Friday, November 30, 2007 Espejo: Losing a winning war By Edwin G. Espejo Southern Comfort
WITH major scandals hitting the Arroyo administration from all angles, one would wonder why it has remained strongly entrenched in power.
From the Jose Pidal account, the "Hello Garci" tapes, the NBN deal, the alleged Palace bribe, political killings and many more, the Arroyo administration is not wanting of issues that lesser governments would have collapsed in less than a minute.
But there she is, still at the helm of government and is threatening to finish her term in 2010.
Make no mistake about it; Arroyo is in a survival mode. She can no longer govern without compromising and arm-twisting allies that owe her government debts of gratitude.
President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo had to accommodate and offer cash gifts to allies in the House of Representatives to ward off any attempt to remove her from office through constitutional means. Her administration has even initiated and supported sham impeachment complaints over the last two years, making a mockery of the Constitution.
She has stacked up her government with retired officers in the military establishment that has so far helped prevent the collapse of her government.
For once, the Arroyo government has learned the lesson of the Estrada administration, which was impeached by Congress but was booted out from power by popular uprising and withdrawal of military support.
If anything, the opposition is also to be blamed, in the same breadth as the Arroyo administration, for the malaise the Filipino people are suffering now.
By continuing to cling on to former president Joseph Estrada as central figure of the opposition, those oppose to the Arroyo administration are alienating anti-GMA forces that are averse to having a convicted president once again become a powerful political force.
Estrada himself should realize that his historical redemption may lie in the realization that his vain attempt to make a political comeback through his proxies will not drive the Arroyo administration away from power before 2010.
The political Left, once a potent and leading force in the protest movement, has been marginalized. Its leaders reduced to ineffectiveness in Congress.
Instead of providing the muscle and political line in the anti-Arroyo administration, the aboveground left has been limited to sharing tables with the elite political opposition.
The economic and political crises are providing the opposition forces fertile ground for mobilizing the Filipino people against the Arroyo administration and a chance to alter the course of Philippine history. But, sadly, they are losing them by default in their bid to grab power in 2010.
