 1986 to support this opposition presidential ticket.

That is not to say that President Marcos did not put up a sterling campaign effort. In December 1985, the KBL held its nominating convention in the Manila Hotel where to the amazement of the assembled delegates Marcos passed over Imelda to name Arturo Tolentino as his running mate! Tolentino was a shrewd choice because he had a degree of credibility having been dismissed as Foreign Minister in March of that year by Marcos. Tolentino was also the only KBL candidate who had won a seat in Metro-Manila in the 1984 legislative elections.

The Liberal Party vice-presidential candidacy of Eva Kalaw for the February 1986 poll also warrants analysis because it was reflective of Marcos’s game plan to create a future DRP. Even though she had no chance of winning the vice-presidency, Eva Kalaw ran as her wing of the Liberal Party’s candidate for that office. This was probably done so that her wing of the Liberal Party would have the party registration going into the May 1986 local government elections thereby gaining a tremendous future advantage over the Salonga wing of the Liberal Party.

The Marcos-Tolentino 1985/1986 campaign was essentially one where Ferdinand and Imelda followed the Aquino-Laurel ticket to places where they had been to stage counter-rallies. At these pro-government rallies the first lady both spoke and sang. While Ferdinand Marcos also made campaign appearances he usually met with KBL officials who might otherwise have been unsettled by the large size of the recent opposition campaign rallies to arbitrate and to conciliate amongst the various pro-government clans to ensure that they delivered the votes come election day.

Rigging the 1986 Vote

It was not long after on election day (i.e. 7^th February 1986) that Corazon Aquino claimed that she had already won the presidency. This prompt action was in anticipation that the Marcos machine would begin tampering with the votes. The first voter returns indicated an Aquino/Laurel lead but there were soon to be suspicious delays with regard to the counting of the votes as these returns began to favour the regime.

The potentially embarrassing incident of when administrative staff of the Commission for Elections (COMELEC) staged a walk out from the central tally-room to protest against poll tampering was converted by Marcos to his advantage by ordering that the vote counting process be undertaken on the floor of the National Assembly.

KBL Assemblymen were then able to delay the counting of the votes as the regime pursued a strategy of padding the votes from pro-government areas to overcome the opposition lead. For good measure Marcos had the gallery stacked out with KBL campaign workers whose presence helped keep government MPs in line as the vote tally began to favour the regime.

The National Assembly’s official declaration on the 15^th February 1986 that Marcos had won with fifty-four percent of the vote was not a lopsided victory[15], but this result still generated massive anti-regime street demonstrations across the Philippines. Many left-wing commentators around the world predicted, if not hoped for a Nicaragua scenario, in which the far-left would be in a position to seize power.

However, Marcos still had the Laurel strategy to run with, under which UNIDO (which included the Kalaw wing of the Liberal Party) would be allowed to win the May 1986 local government elections as a prelude to forming a new national unity government in which UNIDO and the KBL would eventually merge. Ironically, the only real obstacle toward this scenario coming to pass was the internal threat within the regime which came from Enrile.

The disgruntled and scheming Defence Minister Enrile had previously planned to seize power on New Year’s Eve 1986 but put the planned coup was put back to after the February 1986 election. Under Enrile’s rescheduled plan, an attack would still be undertaken on Malacañang Presidential Palace but following the election. Subsequently, a post-coup junta would then be formed, chaired by Enrile.

Had President Marcos, following the National Assembly’s 15^th of February official election proclamation and before his scheduled inauguration (which was to be on the 25^th of February),appointed General Ramos as the new army chief of staff then an Enrile coup could never have got off the ground. General Ramos probably would have supported the Laurel strategy under which he in the future may eventually have become a prime minister after Laurel.

The 1986 Revolution

President Marcos however hedged his bets and instead announced that General Ramos would be appointed as the new army chief of staff on March 1^st 1986, thereby giving leeway for General Ver to make his case to the president to approve Operation Everlasting (‘Oplan’). Under Oplan a series of bombings and arson attacks would be staged by the Ver faction within the military which would be made to look as though they were the work of the NPA. This would then provide the justification for the reimposition of martial law in which Cory Aquino, Doy Laurel, General Ramos, Juan Ponce Enrile, Trade and Industry Minister Roberto (‘Bobby’) Ongpin and Prime Minister Virata would be arrested among thousands of others.

The ever-cautious President Marcos was probably not inclined toward approving Oplan but sticking with the Laurel strategy. However, when General Ver’s agents within RAM uncovered the Enrile planned coup, a trap was set in which the presidential security guard would be ready for the attack and so be in a position to crush the coup thereby enabling General Ver to undertake Oplan.

President Marcos’s decision to approve Oplan constituted an abandonment of the Laurel strategy and this was the gamble of the president’s life because it entailed purging General Ramos. However, Juan Ponce Enrile was alerted to the trap, which was set for him, when Bobby Ongpin, the Minister for Trade and Industry, informed him on the 21^st of February that General Ver had replaced his RAM bodyguards with those loyal to the army chief of staff.  Realizing that his planned coup had been uncovered, Enrile on the 22^nd of February headed for Camp Aguinaldo where he would publicly declare his break with the regime.

Similarly, General Ramos (having been informed by Enrile by phone of his break with the regime) also decided to join the rebellion. He was by now convinced that President Marcos had decided to purge him.

Initially, despite Enrile and Ramos’s decision to rebel against the regime, the military advantage was still with the Marcos regime. The military balance however, shifted in favour of the rebels soon after as a result of  Cardinal Jaimie Sin instructing the Catholic Church’s Radio Veritas to alert Manila’s residents about the rebellion, so that hundreds of thousands of them blocked Camp Aguinaldo and Camp Crame where Enrile and General Ramos had respectively taken refuge.

That the military balance was shifting toward the AFP rebels was reflected by the termination of the televised broadcast that President Marcos when army rebels took over the television station. Nevertheless, the President still made the point on the 22^nd of February television broadcast of publicly overruling General Ver when he appealed to his Commander-in-Chief to be allowed to attack Camp Aguinaldo and Camp Crame.

To have staged such an attack would have cost thousands of lives in civilian deaths and would possibly have plunged the Philippines into a bloody civil war. Furthermore, there was no guarantee that officers and soldiers on the ground would have carried out the attack on the military compounds. From Marcos’s perspective it was better to go into exile and plot a political come-back instead of endangering his family’s lives by ordering a potentially bloody repression.[16]

Having foregone the military option of ordering a military attack Marcos made one last attempt to hold onto power by trying to divide Enrile from General Ramos and the Aquino/Laurel camp by offering to hand power over to his Defence Minister. However, Enrile refused to take the bait leaving Marcos no option but to leave the country with his immediate family and General Ver on the 26^th of February 1986.[17]

The end of the Marcos presidency was welcomed across the world as reflected by the generally condemnatory tone of the international media. However, the Marcos regime did have its positive achievements which generated a degree of substantial residual support for them as evidenced by the Marcos government loyalist demonstrations which took place following the change in government.

The Marcos Regime’s Positive Achievements

The major positive achievement of the Marcos administration was the land reform programme undertaken in Central Luzon which ended the PKP’s Hukbalahap (‘Huk’) guerrilla insurgency in the mid-1970s. Associated with this re-distribution of land to rice famers was the development of the ‘miracle grain’ (under the direction of the brilliant technocrat Rafael (‘Paeng’) Salas, who late fell out with the regime) of rice which boosted grain production so that the Philippines went from being an importer of rice to a major exporter of that crop.

The stupendous success of this land reform programme concerning rice growers made the Marcos regime’s failure to introduce agrarian reform among the sugar and coconut farmers all the more reprehensible. Had land reform been extended to the sugar and coconut sectors of the economy then the NPA guerrilla insurgency in Negros and Mindanao might have ended and those regions could have been converted into KBL electoral strongholds similar to Central Luzon.

Cronies such as Roberto (‘Bobby’) Benedicto and Danding Cojuangco might have foregone their respective sugar and coconut landholdings to instead exercise their economic power via power derived from economic and corporate developments in lieu of possessing extensive landholdings. Perhaps this was a naïve hope, but the Marcos regime did recruit capable technocrats who could have engineered such a social and economic transformation in relation to sugar and coconut landholdings.

For it was the Marcos regime’s talented technocrats who in 1982 had established the Philippine Overseas Employment Administration (POEA). This agency helped address the perennial Filipino problem of unemployment/underemployment while bringing in valuable foreign exchange via remittances from overseas. The Trade and Industry Minister, Bobby Ongpin was also successful in making international trade deals and attracting foreign investment as part of the government’s industry policy which included the manufacture of the local Delta motor car.

The Marcos government also worked successfully with United Nations agencies to promote family planning, including artificial contraception, which resulted in bringing down the birth rate despite opposition from the Catholic Church. The Aquino administration discontinued this family planning programme resulting in a population explosion in the Philippines which has since become a major generator of poverty.

A more lasting legacy of the Marcos regime were the extensive roads, ferry and air connections which were established that are required in an island archipelago nation such as the Philippines. While it is probably true that funds from these extensive transport infrastructure projects were in part diverted to illegitimate uses, the projects were nevertheless completed and were more extensive than those built by all of the preceding administrations combined.

Concerning transport infrastructure, Imelda Marcos as Governor of Metro-Manila helped reduce chronic traffic congestion by building the Light Rail Transport (LRT) which was fast, efficient and economical. The First Lady also achieved a great deal as a patroness of the Filipino arts sector, which was typified by the opening of a world class Cultural Centre in 1969 in the capital. The First Lady was also responsible for the construction of a world class centre for heart treatment in Manila in 1975.

Imelda also granted land deeds to the squatters in Manila’s slum district of Tondo[18] thereby providing the regime with a support base in the capital which was otherwise an opposition stronghold.

This government also single-handedly established a lucrative tourist industry and its achievements in local government have already been outlined with reference to the Barangay unit of local government which assisted many poor people at a grass roots level. President Marcos also delivered electricity to even the remotest barangays. Assistance to the poor by the Marcos government was also facilitated by its Self-Reliance Program that was unveiled in January 1984, which provided food security to many vulnerable people.

However this regime, to state the obvious, was also incredibly corrupt and had Marcos succeeded in re-imposing martial law in 1986 then the talented technocrats who had been brought into government and formed the basis of many of its successes may very well have been substantially purged as a result of their disdain for Imelda.

The Fallout from the Revolution

For it was this attempt on the dictator’s part to re-impose martial law to secure his wife’s later succession to the presidency which was the immediate cause of the fall of the Marcos government. However, in contrast to the 1972 imposition of martial law, there was an active element within the armed forces which was prepared to resist this re-imposition of martial law, there was also a mass protest movement ready to support the armed resistance to this extra-constitutional action and importantly a symbol of alternative legitimacy in the person of Corazon Aquino for the opposing civilian/military forces to rally to.

The overthrow of the Marcos government was also the result of an abortive coup which was initially intended to cede power to Juan Ponce Enrile but instead due to the civilian support for the revolt was shifted to Corazon Aquino. The infrastructure for this protest movement was provided by the Soc Dems.

Many Nat Dems also participated in the 1986 EDSA revolt as they had previously given support to Cory Aquino’s election campaign in defiance of the CPP call for an election boycott. The failure of the CPP boycott was a major set-back for the communists. In a masterstroke the new Aquino government released the imprisoned CPP leader Jose Maria (‘Joma’ Sison in March 1986 (he had been captured in 1977) along with other leading imprisoned CPP/NPA figures such as Bernabe Buscayno (‘Commander Dante’).

The release of Sison (which was initially opposed by Enrile and General Ramos) was a masterstroke by the new Aquino administration. This was because from his new Dutch exile, Sison allegedly ordered the killing of hundreds of CPP cadres and Nat Dem activists as he attempted to re-impose his authority over the Communist Party and Bayan. While the NPA still remains active the Philippines communist movement has never really recovered from this bloody ‘rectification’ programme so that the potential for a far-left take-over of the Philippines has thankfully receded.

Avoiding a Madero Scenario

That is not to say that President Corazon Aquino was not initially in danger of succumbing to a ‘Madero[19] scenario’. At the time of Corazon Aquino’s ascension to power in February 1986 over ninety percent of local government positions were held by the KBL. Furthermore, Juan Ponce Enrile held the Defence portfolio so the prospect of a military coup was still a distinct possibility.

Perhaps the most immediate threat to President Aquino’s authority came from her vice-president Doy Laurel, who also served as Foreign Secretary and had been designated prime minister. Doy Laurel moved quickly to have the National Assembly convene on March 25^th, 1986, to ratify both Cory Aquino’s election to the presidency and his (Laurel’s) installation as prime minister, so that the 1973 would remain operative. Although Cory Aquino would retain the constitutional right to rule by decree, the maintenance of a KBL dominated National Assembly would have shifted power toward Doy Laurel.

The immediate post-Marcos regime KBL was orientated toward Doy Laurel because former president, Ferdinand Marcos, at the time of his fall had attempted to suspend 1973 Constitution which might have entailed the abolition of the National Assembly. The KBL parliamentary caucus had met in March 1986 to elect a new nine-person party executive from among its ranks to replace the previous crony dominated party executive. This new party executive was orientated toward the Laurel component of the new Aquino-Laurel government.

President Aquino however publicly issued a decree on March 25^th 1986 revoking the 1973 Constitution (thereby abolishing the National Assembly) and in its place proclaiming an interim ‘Freedom Constitution’ which guaranteed fundamental rights until a new permanent constitution was drawn up. A new Constitutional Commission was appointed in May 1986 which drew up a new constitution which was approved in a referendum in early February 1987 by seventy-two percent of the vote.

Under the Philippines 1987 Constitution an executive presidency was established which is elected for a non-renewable six- year term with a bicameral legislature (a Congress composed of a House of Representatives and a Senate). Fundamental human rights are enshrined in this constitution which also contains prohibitive anti-nepotism clauses.

The 1987 Constitution was in many ways a throw-back to the pre-Marcos 1935 Constitution with the major difference being the length of the presidential term.  The speed and resolution with which President Aquino restored democracy belied the general lack of resolution which seemed to plague her overall administration. Nevertheless, due to the support of General Ramos, [20]President Aquino avoided a Madero fate.

It was due to General Ramos’s support that the Marcos inspired mini-coup attempts were foiled in July 1986 and in January 1987.  (The more serious RAM inspired coup attempts which were undertaken respectively in August 1987 and December 1989 will be analysed later in this article in more detail). The other major reason besides General Ramos’s support as to why Corazon Aquino survived as president between 1986 and 1992 was because the political nous of her brother Peping.

Post Marcos Political Realignments

Peping Cojuangco realized that if the new government moved against all the KBL local government officials then it would be faced with major civil unrest. This was because local government officials had patronage sources such as networks of employees who could be mobilized to protest against the new government if they were dismissed. This occurred in cities such as Makati, San Juan[21] and Subic Bay where pro-Marcos mayors were replaced by Officers-in-Charge.

Consequently, most former KBL governors and mayors were left in place by the Aquino administration and in September 1986 these officials were brought into a new ruling umbrella group called ‘Laban’. The major political party within Laban was naturally the PDP-Laban which had grown dramatically in size following the fall of the Marcos government. Coincidental with the formation of the Laban umbrella group, the PDP-Laban Party held its congress in September 1986.

At the PDP-Laban’s September 1986 congress the anti-communist Ferrer brothers (whose faction was primarily composed of supporters of the late president, Ramon Magsaysay) shifted their support to ensure that Peping Cojuangco was elected party chairman in place of Aquilino Pimentel. Peping, who was the out-going party secretary, in turn ceded that position to Jaime Ferrer. It was noteworthy that despite this move to the right by the PDP-Laban that the local government officials who had recently joined the Laban umbrella group did not move to join this party.

This reluctance to formally join the PDP-Laban on the part of many local government officials might have been because they were hedging bets by contemplating joining (or re-joining) the Nacionalista Party! This incredible prospect was due to the then strong possibility that there could have been in 1986 an Enrile led military coup which probably would have resulted in the Nacionalista Party (led by Enrile and Renato Cayetano) returning to the status of ruling party.

At the time of Marcos’s fall, Enrile’s law practice partner was Renato Cayetano, who in August 1986 had become secretary-general of the Roy [22]wing of the Nacionalista Party. This once tame-cat wing of the Nacionalista Party had previously been trotted out by Marcos to stand candidates during opposition election boycotts and to soak up candidates who had been passed over for KBL preselection.

It was therefore ironic that the Roy wing of the Nacionalista Party had been revitalized by Marcos’s fall as many KBL party politicians and officials sought to return to this once mighty political party on the basis that Enrile might successfully lead a military coup in 1986. Furthermore, in March 1986 Marcos’s former Labor Minister Blas Ople split from the KBL to form the Partido Nacionalista Pilipinas (PNP).

The prospect of former Marcos aligned politicians making political comebacks was essentially dependent upon Enrile successfully staging a military coup. It was in November 1986 that Enrile attempted to stage a coup in which he planned to reconvene the previously dissolved National Assembly to make its Nicanor Yniguez acting president pending the holding of national elections in June 1987 when Marcos’s full term had been supposed to run. There can be little doubt that had such a presidential election been held, that Enrile as the strongman would inevitably have won.

However, General Ramos was able to outmanoeuvre Enrile when it came to the deployment of troops in Manila so that the rebellious Defence Secretary was obliged to resign in November 1986 before he could launch his coup. A retirement ceremony was then held for the ousted Defence Secretary with General Ramos in attendance. The purpose of this farewell ceremony was to convey a message from General Ramos to President Aquino not to prosecute Enrile for plotting to seize power.

The 1987 Congressional Elections

With Enrile’s resignation he was subsequently free to run for the Senate in the May 1987 congressional elections with the Cayetano wing of the Nacionalista Party. This wing of the Nacionalista Party joined with the PNP, the Palmares wing of the Nacionalista Party, the Kalaw wing of the Liberal Party, members of UNIDO not included on the Aquino administration backed Lakas slate senate slate and the KBL to form a Senate slate called the Grand Alliance for Democracy (GAD). The KBL component of the GAD slate were members of that party’s post-Marcos executive whose continuing connection to the exiled Marcos was ambiguous.

The exiled Marcos had still not lost his political acumen because for him the objective of the May 1987 congressional election was not to win any Senate seats but rather to establish a quantifiable gauge of support which Imelda could utilize to run for president in 1992. Accordingly, Marcos instigated the formation of the Union for Peace and Progress KBL senate slate. The two leading members of this ultra-loyalist senate ticket were Nicanor Yniguez and Marcos’s new personal lawyer, Rafael Recto, who had previously been a UNIDO assemblyman from Batangas in the preceding National Assembly.

The successful Aquino administration backed Lakas ng Bayan (Strength of the Nation) senate ticket was composed of the PDP-Laban, the Salonga wing of the Liberal Party, UNIDO, Bandila and the NUCD. With regard to congressional House of Representatives seats there was considerable intra-party competition for election to office. At the House of Representatives level these aforementioned parties formed a loose coalition known as ‘Laban’.

Included in this Laban coalition was a new pro-administration party called Lakas ng Bayan which had been formed following the November 1986 dismissal of Enrile. This party was primarily composed of local government officials who had once belonged to the KBL as they had previously ‘hedged their bets’ with regard to supporting the Aquino administration. There was also an unsuccessful Nat Dem senate ticket called Partido ng Bayan (Party of the Nation) which included Commander Dante.

The Lakas ticket won twenty-two of the twenty-four senate seats. This massive election victory reflected not only the popularity of the Aquino administration but also the support of the nation’s traditional local government clans which were all aligned with the national government.

Among those elected on the Lakas senate ticket was Aquilino Pimentel who had been compelled to cede his position as Local Government Minister in November 1986 to his successor as PDP-Laban Secretary-General Jaime Ferrer. [23] Those also dropped from the cabinet were Labor Secretary Augusto Sanchez (a Lakas candidate who narrowly failed to win a senate position in 1987) and presidential speech writer Rene Saguisag. These senior officials were dropped in November 1986 to gain General Ramos’s support to secure Enrile’s dismissal.

While leading Soc Dems such as Pimentel and Raul Manglapus were elected to the senate in 1987, the composition of the House of Representatives had less social democratic representation due to the prevalence of local government clans giving their support to the Cojuangco wing of the PDP-Laban, Lakas ng Bayan and UNIDO. This trapo predominance was reflected in Ramon Mitra been elected House Speaker with Peping Cojuangco holding the position of Speaker pro-tempore.  Meanwhile in the Senate, Jovito Salonga (who had topped the 1987 senate poll) was elected Senate President.

Concerning opposition representation in the Senate, Juan Ponce Enrile narrowly won a senate seat in August 1987 after a Supreme Court ruling in his favour. With Enrile’s election to the Senate, the post-Marcos KBL executive (with the exception of Nicanor Yniguez) defected to the Enrile wing of the Nacionalista Party, which had formerly been known as the Cayetano-wing of that party.

This re-alignment vis a vis the KBL and the Nacionalista Party resulted in Ferdinand Marcos resigning as KBL president in August 1987 in favour of Yniguez while the eleven KBL opposition congressmen elected in the 1987 election transferred to the Nacionalista Party. Although the KBL was now without congressional representation this party’s leadership had nevertheless returned to its ultra-loyalist wing so that Imelda Marcos would have a platform from which to run for president in 1992.

Another potential contender for president for the 1992 presidential election was Joseph ‘Erap’ Estrada who was elected to the Senate as an independent on the GAD ticket. Estrada owed his election not only to his popularity as a former film actor but also because the Ilocano bloc vote in northern Luzon (‘the Solid North’), at the behest of the exiled Marcos, had given their votes to him. Estrada, a Liberal in the pre-martial law era, however returned to this party, thereby leaving Enrile as the sole opposition senator.

The Fallout from the August 1987 Coup Attempt

These political machinations very soon became almost irrelevant because on August 28^th, 1987 RAM officers led by Colonel Gringo Honasan nearly overthrew the government. This coup was put down with great difficulty by General Ramos. The fallout from the coup was that President Aquino’s Executive Secretary Joker Arroyo (who had been known as the ‘little president’) was obliged to resign. Furthermore, Vice-President Laurel departed as Foreign Secretary[24] following this coup attempt to in effect defect to the opposition camp.

The Laurel defection was not really a surprise due to the opportunistic nature of his previous political partnership with the Aquino/Cojuangco camp. Following his resignation as Foreign Secretary, Laurel publicly spoke out in favour of a tougher anti-communist counterinsurgency. A political commentator at this time therefore quipped that Laurel was campaigning to be president of a new military backed government should the Aquino administration fall.

Whether the UNIDO party followed its leader into opposition was dependent upon the January 1988 provincial election results, particularly in Batangas. UNIDO was not strong enough to stand candidates across the Philippines in these elections so the party ran in the five provinces of the Southern Tagalog region. Batangas where the Laurels held office going into the 1988 provincial elections was thought to be the only province where UNIDO could win. It was therefore a shock to the Laurels when UNIDO lost Batangas in the January 1988 election to Lakas ng Bansa. [25]

This 1988 loss of Batangas was reflective of the miscalculation on Doy Laurel’s part in breaking with the Aquino administration at a time of crisis in 1987. Whatever misgivings Filipinos may have had about Cory Aquino as president, the political mainstream seemed prepared to back her as president as a guarantor of democracy until her term finished in 1992. Consequently, a majority of voters in Batangas were prepared to vote against UNIDO even if this meant forgoing a native son of theirs who had the prospect of becoming president sometime in the future.

Doy Laurel attempted to surmount this major setback by going into an alliance with Juan Ponce Enrile to form the National Union for Action in July 1988.  This alliance was a prelude to Laurel and Enrile re-launching the Nacionalista Party at a conference in March 1989 in which they were respectively elected president and general secretary of that party. This 1989 conference was delicately balanced between the Laurel and the Enrile factions with KBL members in attendance holding the balance of power.

These KBL delegates undertook not to join the Nacionalista Party while Ferdinand Marcos was still alive. However, Ferdinand Marcos died in September 1989 so that subsequently many KBL members joined the Nacionalista Party. Those KBL members who did not join the Nacionalista Party became divided in their loyalty between the still exiled Imelda Marcos and Eva Kalaw who had by this time registered GAD as a political party.

The LDP: Old Wine in New Bottles

There had also been political realignments within the Aquino administration following the 1988 provincial elections in which most incumbent mayors and governors were returned. Due to this prevalence of local government clans (most of whom had run with Lakas ng Bansa) a new ruling party was formed in September 1988 called the Laban ng Demokratikong Pilipino (LDP, Fight of Pilipino Democrats).

The LDP was an amalgam of the Cojuangco wing of the PDP-Laban, Lakas ng Bansa and the UNIDO party[26]. This new ruling party was led by the House Speaker Ramon Mitra who was the inaugural president of the LDP with Peping Cojuangco serving as the party general-secretary. The formation of this new ruling party enabled Aquilino Pimentel to re-found the PDP-Laban with himself as party chairman.

The formation of the LDP (which was dubbed by a political commentator at the time as a ‘recycled KBL’) demonstrated that there was a return to traditional politics despite, or perhaps, because of the 1986 Revolution. It was therefore an open question as to whether the Liberal Party, one of the two major historic parties, would revert to being a traditional party or be a Soc Dem party?

The Liberals at this time were led by Jovito Salonga[27] who topped the 1987 Senate poll. It seemed that he was on track to win the presidency in 1992 as he was then the Philippines most popular politician. Senator Salonga had shrewdly distanced himself from the increasingly unpopular Aquino government by declaring that the Liberal Party was ‘supportive of but not submissive’ to the administration.

The above cited declaration was code for the Liberal Party position of distancing itself from a government which many Filipinos were becoming disenchanted with due to its day to day lack of clear direction, but still overall supported as a democratic bulwark. It therefore seemed that Senator Salonga would win the 1992 presidential election as the heir to the ideals of the 1986 Revolution.

The Fallout from the December 1989 Coup Attempt

However, in early December 1989 a military coup was attempted by a group of military officers known as the Young Officers Union (YOU) which shifted the balance of power in favour of Fidel Ramos to be elected president in 1992.  YOU were a clandestine network of officers connected to RAM. This coup was the bloodiest attempt to overthrow the Aquino administration and would have succeeded had American air force planes not taken to the skies to show their support for the government.[28]

The crushing of this coup illustrated President Aquino’s dependence upon her Defence Secretary so that she had to support him for president in the 1992 elections. This entailed the Soc Dems (with the tacit agreement of Senator Salonga) transferring their indirect support to Ramos. Consequently Manila-based Soc Dem groups backed by the Catholic Church gave their support to Miriam Defensor Santiago who had served successively as Immigration Secretary and Secretary for Agrarian Reform under President Aquino.

The quick witted and acid tongued Santiago had gained widespread popularity for her tough stance against graft and corruption when she was Immigration Secretary so that for many Filipinos (particularly those in Manila) she represented the spirit of the 1986 Revolution. A new political party, the People’s Reform Party (PRP) was therefore launched in 1991 as a vehicle for Santiago’s run for the presidency in 1992. This new party ate into Senator Salonga’s Manila base among the middle class.

To further narrow his electoral base as part of his strategy of planned abandonment, Senator Salonga had the Liberal Party Executive declare him its presidential candidate in November 1990 instead of holding a party convention. This action, as Senator Salonga had probably expected, prompted Senator Estrada to split from the Liberal Party to form the Partido ng Masang Pilipino (PMP, Party of the Pilipino Masses) so that he could pursue his presidential ambitions in 1992.

Because Senator Salonga and the Aquino administration were strategically aiming to make General Ramos the next president some of the traditional clans which had supported the Liberal Party transferred into the LDP following the 1989 coup attempt. This shift was reflected in November 1990 when Senator Salonga was deposed as Senate president in favour of the LDP’s Neptali Gonzales.

Political Realignments for the 1992 Elections

As a political fallback in case Fidel Ramos did not win the LDP’s presidential nomination in late 1991 the Aquino administration came to terms with one of the Aquino family’s arch competitors, Danding Cojuangco. This former Marcos crony returned to the Philippines in late 1989 on the eve of the coup attempt that year. While Cojuangco was soon slapped down with a raft of criminal charges he nevertheless launched legal action to regain control of the San Miguel Corporation which had been returned to the Soriano family following the 1986 Revolution.

At a political level Danding moved to run for president in 1992 by launching a new political party in 1990 called the People’s Party. The aim of this new party was not really to make Danding president but rather to split the LDP vote in case Fidel Ramos did not win the LDP’s 1991 presidential nomination. Danding subsequently travelled around the archipelago detaching some of the previously pro-Marcos clans which had gone into LDP via Lakas to instead establish a political machine for himself in 1992.

An even more amazing political accommodation in terms of the Aquino administration engineering Fidel Ramos’s election to the presidency in 1992 was with Imelda Marcos! That such an accommodation was reached was incredible because the fall of the Marcos family in 1986 had been a steep one. Due to the international opprobrium in which the Marcos family was held in 1986 the Swiss banking authorities had co-operated with the Aquino administration in uncovering over five billion dollars US in funds which had been deposited in Swiss bank accounts by the Marcoses.

A Swiss court in 1986 had ruled that these Marcos funds be handed over to the Philippine government.  However, there was an escape clause in this ruling, that there had to be a criminal conviction in order for these funds to be returned to the Philippines. The Aquino administration therefore, in co-operation with the New York state authorities had Ferdinand and Imelda Marcos indicted for fraud and racketeering in October 1988. Consequently, if the former first couple were found guilty not only would they lose their freedom but also the five billion dollars in funds.

Ferdinand Marcos died in September 1989 without facing trail thereby obliging Imelda to face court alone in New York in 1990. The former first lady was acquitted in early July 1990 which meant that Imelda not only retained her liberty but that the Marcos estate held onto the money in the disputed Swiss bank accounts. This court verdict consequently provided Imelda with the leverage to later return to the Philippines to help ensure General Ramos’s election to the presidency.

Having resigned as Defence Secretary in July 1991 to pursue the LDP’s presidential nomination this retired general went up against Hose Speaker Ramon Mitra for this nomination. A de facto convention (a ‘straw poll survey’) of the LDP was held in November 1991 in which Ramos and Mitra duelled for the presidential nomination.

Due to the support of the traditional clans which had gone into Lakas in 1986 as a prelude to forming the LDP in 1988, Ramos lost the presidential nomination to Mitra. Ramos however refused to accept this result and instead split from the LDP to form the ‘LDP-EDSA’ in December 1991[29]. Realising that General Ramos had to be kept on side to forestall a military coup, Salonga met with the general to cede him the Liberal Party presidential nomination.

However, the Aquino administration’s political strategists realised that Jovito Salonga could be best utilized to split Mitra’s vote to enable General Ramos to win the May 1992 presidential election. It was therefore instead arranged for General Ramos to amalgamate his incipient EDSA-LDP with Manglapus’ s NUCD in January 1992 at a convention to form the NUCD-EDSA (Lakas) Party.[30] Fidel Ramos choose as his running-mate Emilio Osmena, the grandson of a former president and son of Sergio Osmena, Marcos’s opponent in the 1969 presidential election.

There were also other political alignments in terms of party formation at this time in 1991 which all amounted to helping secure General Ramos’s election to the presidency the following year. In May 1991 Danding Cojuangco joined the Nacionalista Party to seeks its nomination in competition with Juan Ponce Enrile and Doy Laurel.

The Nacionalista Party however split three ways in November 1991 with the three respective factions/wings holding their own respective straw poll conventions to nominate their leaders for president. It was into this melee that Imelda Marcos returned to Manila where in the following month the KBL held a formal convention where she was drafted to run for president.

Imelda upon her return in November 1991 was welcomed by throngs of Tondo slum dwellers which helped provide her with the momentum to take back her political following in Manila which Eva Kalaw had attempted to appropriate from the former first lady during her over five and a half year enforced absence. In early January 1992 Imelda called on upon the three other Nacionalista factions to re-unite at a formal party convention and to nominate her for president!

During this period of flux, Enrile and some of his [31]supporters were accepted into the LDP as candidates when this party held its formal convention in January 1992. Ramon Mitra was formally nominated for president.  Mitra choose as his running mate, Marcelo Fernan, the former Chief Justice of the Supreme Court.

Fernan had initially intended to run for president with the support of the Osmena clan and Cardinal Sin. The Osmenas had a rich voter base on the island of Cebu to support this presidential but instead this family split to support other presidential bids. Emilio Osmenas’s bother, Senator Johnny Osmena teamed up in January 1992 with Danding Cojuangco to be his running mate with the implication that he would be supported by Cojuangco for president in 1998.

Danding Cojuangco’s faction of the Nacionalista Party in January 1992 held a formal presidential convention to coalesce with this tycoon’s personal party, the People’s Party, to form the Nationalist People’s Coalition (NPC).

As for the Nacionalista Party it also held a convention in January 1992 where Doy Laurel was formally nominated for president. Doy Laurel initially choose Rodolfo Ganzon as his running mate.

The initial choice of Rodolfo Ganzon reflected the Laurels’ at times ambiguous stance in opposing the Marcos regime. [32] Ganzon had been the mayor of Iloilo on Panay Island when martial law was imposed in 1972. Even though Ganzon was a member of the Nacionalista Party at the time, he was nevertheless dismissed as mayor in 1972 and imprisoned before being transferred to house arrest in 1978 and finally released in in 1986 with the fall of Marcos. This former senator, who had again been elected mayor of Iloilo in 1988, subsequently withdrew during Doy Laurel’s faltering 1992 presidential campaign to be replaced by Eva Kalaw whose GAD party had coalesced in in early 1992 with the Nacionalista Party.

A more important vice-presidential change occurred in late March 1992 when Senator Johnny Osmena withdrew so that Senator Erap Estrada could become Danding Cojuangco’s running mate, thereby ending the former film star’s own presidential run for office.

It is also interesting to note that with regard to the vice-presidential prospects for the 1992 presidential race that the two female candidates, Miriam Santiago and Imelda Marcos, both selected relatives of the late and revered president, Ramon Magsaysay.[33] Miriam Santiago’s vice-presidential running mate was Ramon Magsaysay Jr, the son of the late president while Imelda Marcos choose as her running mate, Vicente Magsaysay, a nephew of the former president and a former governor of Zambles Province.

As for Senator Salonga he chose Senator Aquilino Pimentel whose PDP-Laban had coalesced in early 1992 with the Liberal Party to form an electoral alliance, called the United People’s Coalition. This Soc Dem alliance could have been electorally stronger than it was but too much social democratic support had been temporarily shifted in Manila to Miriam Santiago so that Ramos instead of Salonga would win the presidency.

Meanwhile the candidates on the right, Danding Cojuangco and Imelda Marcos, were fulfilling their function of taking votes away from the LDP’s Ramon Mitra to ultimately deliver Ramos the presidency. Danding Cojuangco (who called himself ‘the Boss’) by running NPC candidates in the provinces against LDP governors and mayors, had obliged many  of them to seek support and resources from the outgoing Aquino administration so that their votes were delivered to Fidel Ramos instead of to Ramon Mitra. Although Peping Cojuangco ran under the banner of the LDP in his home province of Tarlac in 1992 few doubted that his provincial machine delivered its votes to Ramos.

There was a general misperception that Imelda Marcos’s 1992 election campaign was going badly. This misperception was based on the observation that many KBL members were defecting to the NPC during the course of the campaign. However, these ‘defections’ often occurred in pro-Marcos areas such as the Solid North and Leyte where local gubernatorial and mayoral candidates, who were either with the NPC or with the LDP, transferred their support to Imelda in return for the local government KBL candidates lapsing their campaigns against them.

The 1992 National Election Results

Consequently, Imelda Marcos instead of coming in at second last out of the seven presidential candidates in the 1992 presidential race instead came in at fifth with two million and three hundred thousand votes or ten point-three percent of the vote.[34] This outcome for Imelda was thirty thousand votes ahead of Senator Jovita Salonga who came in at sixth place with his vice-presidential running mate Aquilino Pimentel coming in at fifth in the race for vice-president ahead of Vicente Magsaysay and Eva Kalaw.

Ramon Mitra as the main victim of this vote splitting came in fourth with fourteen percent of the vote which was just over three million and three hundred thousand votes. Mitra’s running mate Marcello Fernan by contrast garnered over four million votes coming in second for vice-president and probably would have won that position if Emilio Osmena (Fidel Ramos’s running mate who came in at third place for vice-president) had not split the Cebuano vote.

This spitting of the Cebuano vote enabled Senator Erap Estrada to win the vice-presidency with over six million votes of thirty-three percent of the vote. This outcome was also due to the pro-Marcos Solid North overwhelmingly voting for Erap Estrada. As for Danding Cojuangco, he came in third by receiving over four million votes or just over eighteen percent of the vote. This vote was predominately provided by previously pro-Marcos local government clans which went into the LDP only to subsequently join the NPC.

The actual winner in the election was Miriam Santiago but due to vote rigging she officially came second with over four million and four hundred thousand votes or just over nineteen percent of the vote. This high vote was due to the strong support which Miriam Santiago received in Manila where Catholic Church backed Soc Dem groups gave their support to this maverick candidate. Santiago also polled strongly amongst her ethnic Ilonggo group based on Panay Island.  Her vice-presidential running mate Ramon Magsaysay Jr came in fourth in the vice-presidential tally with just over fourteen percent of the vote.

General Ramos as the official winner, but who probably was really in second place, was accredited with garnering just over twenty-three-point five percent of the vote or over five million and three hundred thousand votes. This retired army general received much of his vote from LDP local government clans who had unofficially abandoned Mitra in return for the Aquino administration’s support in fending off NPC challengers for local government office.

The Ramos Era, 1992 to1998

The election victory of Fidel Ramos, who was inaugurated president on the 30^th June 1992, was due to wheeling and dealing (with the probable mastermind being Peping Cojuangco). Nevertheless, a fragile democracy had survived. There were verbal protests from Miriam Santiago over the official election result but without continuing Soc Dem support in Manila she in effect became a one-woman band. Her PRP candidate for mayor of Manila, a retired police general named Alfredo Lim was elected to that post but as events would subsequently indicate he was not really committed to Miriam Santiago’s cause.

The LDP won an overwhelming majority in the House of Representatives and the Senate but due to the practice of mamblingism[35] the political dynamics shifted in favour of the new administration party, the NUCD Lakas. A majority of LDP congressmen defected to the ruling party to elect Jose de Venecia, the second most important figure in the NUCD-Lakas, Speaker of the House of Representatives. There was also a mass of defections at a local government level from the LDP to Lakas.

The LDP however held its position in the Senate due to the efforts of Senator Edgardo Angara who was elected president of the upper house in 1993. To prevent further defections from the LDP to Lakas, Senator Angara helped organise a joint Senate ticket between these two parties for the 1995 mid-term congressional and provincial elections. Under this electoral alliance the two parties undertook not to stand candidates against each other in the 1995 mid-term elections.

The LDP-Lakas electoral pact meant that the NPC went into the 1995 mid-term elections as the chief opposition party. The NPC was led during the 1995 poll by the ultimate survivor in Philippine politics, Senator Ernie Maceda.  The opposition 1995 campaign was based round the rallying cry of justice for Flor Contemplacion, a domestic worker who had been executed in Singapore for murder. This campaign failed to win traction among the voters as only one NPC senator (Nikki Coseteng) was re-elected.

The PRP senate slate was more successful with Miriam Santiago winning election with Gringo Honasan being elected as a guest candidate on this slate. Honasan’s election was part of a strategy on the part of the Ramos administration to bring former RAM rebels into the political mainstream so as to end the destructive cycle of attempted coups.

The Honasan victory was not without controversy and was plagued with allegations of vote rigging. Aquilino Pimentel, who ran on the Ramos administrations’ Lakas-LDP senate slate as a guest candidate for the PDP-Laban, alleged that votes which had gone to him were diverted to both Honasan and Juan Ponce Enrile.

Incredibly, Juan Ponce Enrile had joined the Liberal Party following his election to the House of Representatives in 1992 and subsequently was its guest senate candidate on the 1995 Lakas-LDP slate! If Pimentel’s allegations of vote rigging were correct, then the Philippines is probably the only country in the world where votes were taken away from an official government candidate to help the opposition.

Despite the topsy-turvey nature of Philippine politics the Ramos administration had its successes because of the co-operation between House of Representatives and the Senate as a result of the leadership provided by Senate President Angara and House Speaker De Venecia. Legislation was passed which opened the Philippines up to foreign investment which helped generate consistently high levels of economic growth during the period of the Ramos administration.

There were nevertheless daily gripes about perennial electricity failures. Furthermore, the high rate of economic growth which had been achieved had still not lifted millions of Filipinos out of poverty. There was also the risk which Cory Aquino and her brother Peping had taken out of necessity in supporting a former general to become president. This risk was soon borne out.

President Ramos following his success in the mid-term 1995 elections attempted to have the constitution revised to introduce a parliamentary system of government by advocating a Charter Change or “Cha Cha”. Matters reached a crescendo when in September 1997 on the twenty-fifth anniversary of the imposition of martial law noisy and massive Soc Dem supported demonstrations were held across the Philippines to protest against the proposed constitutional change to allow the Ramos administration to perpetuate itself in power.

Faced with this overwhelming opposition President Ramos relented by retreating from the proposed Cha-Cha ‘reforms’. Although, this was a major victory for Cory Aquino and her brother Peping they were still faced with the prospect the populist vice-president, Erap Estrada being elected president in 1998.

The 1998 National Elections

Erap Estrada’s prospects of becoming president were strengthened in June 1997 when his PMP entered into an electoral alliance with the Angara led LDP and Danding Cojuangco’s NPC to form LAMMP (LAMMP Laban ng Makayang Pilipino, Struggle of the Patriotic Filipino Masses). This electoral configuration held a convention in November 1997 where Erap Estrada was nominated as LAMMP’s presidential candidate with Senator Angara as his vice-presidential running mate. [36]

To complicate matters, LAMMP adopted the Liberal Party’s candidate for mayor of Manila Lito Atienza[37], as its guest candidate for that position in the 1998 national elections. Meanwhile, the outgoing mayor of Manila, Alfredo Lim was appointed by the Liberal Party Executive to be that party’s presidential candidate with yet another Osmena - Sergio Osmena III - as his vice-presidential running-mate.

The ruling NUCD-Lakas party held its convention in December 1997 where a motion was passed enabling President Ramos to select its presidential candidate. Predictably, the NUCD-Lakas presidential selection went to House Speaker Jose De Venecia. [38] However, in a sensational development, Senator Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo was selected as De Venecia’s vice-presidential running mate.

The vice-presidential selection of Senator Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo (who was a daughter of former president, Diosado Macapagal) was amazing because she was the preferred candidate of former president Cory Aquino and her brother Peping Cojuangco who had previously been at odds with President Ramos by leading the anti-Cha Cha campaign. Senator Macapagal-Arroyo, a distinguished economics professor, had held senior positions in the Trade and Industry Ministry under President Aquion in the late 1980s. Her father’s faction within the LDP had given its support to Ramon Mitra for that party’s presidential nomination in 1991 in return for Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo’s selection as a senate candidate.

Elected to the thirteenth position in the 1992 elections, thereby coming just in the second half of elected senators, Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo won a three-year term as opposed to a six -year one. Nevertheless, running on the joint LDP-Lakas senate ticket in the 1995 election, Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo topped the national poll therefore making her a presidential contender for the 1998 election.

Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo subsequently split from the LDP in 1997 to found her own party, Kampi or Partner of the Free Filipino. This breakaway party was supported by Peping Cojuangco and Soc Dem veterans were recruited to its ranks.  Realizing that she could not defeat Erap Estrada for the presidency in the 1998 presidential election, Senator Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo in late 1997 joined the NUCD– Lakas party to be its vice-presidential candidate.

Senator Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo’s decision to run for vice-president was vindicated as Vice-President Estrada was elected president with just under forty percent of the vote out of ten candidates. However, Senator Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo’s election victory was even more emphatic as she won forty-nine percent of the vote from among nine candidates.

The Estrada Presidency, 1998 to 2001

Probably, Peping Cojuangco and Fidel Ramos planned for Vice-President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo to depose Erap Estrada after he had served thirty-months in office.[39]  Although Peping Cojuangco and Fidel Ramos had previously quarrelled over the Cha Cha ‘reforms’ they both needed each other if they were to succeed in deposing Estrada. Consequently, a future Arroyo administration would be reflective of the respective influences of Fidel Ramos and Peping Cojuangco.

For there to be a successful future revolt against Estrada he had to fulfil the prerequisite of being excessively corrupt. This expectation was met and became apparent in October 2000 when Ilocos Sur governor, Luis ‘Chavit’ Singson alleged that Estrada and his associates had been receiving millions of pesos in ‘Jeteng’ kickbacks and bribes. These allegations subsequently led in November 2000 to articles of impeachment being referred by the House Speaker Manuel ‘Manny’ Villar to the Senate for trial.[40]

When the pro-Estrada Senate by a one-vote margin voted not to reveal incriminating evidence in January 2001 a civilian revolt ensued in which thousands of demonstrators converged on Malacañang Palace. President Estrada was ready to utilize the military to re-impose martial law to become a dictator. However, in an uncanny replay of the Edsa Revolution against Marcos, the military sided with the demonstrators thereby obliging Estrada to vacate the presidential palace as Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo was sworn on the 20^th of January 2001 as the new president after the Supreme Court had declared the presidency vacant. [41]

Despite its relatively brief duration, the Estrada presidency had been sinister because this president possibly planned to utilize the impeachment crisis as an opportunity to re-impose martial law to become a dictator. The major socio-political development during this period was that former Marcos cronies returned and regained much of their former economic clout with the active backing of the Estrada government. Danding Cojuangco regained control of the San Miguel corporation while another former Marcos crony, Lucio Tan retook possession of Philippine Airlines (PAL) during the Estrada presidency.

President Estrada intended to re-establish an authoritarian regime whose power was derived from the president’s following among the poor and the economic clout of the former Marcos cronies. The main problem for Estrada and his Executive Secretary Ronaldo Zamora achieving this scenario was that former Marcos cronies and their allies within the military held back so that Estrada could be deposed. These powerful forces had recovered sufficient ground under Estrada so that they were not prepared to risk their recent gains. They therefore instead, adjusted to Gloria Macapagal Arroyo’s assumption of the Presidency.

The Presidency of Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo, 2001 to 2010

Gloria Macapagal Arroyo’s assumption of the presidency in early 2001 was also due to the support which she had received from the Soc Dems. The FFW was at the forefront of organising the anti-Estrada demonstrations and PDSP leader Bert Gonzales was subsequently appointed National Security Adviser. However, there were still no appreciable social democratic reforms during the nine-year presidency (2001-2010) of Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo.

Even though the Estrada presidency had been a corrupt disaster, the 2004 presidential elections in which President Macapagal-Arroyo stood for a six-year term in her own right were probably rigged in her favour. The main opposition presidential candidate was Fernando Poe (who died from cancer in December 2004) and was then the leading film actor in the Philippines. His political credibility to seek the nation’s highest office had been mainly derived from his endorsement by Erap Estrada.

The electoral alliance which backed Poe was called the Coalition of United Filipinos (KNP) which was composed of Estrada’s PMP, the Angara-wing of the LDP and the PDP-Laban. The pro-government alliance which supported President Macapagal- Arroyo’s 2004 election was called the Coalition of Truth and Experience for Tomorrow (K4). This electoral alliance was composed of the NUCD-Lakas, the Liberal Party, the NPC and Santiago’s PRP.

By the time of the 2007 mid-term national elections new electoral configurations had developed due to the re-emergence of the Nacionalista Party which was now led by Manny Villar. He had been previously elected in 2001 as an independent on the People Power Coalition senate slate which was supported by the Macapagal-Arroyo administration. The following year, Senator Villar assumed the leadership of the virtually moribund Nacionalista Party at the request of a dying Doy Laurel. [42]

Even though Manny Villar could not have been elected to the Senate in 2001 without the support of the Macapagal-Arroyo administration, his Nacionalista Party linked up in 2007 with its old traditional rival the Liberal Party as well as the PDP-Laban to form the Genuine Opposition (GO) senate slate. By the time of the 2010 Philippine presidential election the Nacionalista Party was strong enough to field Senator Manny Villar for president.

Senator Villar came a respectable third, (out of nine presidential candidates) with fifteen percent of the vote or just over five million votes in the 2010 presidential poll. The winning candidate was Benigno Aquino III of the Liberal Party with an impressive forty-two percent of the vote, or just over fifteen million and two hundred thousand votes. Senator Aquino was followed by Erap Estrada with over five million votes or twenty-six percent of the vote. This marked an extraordinary political resurrection for a man who had been hounded from office so ignominiously only nine years earlier.

It is noteworthy that the ruling NUCD-Lakas candidate, Gilberto Teodoro in the 2010 presidential election came in fourth with eleven percent of the vote or just over four million votes. Teodoro, a nephew of Danding Cojuangco had previously been a congressman for the NPC and had served as Defence Secretary between 2007 and late 2009, before being succeeded in that position by Bert Gonzales. [43]

Teodoro’s relatively weak electoral performance was reflective of how discredited the Macapagal-Arroyo administration had become by the time of the 2010 national elections. In the preceding year former president, Cory Aquino publicly apologised to Erap Estrada for helping to depose him as she took part in anti-Macapagal-Arroyo demonstrations. Later that year, (2009) in early August, Cory Aquino died.

There was a massive outpouring of grief over Cory Aquino’s death which led to the Philippine Liberal Party executive to reverse the order on its presidential ticket. Originally, the Liberal Party had planned to run Senator Manuel Roxas “Mar” Roxas for president with Cory Aquino’s son Senator Benigno Aquino III as his vice-presidential running mate in the 2010 presidential election.

This reversal in candidate order worked as Senator Aquino was elected in a landslide. This election victory was as much as anything a tribute to his late mother who had steered the nation back to a democracy. However, Cory Aquino had failed to undertake any fundamental socio-economic reform when she had the opportunity to do so.

Failed Expectations

During her first year in office, President Cory Aquino ruled by decree and as such she could have introduced sweeping land reform but refused to do so. While it is true that the sugar and coconut monopolies of the Marcos era were dismantled by the Aquino government, land reform did not ensue. Legislation was passed in June 1988, ‘The Comprehensive Agrarian Reform Program’ (sic), but this land reform programme was deliberately flawed in its design so that the actual implementation was rendered completely ineffective.

Similarly, the presidential administration of Benigno Aquino III (2010-2016) was bereft of a socio-economic reform agenda so that most Filipinos remained in poverty. Redeeming aspects of this government were that it was substantially free of corruption and was scrupulously fair in ensuring that clean elections were conducted. Nevertheless, more social action was required, and it was due to the inadequacies of President Benigno Aquino III’s administration that an authoritarian populist in Rodrigo Duterte was elected president in 2016.

The 2016 National Elections

Ironically given his authoritarian tendencies, Rodrigo Duterte was the successful 2016 presidential candidate of the PDP-Laban! This shift in the PDP-Laban’s traditions can be attributed to Jejomar Binay’s falling out with this party. Binay was the mayor of Makati, a stronghold of the PDP-Laban, when he was elected vice-president of the Philippines in 2010. In this election, the PDP-Laban entered an electoral alliance with Estrada’s PMP so that Binay was this former president’s vice-presidential running mate.

Because there can be vote splitting in Filipino elections, Binay was elected vice-president in the 2010 presidential election. For the 2013 mid-term elections Estrada’s PMP and the PDP-Laban formed an electoral coalition called the United Nationalist Alliance (UNA).  Trying to appropriate the PMP’s electoral base, Vice-President Binay had the UNA registered as a formal political party but failed to take much of the PDP-Laban with him.[44] Consequently, the PDP-Laban continued as a separate entity and its party executive choose Davao City mayor Rodrigo Duterte as its presidential candidate for the 2016 presidential election.

Rodrigo Duterte had been the mayor of Davao City on Mindanao where his no-nonsense, if not violent, approach toward combatting crime had won him nationwide admiration. To increase Duterte’s chances of victory the Nacionalista Party did not formally put up a presidential candidate for the 2016 national election. [45] Nacionalista Party backing for Duterte was also reflected by the selection of his running mate, Senator Alan Peter Cayetano, a stalwart of that party.

Although Senator Cayetano formally ran as an independent, he was still a member of the Nacionalista Party and garnered fourteen percent of the vote or just over five million votes which placed him in third place for the 2016 vice-presidential race. As for Duterte, he won the 2016 presidential race (which had six candidates) with thirty-nine percent of the vote or just over sixteen million, six hundred thousand votes. His nearest rival was Mar Roxas of the Liberal Party, who won twenty-three percent of the vote or just under ten million votes.

While Senator Roxas lost, his Liberal Party running mate, Leni Robredo won the vice-presidency with thirty-five percent of the vote or just under fourteen million and four hundred thousand votes. She narrowly defeated Ferdinand ‘Bong Bong’ Marcos for vice-president by less than one percent of the vote.  Senator Marcos ran as an independent for vice-president on a ticket with Senator Miriam Santiago running as the candidate of her PRP for president.

Senator Santiago garnered nearly one and half million votes or three-point four percent of the vote coming in behind Vice-President Binay.[46] He came fourth with nearly five and a half million votes or just over twelve percent of the vote. Incredibly, for a one-time Soc Dem, Vice-President Binay choose as his running-mate, Senator Gringo Honasan who gained just over eight hundred thousand votes or just under two percent of the vote.

This vice-presidential selection by Vice-President Binay of the Senator Honasan was a disgrace because had his RAM faction of the military ever gained power via a military coup they would have established a tough and harsh military dictatorship which might have been as enduring as Egypt’s rule under the Free Officers’ Union. Nevertheless, as paltry as Senator Honasan’s vote was it still had an impact of depriving Senator Marcos of the vice-presidency.

Bong Bong Marcos: Back to the Future?

That Senator Marcos came so close to winning the vice-presidency in 2016 was testament to the political skill of his advisers and the nostalgia which many Filipinos now remember of his parents’ rule. This sentiment would not have been so strong had post-1986 Filipino governments not failed to deliver much needed socio-economic reform. However, the question remains as to whether Ferdinand Marcos Jr can ever be trusted with his nation’s leadership? Certainly, in reviewing his post 1986 political career, a picture emerges of Bong Bong Marcos which indicates that he is methodical and that he plays the odds.

Bong Bong Marcos was elected in 1992 to a House of Representatives seat in Ilocos Norte Province in the year that his mother garnered over two million votes to help deliver Fidel Ramos the presidency. Utilizing his congressional seat as a platform, Bong Bong ran for the Senate in 1995 with the KBL as a guest candidate of the NPC. Although Bong Bong lost his 1995 senate bid, he nevertheless kept his family’s then two million bloc vote intact so that his mother could run for president in 1998.

Imelda Marcos went into the 1998 presidential race with the discreet backing of the then ruling NUCD-Lakas Party on the understanding that she would siphon votes away from Erap Estrada. [47] In return for Imelda running for president the NUCD-Lakas party put up a Marcos family supporter, Roquito ‘Roque’ Ablan, for governor of Ilocos Norte. Ablan ran for governor with the intention of losing to Bong Bong Marcos who also ran for that position as a guest candidate of LAMMP’s.

Furthermore, Imee Marcos (daughter of Ferdinand and Imelda) ran for a House of Representatives seat in Ilocos Norte as a guest candidate of LAMMP in 1998. The Romualdez family was also accommodated in the 1998 national elections with Imelda’s brother Alfredo, running for mayor of Tacloban, the home city of the former first lady on the island of Leyte.

With her relatives ‘on track’ to winning in their respective electoral races, Imelda withdrew as a presidential candidate on April 27^th, 1998, as she went incommunicado before resurfacing just before the May vote to publicly endorse Erap Estrada. When President Erap Estrada was faced with impeachment in November 2000 he attended a support rally in Ilocos Norte with Imelda, Bong Bong and Imee Marcos all being present.

Following this rally, the Marcos family publicly broke with Estrada to declare themselves supportive of the impeachment process so as to discover whether there had been any corruption on the president’s part. Imelda subsequently gave her public endorsement of Gloria Macapagal Arroyo’s assumption of the presidency in early 2001. The pay back for the Marcos/Romualdez’s family’s shift in support was they were able to run as guest candidates of the NUCD-Lakas party in the May 2001 mid-term national elections.

Taking advantage of their being able to run as guest candidates with the NUCD-Lakas party, the Marcos family stacked out the local government offices in Ilocos Norte with close and extended relatives to establish (or re-establish) a provincial bailiwick after the 2001 poll. The following year Imelda’s brother Alfredo, who had won re-election as mayor of Tacloban in 2001, formally joined the NUCD-Lakas party with his sister’s public blessing.

Interestingly with respect to the NUCD-Lakas, that party has gone into steep decline since Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo’s presidential term expired in 2010 with most of its members, including its original faction, which was loyal to the late Raul Manglapus, going into the Liberal Party.  However, the Leyte based Romualdezs have remained within the NUCD-Lakas party to now constitute a substantial inner party faction within this former ruling party.

As regards to another former ruling party, the KBL, the Marcos family have distanced themselves from this once mighty political machine. In January 2007, the remnant of the KBL held a convention at which the Marcos family was conspicuous by its absence. This convention nominated a senate slate (which did not have the Marcos family’s full endorsement) and elected a new executive which did not include members of the former first family.

In 2009, the KBL executive ‘de-listed’ Bong Bong Marcos as a party member which cleared the way for him to formally join the Nacionalista Party that year and to be selected as one of its 2010 senate candidates. Bong Bong Marcos was elected as a senator in 2010 due to the fact that former local government clans which had once supported the Marcos regime, had also returned to the Nacionalista Party. These clans provided Bong Bong with sufficient bloc votes to facilitate his election to the Senate in 2010.

Similarly, in 2010 Imee Marcos and Imelda Marcos were respectively elected as governor of Ilocos Norte and to the House of Representatives for that province. Due to their electoral successes, Imelda and Imee have both returned to the KBL while remaining within the ranks of the Nacionalista Party. Having served a maximum of three three-year terms as governor of Ilocos Norte, Imee was elected to the senate in 2019 as a candidate of the Nacionalista Party, which was (and still is) in coalition with the PDP-Laban.[48]

Imee Marcos partly owed her election to the Senate to the return of the ‘Solid North’ vote to the Marcos family. The Marcos family can also attribute their success to positive memories of Ferdinand Marcos’s presidency. Due to Bong Bong’s strong 2016 electoral performance when he ran for vice-president, a Marcos return to the presidency in 2022 cannot be ruled out.

The Need for Positive Reform

The question therefore emerges as to whether the Marcos family can be trusted given their past actions? The answer to that question is an unequivocal no! The Marcos estate has not voluntarily returned any of the money which it had previously misappropriated and family members have still not publicly demonstrated any sense of remorse for their past actions.

A Marcos return to power would therefore be akin to the resumption of the presidency by Daniel Ortega in Nicaragua in January 2007. Ortega returned to power after a sixteen-year absence from the presidency. By honing his political skill in opposition, Ortega has become such a formidable political actor that he and his family have since so entrenched themselves in power that they can now only be removed by a violent revolution.

Bong Bong Marcos, similar to Daniel Ortega, would not be satisfied with the presidency but would instead conceptualize that high office as a vehicle by which to re-assert his family’s political and economic dominance regardless of the tremendous social cost.

However, poor Filipinos (who constitute the overwhelming majority of the electorate) need positive reasons to vote for the anti-Marcos alternative. Accordingly, the Soc Dems need to have a socio-economic agenda which will lift millions of Filipinos out of poverty. Ironically, it was Ferdinand Marcos who demonstrated that the Philippines does have an extensive talent pool of technocrats which can be utilized for the betterment of society.

Hopefully, Vice-President Leni Robredo of the Liberal Party will be elected president in 2022. For the vice-president to be elected in 2022 will take an extraordinary amount of political skill similar to that which Ferdinand Marcos, Kokoy Romualdez and Peping Cojuangco had all demonstrated. However, that political skill will need to be translated into a positive socio-economic outcome for the Philippines so that Senator Ninoy Aquino’s 1983 death will not have been in vain.

Why The Philippines should be Wary of Communist China

Leni Robredo’s possible election to the presidency in 2022 is premised on their being presidential elections that year. President Duterte’s move toward allowing the Communist Chinese to construct a new airport as Sangley Point has serious international and domestic ramifications. Should the Philippines move into Communist China’s military and political orbit then the position of the United States in the Asia -Pacific region will be fundamentally challenged.

Furthermore, it also should not be forgotten that if the Philippines become an ally of Beijing then the capacity of the Republic of China on Taiwan to ward off threats from mainland China – the PRC - will be fatally undercut. Should Taiwan be absorbed into PRC then Japan might very well determine to acquire nuclear weapons in the not too distant future.

For Canberra, the consequences of the Philippines becoming an ally of communist China are immense because the United States would become even more reliant upon Australia to maintain its position in the Asia-Pacific region. This in turn could make Australia a more focussed target of the PRC.

Therefore, to help avoid the above scenarios becoming reality, an understanding of the dynamics of Filipino politics is essential. It is possible if President Duterte prevails with regard to aligning his nation with the PRC then he may be on track toward illegally perpetuating himself in office beyond 2022.

President Marcos was able to ‘get away’ with extra constitutionally staying in power in 1972 via the imposition of martial law because the power balance within the military was favourable to him. By contrast, this was not the case in 1986 when President Marcos tried to re-impose marital law. Nor were the military and political dynamics favourable to President Erap Estrada in January 2001 when he tried to impose martial law.

President Duterte may very well be hoisting a ‘trial balloon’ to see that if by ensuring that the Sangley airport proposal proceeds that he can ultimately perpetuate himself in power beyond the expiration of his presidential term in 2022. Hopefully, the domestic military balance of power is unfavourable to the Philippines president for him to achieve this objective.

As Byzantine as Filipino politics can be, it would be a mistake not to appreciate how important it is to have some understanding of the socio-political dynamics of this nation because of its significant strategic value.

 

[1] Laurel Snr died four days before the 1959 Senate election.

[2] The Lopez family reconciled with a former critic of theirs, Raul Manglapus by financing his exile-based Movement for a Free Philippines, MFP.  Don Eugenio’s American-Greek son-in-law Steve Psinakis instigated urban military operations against the Marcos regime in the late 1970s/early 1980s which were carried out by militant Soc Dems).

[3] Between 1982 and 1986 Kokoy served as Philippine ambassador to the United States. In this capacity he adroitly negotiated the renewal of leases of US bases in the Philippines in Subic Bay and Clarke Airfield Base in 1983.

[4] The KBL’s Central Luzon ticket was headed by Imelda Marcos, who was appointed Minister for Human Settlements and Ecology following this 1978 poll.

[5] Gonzales eventually took refuge in Mindanao in 1980 where he teamed up with a Soc Dem faction within the MNLF.

[6]  Marcos’s main ‘opponent’ in the June 1981 presidential election was the elderly Alejo Santos who ran with another tame cat wing of the Nacionalista Party headed by Jose Roy. Santos garnered over eight percent of the vote, while Marcos was accredited with eighty-eight percent of the vote which gave him a six-year presidential term.

[7] Doy Laurel was chosen by UNIDO’s executive in 1981 to become president of that organisation after Gerry Roxas and Pepito Laurel had stepped down as co-presidents.

[8] It was at this meeting that Imelda reputedly said that there were people that she and her husband could not control who thought that they would be doing the Marcos interests a favour by having Ninoy Aquino killed.

[9] August 21^st, 1983 was the twelfth anniversary of the 1971 grenade attack on the Liberal Party’s senatorial candidate slate which left most of its members seriously wounded but not killed.

[10] Whatever the faults of then Nicaraguan president, Anastasio Somoza, he was not responsible for Chamorro’s assassination. As corrupt as the over forty- year ruling Somoza family was, they at least left their nation in 1979 with the second highest standard of living in Central America after Panama. Today due to Sandinista misrule, Nicaragua is the second poorest nation, after Haiti, in the southern hemisphere.

[11] The position of vice-president had been re-established by a constitutional amendment which was approved in a referendum in January 1984.

[12] Officially this 1985 nominating presidential nominating convention was held under the auspices of the National Unification Committee (NUC) so as to include the Kalaw wing of the Liberal Party.

[13]  General Ver and his co-accused were acquitted in December 1985 and with that he was reinstated as army chief of staff.

[14] The local government elections were moved to May due to the calling of the February 1986 presidential election.

[15] Tolentino was officially accorded a victory with a plurality of fifty percent of the vote for the vice-presidential race.

[16] Had President Marcos ordered a military attack costing thousands of lives he and his family probably would have been denied asylum in the United States.

[17]  The Marcos party initially wanted to go Ilocos Norte, the deposed president’s home province, where a separatist Ilocano state may have been established. At the behest of President Corazon Aquino, the Marcos request to be flown by the Americans to Ilocos Norte was refused and the Marcos family was instead flown to Guam and then onto Hawaii.

[18]  Tondo was once the support base of Raul Manglapus but he lost touch with this district during his 1972 to 1986 exile.

[19] Francisco Madero served as president of Mexico between 1911 and 1913 having previously led a revolution against the long-standing tyranny of Porfirio Diaz in 1910. The Madero government’s attempted reforms galvanized opposition by forces of the preceding regime while still disappointing too many of his supporters by not going far enough with the reform programme. The consequence of this imbalance was that President Madero lacked a sufficient base to prevent his fall with subsequent loss of his life in 1913.

[20] General Ramos served as army chief of staff between 1986 and 1988 and between 1988 and 1991 he served as Defence Secretary.

[21] Future president Joseph ‘Erap’ Estrada was dismissed as mayor of San Juan, city within Metro-Manila.

[22] Jose Roy died in late 1985 and was succeeded as Nacionalista president by Rafael Palmares who had previously been elected to the National Assembly in 1984 as a member of the Kalaw wing of the Liberal Party which had run with UNIDO.

[23] Jaime Ferrer was assassinated by NPA terrorists in late 1987.

[24] Laurel was replaced as Foreign Secretary by Senator Raul Manglapus.

[25] Batangas was one of the few provincial contests where Lakas Ng Bansa did not run as the incumbent party.

[26] Most UNIDO legislators broke with Doy Laurel in 1988 following his family’s loss of Batangas.

[27] Salonga had also topped the 1965 and the 1971 Senate polls.

[28] Had this coup succeeded Doy Laurel, who publicly called on Corazon Aquino to resign, probably would have headed a post-coup regime.

[29] EDSA was named after the highway where crowds of people had thronged to protect General Ramos and Juan Ponce Enrile during the 1986 Revolution. 

[30] Lakas’s nomination of General Ramos meant that this party was passing over its leader Raul Manglapus which was a pity because this Filipino statesman was the ‘godfather’ of the Soc Dems.

[31] The most prominent Enrile supporter who joined the LDP to be elected a senator in 1992 was Blas Ople who had taken his previous political formation, the PNP, into the Nacionalista Party in 1989. Enrile himself, having been dealt into the LDP, forewent his 1992 presidential bid to instead successfully run for the House of Representatives.

[32] Doy Laurel, who had been at Manila International Airport in 1983 to welcome Ninoy Aquino home, had also tried to welcome Imelda Marcos back when she flew in in 1991 but the former First Lady brushed passed the Vice- President.

[33] In the 1969 presidential election, Sergio Osmena’s running mate had been the late Ramon Magsaysay’s brother, Gene.

[34] The general expectation that Doy Laurel would come last was met with him gaining three-point four percent of the vote and his running mate Eva Kalaw receiving less than half of that figure.

[35] Mamblingism is an almost non-translatable Tagalog word which approximately means to align with those in power.

[36] Senator Angara came second in the 1998 vice-presidential race with twenty-two percent of the vote.

[37] Lito Atienza had been elected deputy mayor of Manila in 1992 on the PRP ticket with Alfredo Lim. Atienza was a right-wing Soc Dem who had previously supported Eva Kalaw.

[38] De Venecia came second in the 1998 presidential election with just over fifteen percent of the vote.

[39] Under the 1987 Constitution a vice-president who succeeds to office in less than thirty months is ineligible to stand for a six-year term in their own right.

[40] Manny Villar in transferring his allegiance from the NUCD-Lakas to LAMMP following the 1998 election helped precipitate a majority of congressmen in defecting from the outgoing ruling party to the new one.

[41]Estrada was later arrested and tried for corruption.  Intermittently imprisoned between 2001 and 2007 he was eventually pardoned by President Arroyo in 2007 and subsequently served as mayor of Manila between 2013 and 2019.

[42] Doy Laurel died in January 2004 in the United States. At the time of his death he was under indictment for allegedly misusing funds of the Philippine Centennial Commission of which had previously been chairman.

[43] The NPC departed from the LAMMP electoral configuration following Estrada’s fall in 2001. The party then went into ‘wholesale’ as opposed to ‘retail’ politics by its different factions aligning with either the Macapagal-Arroyo administration or the opposition depending on what were seen as the best electoral prospects.

[44]  The PDP-Laban’s two strongest factions were geographically based, with Binay’s faction centred in Makati in Metro-Manila while Duterte’s powerbase is on Mindanao.

[45] Grace Poe, the adoptive daughter of the late Ferdinando Poe ran as an independent but was considered by many to be the Nacionalista Party’s de facto presidential candidate.  She came third with twenty-one percent of the vote or just over nine million votes.

[46] Senator Santiago died of natural causes later in 2016.

[47] To help maintain the Marcos family’s then two million voter base, Imelda was elected in 1995 to the House of Representatives for a seat on her home island of Leyte.

[48] Imee Marcos’s son, Matthew was elected in 2019 as her successor as Governor of Ilocos Norte.

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The chances of a war between mainland China and the United States of America (USA) – either directly or by proxies- will substantially increase should President Donald J Trump fail to win re-election in 2020.  This is because President Trump has demonstrated sufficient backbone in standing-up to the Peoples’ Republic of China (PRC) concerning trade policy and in the process President Trump has so far protected the jobs of millions of American workers.  Should President Trump lose re-election then the leadership of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) will interpret this as a signal to ‘walk all over’ the USA when it comes to trade policy under a Democrat US president.

The massive tilt in the PRC’s favour which will ensue should a Democrat president be elected in 2020 will cause such an equilibrium shift which could be so economically disastrous for the USA that there will be a pendulum swing back to a hawkish Republican president in 2024 so that a war between the USA and the PRC could very possibly follow. 

Paradoxically, it is therefore in the PRC’s best interests that President Trump win re-election in 2020.  For all the Trump administration’s manifold faults, it does know how to negotiate trade deals!   At stake is more than reaching a mutually beneficial (‘win-win’) trade deal- what is at stake is whether or not a power equilibrium/modus operandi between the PRC and the USA can be reached so as to avoid the future scenario of a possible Sino-American War.

                                                                                                                                                  USA to Iran: 'Don’t Tread on Me’! 

Regarding the reaching of ‘win-win’ outcomes, it has to be said that the scope for reaching such a scenario between the USA and republican Iran has probably unfortunately expired.  The fault for this state of affairs rests primarily with Tehran, which has, going back to the 1979-1981 Hostages Crisis, considered the USA to be a ‘paper tiger’ to be treated with disdain. 

The recent joint naval exercises in the Gulf between Russia, the PRC and republican Iran emboldened Tehran to engineer attacks on the American Embassy in the Iraqi capital of Baghdad.  The American action of consequently assassinating republican Iran’s top general, Qassem Soliemani, was a proportionate response due to the massive disruption which he had masterminded in the Middle East, including the loss of American life in that geographical region.

The question therefore now arises as to whether or not republican Iran’s threatened response will lead to an escalation which will result in an outright war between the United States and Iran?  Tehran’s recent forewarned missile attack on American bases in Iraq was a mere ‘slap on the wrist’ which conveyed Iran’s underlying fear of provoking the United States into an all- out war.

The Iranian republican regime should be aware that the United States has historically responded vigorously to attacks on American home soil and transgressions against its citizens abroad, including its armed forces personnel.  This inclination on the part of the United States to protect its own goes back to its War of Independence when the motto was emblazed on the 1775 Gadsden war-flag, (which contained a coiled rattlesnake) which read ‘Don’t Tread on Me’! 

This American resolve not to countenance aggression was such that the Japanese policy objective of strengthening its negotiating position by initially bombing the American naval base of Pearl Harbour in December 1941 was from the onset, a forlorn hope.  Having attacked American territory, the United States was always going to consequently insist upon Japan’s unconditional surrender. Indeed, America’s concerted and wide-ranging responses to Osama Bin Laden’s attacks on the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center and on the Pentagon in September 2001 illustrates how determined and effective the United States’ responses can be to aggression. 

By contrast, the US A’s ineffective response during the 1979 to 1981 Iran-America Hostages Crisis was an aberration due to the then strong impact of the Vietnam Syndrome and President Jimmy Carter’s weak leadership.  However, even under a Carter presidency, should any of the hostages have been harmed, or killed, then the USA would have engaged in an all-out war against Iran. 

Nevertheless, President Trump’s isolationist tendencies combined with the US House of Representatives recent invocation of the (probably unconstitutional) 1973 War Powers Act may create the colossal misassumption on Iran’s part that the United States is a ‘paper tiger’.  History however illustrates that these aforementioned potentially restraining dynamics will be cast aside should Iran attempt to either directly or indirectly hit out against the United States in response to General Soliemani’s assassination. 

                                                                                                                                                           Regime Change in Tehran? 

From an American perspective, should war eventuate due to Iranian provocation, a minimum US objective should be to permanently disable Iran’s nuclear weapons capacity.  Alternately, a maximum American objective could be to facilitate regime change in Tehran.  There is however considerable reluctance in the United States (to put it mildly) to attempt regime change in Iran. This is partly due to the widespread misperceptions that the 2003 American led invasion/liberation of Iraq and subsequent occupation were gross public policy disasters.

However, contrary to popular opinion these above-mentioned actions were ultimately successful due to the invaluable support that the United States received from Iraq’s pre-eminent religious leader, the Iranian-born Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani.  Indeed, His Eminence (or a nominee of his) should be considered to be a prime candidate to lead a liberated Iran as Supreme Leader under Iran’s 1979 Constitution in place of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. 

Ayatollah Sistani has the requisite leadership skill and integrity to take Iran to a full-democracy thereby ensuring that any American-led occupation or Iran is of a relatively brief duration.

The establishment of a fully-fledged Iranian democracy would be giant step forward for peace in the Middle East*.  As Margaret Thatcher once observed no two established democracies have ever gone to war against each other.  Therefore, the onset of a genuine Iranian democracy would pay huge dividends with regard to achieving world peace. 

(*Another giant step for world peace at this critical juncture would be for Iran to allow international inspectors into their country to verify that Tehran is really discontinuing its nuclear weapons programme). 

                                                                                                                                       Why the Pursuit of Democracy Requires Follow-Up

There should however be no naïve assumption that democracy will come easily to the Middle East.  Eliminating dictators in and of itself is not the solution to the problem- only part of the solution.  There has to be follow-up! 

Ironically, the champion of democracy in the Middle East is Turkey’s quasi-authoritarian leader, President Racep Erdogan.  The Turkish leader knows that that should democratic elections be held in Sunni-Muslim majority nations in the Middle East that Muslim Brotherhood parties, similar to Turkey’s ruling Justice and Development Party, will probably come to power.  This will consequently expand Turkish influence throughout the Middle East. 

Turkish troops are thankfully shortly to be deployed to Libya in defence of that nation’s democratically elected government against the advancing forces of the Egyptian-backed would be dictator, General Khalifa Haftar.

Turkey is an important North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) member and as such the Trump administration will hopefully support Turkish led efforts to defend and/or promote democracy in the Middle East, even if there are real politick considerations on Ankara’s part.  Similarly, not only would there be a massive security return should Iran be deprived of a nuclear weapons capacity but there would be a needed world peace dividend should Iran eventually became a fully-fledged democracy. 

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