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- A pre-election primer
A pre-election primer
šµš Where decades past will shape the future
Hello friends!
I have arrived in sunny Manila! Actually sunny. The friend Iām staying with says the air pollution hasnāt returned to pre-pandemic levels yet and it is quite surreal to see, what is this?, rays of sun poking through actual clouds? Hopefully air quality is one of the things that unexpectedly changes for good!
The last few days have been spent mostly getting my head around things again. I had to come to terms with having lost my edge spending two years in Canberra, which has led to rookie mistakes like getting trapped in malls and holding up queues in public transport hubs staring at signs.
Thankfully, getting across the presidential election has been much easier ā if not far more confronting, of course ā thanks to the brilliant work of Filipino and foreign journalists.
In the coming week, Iāve got some emails planned looking at endorsements, rallies and religion which will dig a little deeper into how overarching issues look from the ground. Today, I thought weād start with a couple of the pieces which have helped me really find my bearings.
See you tomorrow,Erin Cook
Iām a big fan of the ABCās Anne Barker anyway, but her pre-election piece back home has become the go-to link I send to people who have heard the surname Marcos ā but not much more. As my sister put it: āI finally know what youāre talking about.ā This is, I think, the definitive explainer piece on the Marcos regime and its legacy and the links between the past and the imminent near future.
And in a country where poverty and unemployment remain entrenched, many Filipinos think of the earlier Marcos era as a time of relative prosperity.
Bongbong Marcos himself once said: "If my father was allowed to pursue his plans, I believe that we would be like Singapore now."
A former Supreme Court judge warned that if Bongbong Marcos wins the presidency, the decades-long battle to recover the family's ill-gotten wealth will likely stop.
"The evidence that they have ill-gotten wealth is overwhelming and mind-boggling," retired justice Antonio Carpio said.
This one from Clara Ferreira Marques at Bloomberg, which came out yesterday, is a great complementary piece. It looks forward at how the Marcos clan has worked to rehabilitate its image, casting itself as the only hope for the millions of Filipinos shut out from social mobility and opportunity. I was very intrigued by the paragraphs reflecting on how democracy really hasnāt served many people well enough to be worth prioritising a vote towards.
All of this thrives on fertile terrain, given that so few Filipinos, especially outside Manila, feel like democracy has brought much economic or political change. Similar families are in charge. Society remains deeply unequal, and is now also bruised by a pandemic that battered livelihoods and punished the youngest, kept out of in-person school for virtually two years.
More reason, of course, to look forward to a leader who can guarantee openness and, with a coherent vision, bring investment and positive economic change. Filipinos are choosing to look backward instead.
This is the one that really stunned me, that one I canāt stop talking about. From the Philippine Centre of Investigative Journalism, itās brilliantly illustrative of just how close all this history sits to the surface.
Wanna Ver, daughter of the Marcos right-hand man and suspected but eventually acquitted Aquino assassination plotter General Ver, reflects on what life under the shadow of such a man was like.
It does not pull any punches. In 1993, the piece reports, Wanna read Waltzing with a Dictator and learnt that her mother was her fatherās mistress. When giving birth in Sweden just a few years ago, she learnt her Filipina doula had been a āmartial law babyā, born during that terrible time.
As the piece goes on it is very confronting to see the small and then monumental ways Wanna confronts recent history through books and documentaries. She is far more personally connected to the Marcos regime than most and with the opportunity to study further, even if it mustāve been chilling to learn some of these facts, she now works on projects in Sweden collating and reviewing data on human rights abuses during the Marcos period.
It stands in very stark contrast to the many other stories Iāve read recently (this from Regine Cobato at WaPo is my pick, this from Nikkei Asia is also great) which note that the project to rehabilitate the Marcos family name and its legacy has been hard at work almost since the late-80s. Most Millennials were young children or not yet born when the Peopleās Power movement removed Marcos and for Gen Z, a large cohort of which will be voting for the first time next week, Benigno Aquino III, who came to power in 2010, would be the first president of which there are first-hand memories.
Election data shows over half of enrolled voters are between 18 and 40 years of age. This sort of very successful whitewash project surely canāt bode well for democracies with similar histories around the world. It worked here, whatās stopping it from working elsewhere?
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