The Philippines in 2013: Popular President Confronts Daunting Challenges

Philippines

In early 2012, President Aquino was dubbed an absentee president by former President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo who denounced his “nobody’s at home” attitude when he convened his cabinet only four times in 2011.¹ Later that year, two newspaper columnists characterized the president as a “do-nothing chief executive” who is “not working hard enough to solve the country’s problems”.² However, the Social Weather Stations (SWS)’ September 2012 survey signified that the majority of Filipinos saw their president in a different light. The SWS’ third quarter survey showed that 77 per cent of Filipinos were satisfied with the performance of Benigno Simeon Aquino III as president of the Philippines.³ The survey noted President Aquino’s record-high net satisfaction rating of 77 per cent which indicated a 25 per cent increase from his rating of 47 per cent in May 2012. Thus far, it is the highest recorded net satisfaction rating obtained by any of the post-1986 Philippine presidents. The following year, the SWS and Pulse Asia surveys showed that President Aquino enjoyed a high performance rating of 72 per cent which showed that, almost three years into his term, public satisfaction for the president remained at unprecedented highs.⁴

In early 2013, President Aquino’s popularity was at its peak as the Philippine economy expanded and many analysts attributed this to his relentless anti-corruption campaign. The Aquino Administration’s campaign against corruption in government, which led to the impeachment of the chief justice of the Philippine Supreme Court, generated political capital for the state and the economy. Thus, the Philippines emerged as a possible tiger economy in Asia as its economy grew by 7.8 per cent in the first quarter of 2013, and was expected to grow by an average of 6 per cent in the same year. However, in the latter part of 2013, the Aquino Administration was jolted by a series of unexpected challenging events.

Early in August, a rescue of a kidnap victim by a law-enforcement agency led to an investigation of several Filipino legislators who were allegedly involved in the US$200 million pork barrel scandal. Consequently, President Aquino was accused of targeting opposition legislators when the government filed plunder cases against them. In September, Muslim insurgents from the Moro National Liberation Front (MNLF) stormed the southern city of Zamboanga. This crisis exposed the government’s weakness in not being able to provide security to its citizens and institute a durable peace in Mindanao. In mid-November, Typhoon Haiyan ravaged the central part of the Philippines and destroyed the provincial capital city of Tacloban. The initial government response was slow but after widespread criticism, President Aquino directed all agencies and departments to develop a mechanism to coordinate the entire country’s disaster relief operations with the international community to speed up relief and rehabilitation efforts for victims of the typhoon. As the year ended, political analysts and observers noted that the pork barrel scam would dominate the political scene till the next presidential election in 2016, and because of the government’s slow response to the effects of the typhoon, this might adversely affect President Aquino’s popularity and ability to push his reform agenda in the last days of his term.

The Anti-Corruption Campaign Opens a Pandora Box

During his inauguration in July 2010, President Aquino had censured the past administration for corruption, political impunity and indifference to the plight of ordinary Filipinos. He formed a Truth Commission to investigate ex-President Arroyo for mismanagement and oppressive policies; fired her so-called “midnight appointees”; and replaced her designated officials in the military and in the Office of the Ombudsman. The following year, President Aquino even had his predecessor arrested without bail on charges of electoral fraud.

In 2012, President Aquino pushed his anti-corruption campaign further when he took the unprecedented move of impeaching the chief justice of the Supreme Court of the Philippines. In January 2012, the Philippine Senate tried the chief justice after President Aquino...