Friday, July 25, 2008 Valdehuesa: A franchise called political party By Manuel Valdehuesa Street Talk
A POLITICAL party is to the state what a religious order is to the Church. Just as the Church relies upon seminaries to produce priests and acolytes to man its pulpits and administer its parishes, the State draws from the political parties the leaders and functionaries needed to outfit the government and its bureaucracy. That's how it is supposed to be, especially in a democracy. But it is not so in our case.
Our seminaries do train workers and scholars who propagate and defend the doctrines of the faith. But our political parties not only do not train leaders to promote democracy or the democratic way of life, they pick candidates who bastardize democracy and turn the concept of a party system into a travesty. They're simply an alliance of convenience consisting of ambitious trapos out to exploit public naiveté. Why would they pick a barely literate pugilist like Manny Pacquiao to be a lawmaker, or a talkative dropout to be a mayor or vice mayor?
Check out any group that styles itself as a party. See if it's not just a personal vehicle to carry its so-called leader to the pinnacle of power. Does it have card-carrying members? Do they pay dues or contribute to the party's upkeep? If they don't, they're just paid hacks and errand boys, not party members in the proper sense of the term. Chances are that the "leader" has pockets lined with money contributed by people seeking a similar vehicle or by special interest groups, and other funds of dubious provenance.
If you look closely, you'll find that the leader may also be the party's founder or organizer, fundraiser, financier, dictator, and grandstanding spokesman rolled into one. He isn't chosen or nominated by party members to be their leader or standard bearer; in the first place, there are no members except collaborators who are in it same as he - to promote themselves. He usually just crowns himself or gets the collaborators to do it, then buy the support of people he figures would flatter him in public, and parade them around like a float with him in the middle and them as choral background.
All this he can do because, in fact, he practically owns the party. It is basically a franchise, and he is the franchise owner. Note how the party goes to sleep in-between elections, coming alive only when the owner pumps some money into it. He can do with it whatever he likes - just like any owner of a franchise.
If politics were an educational system, our political parties would be the equivalent of diploma mills disguised as institutes that sell enrolment forms, then accredit under-trained, under-achieving enrollees who pay or cheat their way to graduation. Their candidates would be analogous to laggard scions of wealthy alumni who buy their diploma from enterprising artists of Quiapo and Raon. That's what they do when they buy votes or seduce voters with patronage and dole-out in other to win.
The failure of our posturing politicos to establish parties that engage in honest-to-goodness political education to produce worthy cadres of potential statesmen is the greatest shortfall in Philippine democracy. The wonder of it all is that the alleged party leaders, self-proclaimed or anointed by others like themselves, act out the pretense of being statesmen without the slightest self-consciousness or embarrassment.
Watch out for these ambitious hypocrites and pretenders to the throne and don't be fooled by their demagoguery. They're stalking the campuses, cities and countryside even now in hopes of snaring the support of the naïve, the ignorant, and the corrupt.
(A former UN executive and director at the development academy of the Philippines, Manny heads the Gising Barangay Movement and writes Mondays, Wednesdays, Fridays.)
