PHILIPPINES: Belittled Former Actor Leads Presidential Race

By IPS Correspondents Reprint | | Print |

Johanna Son

MANILA, May 12 1998 (IPS) - Belittled for his less than perfect English and his acting background, Vice President Joseph Estrada is getting a second, serious look from sceptics now that he has taken an early lead in the Philippines’ presidential race.

Exit polls and unofficial counts underway here a day after Monday’s national election show Estrada, 61, leading a field of 11 candidates in a bruising contest for the presidency.

Gloria Macapagal Arroyo, daughter of a former president and running mate of trailing administration candidate Jose De Venecia, is leading the vice presidential race so far.

Some 80 percent of qualified voters, or some 32 million Filipinos, cast their ballots on May 11 for 17,505 elective positions from president down to village councilor. The election was largely peaceful.

The official tally will not be completed until two weeks, given the country’s tedious process of manual tabulation. The unofficial count by the accredited citizens’ arm, the National Movement for Free Elections (Namfrel), should be done in 10 days.

Local media are also conducting their own counts, but like the Namfrel tally, all show Estrada with a sizable lead over his rivals.

But this early, Estrada’s camp has been getting congratulatory messages, and stickers calling him “the president of all Filipinos” have been sprouting in city streets.

Riding the crest of independent surveys that showed him getting 30 percent of votes, Estrada had said just before polling: “It’s all over but the counting.”

Estrada’s showing represents a strong political statement against a political culture traditionally weighed in favour of party machineries, the political elite and well-known names in political dynasties here.

For the most part Estrada, wildly popular among the poor, did not reach his standing through the normal political routes.

Before seeking the presidency, Estrada had been mayor of San Juan town for 17 years, senator for six years and has been vice president since 1992. In the 1992 polls, he had obtained more votes than Ramos himself, whose term ends on June 30 this year.

Despite his long career in public service, he has had to battle with perceptions doubting his capability to become president of this country of 70 million people.

Critics have long made fun of his being a former actor, and attacked his penchant for drinking and for womanising, habits that he says belong to the past. Estrada has also been faulted for fraternising with underworld characters, and for leading an anti- crime group accused of summarily executing criminals.

Of late, detractors have said Estrada might turn out to be another Abdala Bucaram of Ecuador, who was swept to the presidency amid popularity but was later kicked out by Congress due to corruption.

But none of the criticism seems to have dented Estrada’s popularity in a major way. An office employee said after Monday’s voting that she would be crazy to vote for politicians she knew were corrupt, “at least you can’t say that of Erap (Estrada’s nickname).”

Earlier in the election campaign, many businessmen and analysts said they feared that Estrada, a college dropout, would not be able to steer the economy or might even reverse economic liberalisation put in place by the Ramos government.

Estrada’s camp has been working to dispel such perceptions, disclosing a group of advisers and would-be Cabinet officials that included free-market thinkers, bankers and academics.

In interviews ahead of the polls, Estrada has sought to assure doubting businessmen that he is “committed to free trade and free- market institutions”. The difference, he says, lies in his “unwavering” dedication to the poor he counts as his mass base.

As the possibility of an Estrada victory grew in recent weeks, more businessmen seem ready to reassess earlier their impressions of the vice president.

In a commentary Tuesday, economist Bernardo Villegas of the Manila-based University of Asia and the Pacific said there was nothing to fear from an economy under Estrada’s leadership.

“Whoever is elected, the market-oriented economic programmes institutionalised during the Ramos administration will be kept intact,” he said.

“There is no one among the candidates who is expected to revert to the mercantilist, protectionist and interventionist practices that turned the Philippines from the most developed economy in the region, apart from Japan, after World War II to the sick man of Asia in the 1980s,” Villegas added.

In a sign of his appeal among different sectors, Estrada’s myriad supporters run the range from tycoons like Eduardo Cojuangco, a former close associate of dictator Ferdinand Marcos, to leftist intellectuals who fought the Marcos regime.

The election is already dealing out major losses for other power brokers, not least the Catholic Church and former president Corazon Aquino, who played a key role in the 1986 ‘People Power’ Revolution that ousted Marcos and paved the way for the restoration of democracy.

A day before the election, Filipino bishops issued a thinly veiled reminder to Filipinos to avoid voting for Estrada — one that has had little effect thus far.

“Vote for persons who morally, intellectually and physically show themselves capable of inspiring the whole nation toward a hopeful future,” they said in a pastoral letter read in all Catholic churches.

The much-vaunted influence by Aquino, whose endorsement of Ramos helped bring win the presidency in 1992, is also not working to the favour of her chosen candidate for president, former Manila city mayor Alfredo Lim.

President Ramos himself must be licking his political wounds. His anointed candidate De Venecia, hobbled by his reputation as a horsetrading politician, looks headed for a poor showing in the presidential race.