Dilawan: Rise and Fall of the EDSA Regime - Another Aquino

“I have fought the good fight, I have finished the race, I have kept the faith.”

Those were the words of Pres. Noynoy Aquino at his valedictory State of the Nation Address to Congress in July of 2015 where he summed up his administration’s achievements and looked forward to “a new dawn of justice and opportunity” forged by “freedom from corruption” as he claimed, and I quote

My one and only interest is the well-being of my Bosses. I did all I could to forge a nation that is more just and more progressive—one that enjoys the fruits of meaningful change. I will let history decide.

And within 12 months of uttering those words, the era of the EDSA regime would draw to a close, with the rejection of Aquino’s hand-picked successor and the election of Rodrigo Duterte, whose approach to criminal justice was anathema to what the regime had stood for.

In this fourth part to the Rise and Fall of the EDSA Regime, we will look at the second Aquino presidency, its ambition, achievements and follies, and while five years is too short a time frame to have gained enough “distance” from those events, we will try to explain what led to the collapse in confidence in the yellow movement, which triggered their losses at the ballot in 2016 and since, and as to why it is unlikely that it will return any time soon. 

Dilawan: Rise and Fall of the EDSA Regime - Uno, Dos Tres

"I am the Market and thou shalt have no other models before me."

That is the first commandment of neoliberalism, an ideology that took root in the Philippines after the February 1986 people power revolt at EDSA.

In this series on the Rise and Fall of the EDSA Regime, we’ve been looking at the origins of the yellow movement and its impact on Philippine society. 

Episode 26: Yellow Alert! How do you address populism?

In the first part of this series, we showed how the weakening of democratic institutions in the country can be traced to the establishment of neoliberal economic policies, which have given rise to a populist backlash. 

The Philippine debt driven, crony capitalist growth of the 1970s under Pres. Marcos led to the IMF prescribed austerity measures of the 1980s under Pres. Cory Aquino and the globalist trend of the 1990s under Pres. Fidel Ramos. The Philippine state and its economy was too weak for the state to say no to the imposition of policies from external lenders.

This led to a populist backlash from the left in 1998, in the wake of the Asian financial crisis. The election of Pres. Joseph Erap Estrada was a response to the austerity under which  the government had to spend more on debt service than education contrary to our constitutional provisions. It was also based on Erap’s charisma and cult of personality.