Salingkit

cory’s presidency

cory’s presidencyCORAZON Aquino became the Philippines’ eleventh and first woman president. Following Marcos’ twenty-year dictatorship was not an easy task; how was she to revive an economy in severe recession, as well as restore full constitutional rule to a people with a million and one, often contradictory, demands? Those forces which had all combined to make People Power a success now divided again into their own groups with their own interests and concerns: “the politicized and putsch-oriented factions of the military, the anti-Marcos financial and industrial elite, traditional politicians disenfranchised by the previous regime, the Catholic Church, the articulate urban middle classes, and a plethora of non-government and people’s organizations representing the moderate to the radical Left” (quoted in Abinales and Amoroso 231).

RECESSION means a period of temporary economic decline during which trade and industrial activity are reduced, generally identified by a fall in GDP in two successive quarters.

In May—barely three months after the EDSA Revolution, Marcos loyalists attempted to reclaim the presidency for Marcos. In November, the RAM staged another coup, this time against Cory instead of Marcos. During her six-year presidency, she was to survive seven coup attempts (Sta Romana-Cruz 292).

The coup attempts by themselves caused a lot of trouble: not only did it disturb civil order, it also “made foreign investors wary and so affected the degree of international assistance the Philippines could expect to receive in its recovery effort” (Abinales and Amoroso 233). The Philippines had also accumulated a large international debt, much of the money lost to fraud committed by the Marcos government, which had secreted various amounts in different banks abroad.

And then there were natural disasters like the earthquake of 1990 and the eruption of Mount Pinatubo in 1991. It was no doubt a steep and uphill climb for the Aquino government.

There were, however, a lot of things that made the new government different from the previous regime. One of Cory’s first acts as President was to appoint a constitutional commission. In 1987, a constitution was presented to, and approved by, the people. The 1987 Constitution “restored the pre-martial law constitutional system consisting of a president and vice president, bicameral legislature, and independent Supreme Court” (234). What was more, this Constitution limited the President’s term to six years, after which she could not run again for President. In line with this, safeguards were set in place to make sure the rule of martial law could never be abused again.

Secondly, the political climate had changed to a degree where no one person could have absolute power; words such as “people empowerment,” “democratization,” “social justice and human rights” became popular in usage by the different political and non-governmental groups (quoted in Abinales and Amoroso 237).

Finally, during Aquino’s restoration of democratic practices, women’s participation in the public sphere expanded significantly. Aquino opened the doors of the state to women and they have remained open since (241). Abinales and Amoroso sum up Aquino’s presidency as “a mosaic of contradictory elements,” where “structural and political remnants from the authoritarian past” stood side by side with more democratic practices. Because no one political group could gain ascendancy over others, the Aquino government could at least reign with some stability.

Aquino eventually settled into a “middle ground” that she described as “a peaceful political transition … protected every step of the way by the military.” The middle ground was her political legacy—but it would also be a curse on her successors, for it dictated a delicate balance between strengthening state capacities and the need to assure a rightly skeptical public of the state’s commitment to democracy. (242)