by MANUEL L. QUEZON III

HAVING COME so close to not having elections at all, there was enormous pent-up political energy in the runup to the recently concluded polls. The elections released all that pressure and actually improved the prospects for political stability. This is also due to public opinion finally being clarified once and for all: After 2004, which should have settled the questions of legitimacy and a mandate definitively, the country had stumbled along with only public-opinion polls serving as a rough guide to the public mood.

Still, the local and House elections only proved the durability of old ways, in particular, of patronage. The senatorial results signaled the end of one fad — the showbiz candidate — and a return to older, but tried-and-tested themes in our political history. The election sounded the death knell for an older generation of candidates, and the entry into the national arena of a younger generation of leaders.

Most of all, though, it sent a series of signals virtually impossible to ignore: President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo lacks a national following; her machinery could not counteract the national tide; the public expressed itself firmly in favor of checks and balances between the executive and the legislative and between the two chambers of the legislature; the military itself, which resisted the call to decide matters in February 2006, also revolted against its commanders and voted as it pleased.

But it needs to be pointed out that what we just had were also rare midterm polls.

We overlook the fact that prior to 2007, the last midterm elections the Philippines experienced took place in 1995. And that the 1995 midterms were the first a presidency had experienced since 1971. The 1995 elections themselves may have signaled the beginning of a new era of political turbulence. If the late 1970s to mid-1980s had been marked by efforts to restore democracy, and the mid-1980s to the early 1990s a time when democracy was under threat from force of arms, the late 1990s inaugurated the confrontation between populism with mass appeal, and middle class defined-and-defended people power.

The 1995 midterms had produced results favorable to the Ramos administration — indeed so favorable that there was a serious attempt to amend the 1987 Constitution to permit President Fidel Ramos an extension in office. It floundered due to public protests. The elections after that, in 1998, included presidential polls, which resulted in the Estrada administration. That government’s populism was resented, then openly challenged, by middle-class moralism and upper-class contempt. What should have been the Estrada midterm elections of 2001 instead became a referendum on Edsa Dos that had led to President Joseph Estrada’s ouster.

Yet the 2001elections came in the nick of time, regardless of whether one feels Edsa Dos was a coup or genuine people power, or thinks of Edsa Tres as mob rule or a failed populist power. Those May polls defined an arena and established parameters of political confrontation and even engagement, with which nearly all Filipinos were comfortable. It’s significant that in those elections, the newly elevated Arroyo administration contested the senatorial race, as all senatorial races have always been contested. That is, as a proxy war between the incumbent president and the opposition.

Then came 2004, another presidential election year. As other presidential contests before it, the 2004 polls had their own dynamics, nationally and locally, that are peculiar to any race in which the Palace is up for grabs. Contesting the position, with Arroyo up for reelection, was itself an unusual exception (the 1987 Constitution generally didn’t contemplate a president running for office), but the participation of the opposition was a kind of pledge of loyalty to the political order. A pledge that Fernando Poe Jr., even after his defeat, adhered to: the revelations that the election had been stolen wouldn’t surface until he died, but even then his widow always shrank from calling for open revolt.

From July 2005 to August 2006, from the resignation of a portion of her cabinet to the second rejection of articles of impeachment in the House of Representatives, the Arroyo presidency fought for survival. The president’s countermoves focused on holding the line and then waging a war of attrition for which the presidency, with its patronage and powers of compulsion, were ideally suited. In her 2005 State of the Nation Address, Arroyo put forward federalism and a transition to a unicameral parliamentary system as the means to galvanize local government and House support for her administration. The defeat of the second effort to impeach her gave way to a counteroffensive meant to accomplish the abolition of the Senate, and quite possibly the postponement, if not outright cancellation, of the 2007 midterms.

The gambit failed in December 2006 — and spectacularly so. Having expended a tremendous amount of energy and resources, both the administration and the opposition then prepared to duke it out in the midterm elections. They did so, having made certain assumptions, and with certain political calculations in mind.

THE ADMINISTRATION had resources aplenty, but lacked a president with prestige and political capital to spend on boosting the chances of her slate. This was a highly unnatural position for a president to be in, and particularly during a midterm poll. In 2001 and 2004, Arroyo herself had gone on the stump in a manner similar to her predecessors; in 2007 she could not do so, and besides a few appearances in known bailiwicks, she neither campaigned in person nor appeared in the collaterals of her slate’s campaign.

The gamble was that pirating candidates from the other side would foster squabbling within the opposition, and fill out an administration slate that was virtually impossible to fill: The administration had preached for so long that the upper chamber was superfluous, it seemed incongruous for anyone to suddenly put himself forward for election to it. And so it was that Vicente 'Tito' Sotto, Edgardo Angara, and Tessie Aquino Oreta became part of the administration’s Team Unity. This was further fortified by replacing a Visayan local leader with action film star Cesar Montano, on the (by now) old rule of thumb that celebrity was a selling point in politics.

Most of all, the administration had a reputation for going for broke; it had the money and the will to put up a tough fight. Local kingpins unfriendly to the administration (Makati Mayor Jejomar Binay being the most obvious example) were kept on their toes through a combination of brute force (there would be efforts to suspend Binay, even practically on the eve of elections, and similar moves would be attempted against Naga City Mayor Jess Robredo) and lavish logistical spending.

The opposition, to borrow a phrase first coined by Sergio Osmeña, Jr. in 1969, was “outgooned, outgunned, and outgold.” It was disunited, and at times, dispirited. It conceded the Lower House to the administration virtually from the start, except in the districts the Palace had identified as areas it would contest to set a political example and put certain candidates in their place. But the opposition had certain advantages: through surveys, the campaign directorate identified opposition leaders with enough residual clout to be useful as endorsers; and it did research on political messaging to know that “a vote for the opposition is a vote against the incumbent,” to paraphrase its campaign slogan.

And it had martyrs such as the jailed Navy Ltsg. Antonio Trillanes, or Congressman Allan Peter Cayetano, who became the target of an unprecedented demolition job — one in which the Commission on Elections (Comelec) came to be perceived as a willing accomplice. The opposition had more youth, and (ironically, because of Palace-sponsored defections) a more cohesively anti-administration slate than might otherwise have been the case. It was also one less patently Estrada-influenced because of the last-minute shifts in alliances (only John Osmeña remained, an aging relict of the old Estrada crowd).

Most of all, as with all political contests, it had the eminent advantage of having the public mood on its side. But the depths — and breadth — of this public mood would end up surprising even the opposition itself.