AFTER 16 years as Chancellor, Angela Merkel leaves office as the most popular politician in Germany. Her center-right or moderate right Christian Democratic Union Party has successfully steered Germany into becoming the biggest and strongest economy in Europe.
In a stark demonstration of their political maturity, German voters replaced her with Olaf Scholz of the center-left or moderate left Social Democratic Party. They saw the need for a labor party to head a coalition that would make Germany greener for all and fairer to the working class within their strong economy.
Much earlier in 1945 in England, Winston Churchill’s center-right Conservative Party was soundly defeated by the center-left Labor Party of Clement Atlee who replaced Churchill as Prime Minister.
Churchill won the war for England; yet politically mature British voters knew, now that the war was over, that their country needed the Labor Party not only to revive the economy, but also to insure the welfare of members of the working class who manned the front lines of the war and bore its brunt.
The Philippines has had neither a center-right nor a center-left party. We have always been ruled by politicians belonging to loosely bound factions of one conservative party of the far right. In the absence of a labor party to represent the lower middle and lower classes, the nation’s majority, political, economic and cultural policies have always been skewed to favor big business owners and landlords.
(We do have an ideology-based Communist Party at the extreme left. But more as a warning than a prediction, I say that in the absence of a peaceful alternative, the guerilla war waged by its New People’s Army might be the working class’ last hope for social change.)
Among today’s candidates there is no shortage of promises to improve the lives of Filipinos. But, from previous elections we know their honeyed words are merely meant to get votes from a dominated electorate. Once in office they will protect and promote, as any far right politician would, the interests of their financiers, the bigwigs of a neo-liberal economy.
Thus, for lack of support from Congress, President Duterte just gave up on his push for federalism, a system that would have broadened political and economic participation in our otherwise elitist country. How, anyway, could an elitist Congress support a move that would level the economic and political playing field of our hierarchical society?
The question then is when will the lower middle and lower classes have a strong voice in, or even dominate, Congress? When will scattered labor groups mature politically and coalesce to form a center-left political party that would skew the economy, whenever needed, towards the working class as the German Labor Party is doing now and England’s Labor Party did in 1945?