The Philippines Under Aquino III, Year 2: A Ponderous Slog Continues

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President Benigno Aquino III’s Third State of the Nation address on 23 July 2012, to the joint houses of the legislature, is probably the best starting point for this chapter. For what was notable about the speech was that it was not simply a listing of his accomplishments after a year in office. It also set out to show how long a way he had come in changing the manner of conducting politics and governance that his predecessor, Gloria M. Arroyo, had purportedly tarnished.¹ Despite understating the obvious, the comparison to the Arroyo administration permeated most of the speech.

Where Arroyo exacerbated the practice of looting the state, Aquino declared success in implementing a variety of administrative and political reforms that cut wasteful spending and “held offenders accountable for their actions”.² Where the increase in rice importation under Arroyo exemplified a deterioration of the rural economy, under Aquino extreme import dependence on this primary staple had gone down, and the country was back in pursuit of food self-sufficiency. And where Arroyo showed only perfunctory concern for the poor, her successor boasted that by giving more serious attention to past programmes like the Conditional Cash Transfer (CCT), the government had successfully assisted 3.1 million poor Filipinos in gaining access to primary health and getting their children to school.³

Aquino closed his speech by declaring that his presidency had “showed … the world that the Philippines is now open for business under new management”.⁴ This confidence is anchored on the president’s continuing popularity, reinforced by the country’s remarkable general economic performance. Past overviews of the country have grudgingly acknowledged how these two distinctive features of the Aquino presidency have persisted despite an unwieldy, spoils-infected, elite-controlled, factionalized, and administratively fragile state structure, and a president who has been described as “lacklustre and reactive”.⁵ An earlier evaluation focused on his doggedness in pursuing his administrative agenda, while others point more to a consistently positive economic growth that had, in turn, fostered a strong sense of hope that the country will finally overcome its underdevelopment.⁶

Aquino Remains Personally Popular

In his speech, Aquino III referred to the Filipino public as his “bosses”, a term which, together with such mundane action as to ban the use of sirens by government officials when on the road, further endeared this son of one of the country’s most powerful oligarchic families to the people. “PNoy”, as he is now simply called by everyone including critics, has tapped on this political capital to maintain a substantial majority approval/satisfaction rating.⁷ Pulse Asia, one of the country’s two top poll survey groups, reported that his Pulse Asia’s September 2012 Ulat ng Bayan (Report to the People) survey showed the president’s approval rating at 78 per cent, improving 11 percentage points from an earlier May survey. This consistently high mark earned for Aquino as president the longest approval rating among his peers (including his late mother Corazon) since 1986.⁸

Aquino III scored highly on only three of the eleven issues listed for a sample group to comment on: his efforts to fight corruption in government (52 per cent), criminality (56 per cent) and “enforce the law equally on all citizens” (52 per cent). What clearly influenced this positive view was Aquino III’s determined pursuit of the corruption cases against his predecessor, Arroyo, in the courts, and her perceived judicial defender, former Supreme Court Chief Justice Renato Corona, in the Senate impeachment hearing.

Prosecuting Arroyo was almost a no-brainer; when she finished her term, the country’s fourteenth president was tagged the most unpopular of all post-war presidents. Aquino was less sure as to whether he had enough votes in the Senate to impeach the Chief Justice. In the end, however, it was Corona who did himself in, and the contempt he displayed towards the senator-judges led to an overwhelming 20–3 vote in favour of his removal from office — the first...