by Malou C. Mangahas

GLORIA Macapagal Arroyo is an accidental president. She became head of state not because she was the unanimous choice at Edsa 2 but simply because, as vice president, the constitution said she was next in line. The Supreme Court's 13-0 ruling against Joseph Estrada provided the legal scaffolding for her assumption of the presidency, but in fact her legitimacy is buttressed by three pillars of support - the Roman Catholic Church, the military and the amorphous middle called "civil society."

Since she was sworn into office in January's people power revolt, Arroyo's attempts to define her presidency have been stymied by a chain of events that have compelled her to constantly reinvent herself. In the beginning, the self-confessed fan of Iron Lady Margaret Thatcher vowed to crush her foes and bring Joseph Estrada to jail. And so the Ombudsman rushed the Estrada cases, the court ordered his arrest, and thousands of policemen escorted him to prison. Estrada's loyal supporters promptly took to the streets, while his lawyers took to the courts to secure the former president's house arrest. Yet for a fleeting while, it seemed like the Estrada saga was over. Arroyo had succeeded in projecting herself as a pugnacious president delivering good governance and justice, just as those at Edsa 2 expected her to.

Thus, even after tens of thousands of Metro Manila's poor tried to storm Malacañang Palace, she was still her fighting self. She called the pro-Estrada protesters "a mindless mob," taunted the skimpy sample of those arrested who tested positive for drugs, and ordered their leaders' arrest without warrant, on the basis of a "state of rebellion" edict just two steps shy of martial law. Over 100 of those who took part in the May 1 protest were hauled off to jail. All of them were destitute and they were kept in detention even after their leaders had already been released on bail.

But as the days passed, it became clear that the "mindless mob" was really the poorest of the poor asserting power in their numbers. Although ridiculed as a paid crowd of the toothless, shoeless and shirtless, their rage was real and was rooted in decades of misery and neglect. Poverty was the powder keg and it had exploded.

May Day 2001 changed the political equation for Arroyo and her coalition. It sparked a shift in public sentiment against her senatorial candidates. And as the surveys showed a rising tide of sympathy for the jailed Estrada, Arroyo shifted her style as well, adopting a softer, gentler stance toward her foes, even if she insisted that they hatched a power grab against her. She even paid Estrada a visit twice - in prison and later at the hospital where was confined for treatment.

In the next weeks, she stormed through Metro Manila's shantytowns, using the same tricks perfected by her predecessor. She gave away million-peso checks and goodies to the poor, dressed down, delivered speeches in Filipino, and summoned a jester, an actor-turned-governor, among other entertainment stars, to pack in the crowd.

She was now "Ate Glo," Big Sis Glo. According to the new spin, Arroyo is the president of the poor. But because her pro-poor program had yet to take off, she dangled what her own Cabinet secretaries called "Band-Aid solutions" to poverty. Ate Glo now offers to fix roofs and repair street alleys, sells rice cheap, drags doctors to free clinics, and where she could, pledges to bless the poor with land and home of their own - in time.

Gloria Macapagal Arroyo, the snarling tiger of Malacañang, has been turned by a hostile political climate and a divided polity into a purring kitten.

IS THIS transformation just a shift in tone and themes, bringing with it a new rhetoric and style, an innovative product packaging for a President who must now focus on managing the competing claims of various constituencies? Is Arroyo just going through a phase brought about by the need to balance short-term security threats with long-term development goals? Or has the President, a supposed advocate of "new politics" and good governance, merely bared what she really is: a pragmatic politician more adept at transactional politics rather than a visionary espousing social reform?

Not too long ago, as her deputies set down to revise the Medium-Term Development Plan, Arroyo gave marching orders. "She said that for results, she wants poverty alleviation," says Economic Planning Secretary Rafael PM Lotilla. "For method, she wants good governance. For advocacy, it will be new politics."

Before ideas yield results, a long and difficult road must first be traveled. For Arroyo, the path is strewn with minefields that will compel her to make hard choices that might please one constituency but enrage another.

The most difficult problem is how to address the anger of the poor and improve the worsening poverty situation. To complicate matters, the poverty issue is now hitched to the debate on how to deal with Estrada. "The problem of the poor," says Presidential Spokesman Rigoberto Tiglao, "has become a political problem linked up with Erap."

Both problems are urgent. Government data due for release earlier but waylaid by the election campaign show that poverty incidence has soared from 31.8 percent in 1997 to at least 40 percent by 2001. The figure is arguably understated because it does not yet account for the impact of the economic slump this year and the previous one. Public opinion polls paint a worse picture: Self-rated poverty is a high 60 percent nationwide. Population growth rate is hitting 2.6 percent, much higher than government's 2.3 percent target, a matter that makes more critical the government's advocacy of artificial contraceptives, a sensitive issue to Arroyo's Church patrons.

The living conditions of the urban poor, Estrada's bailiwick, have helped fuel the unrest. In October 2000, the Housing and Urban Development Coordinating Council estimated the number of squatters or "informal settler families" at 716,000 families in Metro Manila, or over four million of the city's 10 million residents.

Yet four months into her presidency, Arroyo could not move the poverty alleviation program beyond a dole-out regime. One reason is her appointees to the National Anti-Poverty Commission cannot even begin work because Estrada's tenured nominees have refused to vacate their posts and questioned the legality of the Arroyo appointments. This is also the reason why the Social Reforms section of the Medium-Term Development Program has yet no entry, says Lotilla.

Dan Songco, head of Code-NGO and secretary-general of the KOMPIL II coalition that helped sweep Arroyo to power, says five "core strategies" define the Arroyo government's anti-poverty campaign. The strategies make a few innovations on the Ramos-era blueprint, but they are neither dramatic nor direct responses to poverty: asset reform, delivery of basic services, participation in governance, the peace process and provision of safety nets.

Songco says that some of Arroyo's supporters believe that the pro-Estrada protests illustrated only that "what the poor want at this point is not so much results but attention [and] a more visible government." These supporters think Arroyo should continue her shantytown sorties but in time, "she must produce results" or people will see through "the strong pro-poor rhetoric" a cheap public relations gimmick.

Tiglao says that Arroyo is impatient for concrete results on pro-poor projects and understands fully well that the problem is first of all communicating to the poor that Ate Glo cares for them as much as Erap did. "The idea is to achieve a balance between a strong presidency that is reaching out, a government that counts civil society as its ally but with an urban poor component," Tiglao explains. Arroyo has directed all her Cabinet secretaries to initiate a pro-poor project. "She said, what we need is a reorientaton of the Cabinet not a presidency under siege."

But funding anti-poverty projects could well be the big damper to this effort. The government's budget deficit is forecast to surge past P160 billion, even as tax collection remains grossly corrupt and inefficient, and non-tax revenues continue to decline. A proposal that might help shore up the budget is to return to the gross compensation tax regime. This, however, could also generate opposition from Arroyo's middle-class base. Tax evasion by some big corporations, including those owned by the president's benefactors, is a problem that requires political will to solve.