The Philippines Giant Step for Democracy

President Corazon Aquino’s smile was as bright as the sunshine outside when she entered the wood-paneled Cabinet room in Manila’s Malacanang Palace. “Had I known this kind of victory was going to be achieved,” she jokingly told her ministers, “I would have asked all of you to run.” Responding with laughter and applause, the Cabinet congratulated Aquino on what appeared to be an overwhelming victory by her candidates last week in nationwide voting for 24 seats in the Senate and 200 in the House of Representatives.

Although final results were not expected for two weeks, initial projections indicated that Aquino’s slate had captured as many as 23 Senate seats and a substantial majority in the House. Only one opposition candidate, Movie Actor Joseph Estrada, 48, seemed assured of a Senate seat. Former Defense Minister Juan Ponce Enrile, 63, the leader of the opposition Grand Alliance for Democracy (G.A.D.), fell just shy of the mark in the early counting, but could win a Senate seat once the official tally is completed. The radically left Partido ng Bayan (People’s Party), formed only last year, entered elective politics for the first time and apparently won no seats.

It was the first truly democratic legislative election in the Philippines since Marcos abolished the old Congress in 1972, later to replace it with the unicameral National Assembly, his rubber-stamp parliament. The new Congress, which convenes in July, will take over the legislative powers that Aquino has been exercising by decree since Marcos’ ouster in February 1986. Last week’s election was the final step in restoring a system of checks and balances under the terms of a new constitution that was approved in a national referendum last February.

While the results reflected Aquino’s immense personal popularity, they also carried the seeds of potential trouble. As a new power center, the Congress may prove difficult to control — especially by a President who has been reluctant to use executive power. Moreover, the President’s slate included an ideologically diverse assortment of candidates unified by little more than her endorsement, and that diversity leads many observers to expect the group to fragment once Congress meets. The lack of a politically coherent majority and the absence of an institutionalized parliamentary opposition could pose threats to long-term stability.

Opposition candidates began to denounce the elections as a fraud as soon as the first projections were announced. Accusing the government of widespread cheating, Enrile called the vote a “failure” and warned that it would lead to “instability of unimaginable magnitude.” At a midweek rally, while his supporters shouted “Down with Aquino!,” Enrile branded the election the “dirtiest in the nation’s history.” Next day, at a rally of 20,000 protesters in suburban Quezon City, Enrile declared, “Let us not stop until the cheaters have been punished.” Enrile, whom Aquino dismissed as Defense Minister last November after his alleged involvement in a coup plot, vowed not to take his Senate seat if the official count declared him a winner.

Ramon Felipe, chairman of the Commission on Elections (Comelec), quickly dismissed Enrile’s complaints. “There was no failure of elections,” said Felipe, “but I think some losers would like to have a failure of elections.” There were isolated incidents of vote buying and intimidation on both sides, and some of Aquino’s relatives, either running on her slate or working for it, allegedly sought to use their family connections to influence the vote. Nonetheless, Comelec pronounced the balloting the cleanest and most orderly since the Philippines received its independence from the U.S. in 1946, an assessment generally shared by foreign observers. Despite the oppressive heat that gripped much of the country on election day, people began lining up at the 104,544 precincts well before the opening hour of 7 a.m. By the time the polls closed at 4 p.m., a record-breaking 90% of the 26.4 million registered voters had cast their ballots.

The voting was not entirely free of violence. Since the campaign began last March, 72 people have been killed in election-related incidents, including 34 on polling day itself. Still, that is a marked improvement over the 158 killings reported during the 1986 presidential campaign, which precipitated Marcos’ ouster. This year’s death toll might have been higher if police had not disarmed an incendiary device in a toilet of the Comelec building last week. Police said the bomb, thought to have been planted by G.A.D. supporters, could have destroyed the three-story structure.

Although the election victory was a sizable step in consolidating Aquino’s power, serious obstacles remain. Beyond the chronic problems of poverty, unemployment and a sputtering economy, doubts linger about the loyalty of the military; a majority of the country’s soldiers apparently voted for the opposition. Defense Minister Rafael Ileto discounted the importance of this, $ but did not rule out the possibility that some disgruntled soldiers might be persuaded to take part in yet another plot against the President. The military’s displeasure centers on the charge that Aquino has been too soft on the 18-year-old Communist insurgency, which has intensified since the collapse of a cease-fire agreement last February. The day after the election, ten policemen were killed in an ambush by the Communist New People’s Army in Surigao del Sur province on Mindanao. At week’s end 38 people were killed in scattered guerrilla attacks around the country, bringing the number of insurgency-related deaths this year to more than 1,000. Said a top-ranking general: “The soldiers are not free to move or do what they think ought to be done in terms of licking the insurgency, simply because the Commander in Chief has yet to act like one.” Caught between such critics on the right and guerrillas on the left, Aquino faces a perilous road ahead.