Crescendo

Sara Duterte was dragged to court on funny charges of grave threats. The man on the street sees this as a sign the impeachment trial is failing and those who want to knock her out of the 2028 contest are getting desperate.

Martin Romualdez should be in jail soon. His claim about needing hospitalization is made hollow after it has been established he accessed a hospital bed without going through the emergency room. The cover story gets thinner by the hour and the excuses more laughable by the day.

These two cases are not unrelated. Sara was among the first to accuse former Speaker Martin Romualdez of massive corruption. Romualdez, it is widely believed, has been funding the effort to oust Sara and bar her from holding public office.

At the start, it was widely believed that Sara and Martin would be the two main contenders in the forthcoming succession battle. But the flood control scandal and the impeachment intervened. It is possible neither of them will be participants in the succession battle after all.

Charged with plunder, Martin faces an extended period under detention. It seems he has been knocked off the succession game ahead of his nemesis. On the other hand, conviction by the Senate will not only foreclose Sara’s political career. It will deeply polarize the nation and possibly open a Pandora’s Box.

There is a sense the political crisis we are now enduring nears a crescendo. There is no immediately evident resolution to this crisis. It goes beyond the two rival personalities. This crisis tests the viability of our deeply flawed constitutional order.

Our nation’s economy cannot labor too long under all the unresolved leadership crises we face. Our GDP growth has slowed to 2.3 percent, making us the worst performing economy in the region. Our sovereign debt will soon hit P20 trillion. Our debt service alone eats up a third of the national budget, making the provision of social goods even more difficult. Our currency continues to depreciate, making it one of the worst performing currencies in the world. We are importing more of the food we need to survive.

Meanwhile, the political leadership is rapidly losing its legitimacy. The President’s approval ratings continue to sink. Investments in our economy are evaporating. Business confidence, by the latest poll, has gone underwater. Enterprises are under severe stress. The poverty rate will inevitably rise – the magical statistics proffered by government agencies notwithstanding.

We are 22 months to the next transition in power – assuming our electoral democracy holds. Until that time, nothing is likely to move in our economy. No one is even buying our stocks even as they have sunk to bargain basement levels. All plans for business expansion are tucked back into the shelves.

It is easy to seek consolation in the thought that the 2028 elections will solve all the nation’s problems. This is the opium of the people.

There is little basis to hope that the 2028 transition will be both decisive and benevolent. The likelihood is that it will be neither.

We are not even sure who will contest the elections. Our political parties are moribund. They have been chronically unable to build a credible cadre of alternate leaders. They are unable to supply a workable program for how the nation will reemerge from this dismal state.

There is too little time, and too little available trust, to undertake a renovation of our constitutional order. Any effort to introduce constitutional changes will run into a wall of political distrust. After all, the only groups positioned to undertake such renovation are the same deeply discredited ones who now wield power.

It is time to review the premises of our constitutional order. But only the next government might be able to do that – provided it is blessed with strong public consensus and led by decisive leaders with a profound sense of mission to rescue the Republic from the quagmire it is now in.

The same mode of selecting leaders in the same flawed electoral system will not likely produce the visionary political leadership we so direly need. Beyond the Sara/Martin drama, there is no supply of new statesmen in the wings. The pork barrel state that we allowed to degenerate into its worst incarnation the last few years cannot produce statesmen. All it produced are ambitious hypocrites angling for a crack at power.

Today, we cannot even see a hint of economic statesmanship capable of turning the economy around and saving our people from further distress. Instead, what we see is endless gimmickry intended to conserve whatever shreds are left of the political order’s legitimacy.

The whole nation is under water – literally and figuratively. But all the political elite can do is to keep the people entertained with a lame impeachment trial and a regular supply of opinion polls that convince us the current cast of politicians are the only choices we have.

There is no effort to launch a citizens’ movement for national redemption. Perhaps because the public has become so jaded by the tidal wave of scandals that they could not invest time and effort in reinventing the terms of our political community. There is no credible voice to represent an alternative vision of the nation.

Beyond the Sara/Martin drama, there is nothing else.