Malice

The behavior of the three presidential candidates sure to lose on May 10 is getting more bizarre by the day.

The other day, the camps of Raul Roco, Panfilo Lacson and Eddie Villanueva announced they would be holding a joint rally on May 1. That coincides with the day that militant unions traditionally march in the streets to demand politically brokered wage increases.

That day also calls up ugly memories of "Edsa Tres": that orgy of mindless anger in 2001, when politicians goaded the poor to assault the seat of authority armed with sticks and stones and driven by utter disrespect for due process.

The May 1 rally planned by the electoral laggards is, according to their announcement, intended to protest what they imagine to be systematic cheating on May 10. No evidence has been offered to support that claim. They have created a specter and are entranced by it.

This rally is, therefore, nothing more than an opportunity to build frenzy on the basis of nothing really. It is an orgy planned on the basis of malice.

This rally will have to be unmasked for what it really is: a carnival of desperate political oddities.

This rally will be nothing more than a forum for hurling irresponsible charges, making unsustainable claims and projecting misleading numbers. It is a poor substitute for the inability of the three camps to individually muster enough people for a compelling miting de avance in the homestretch of this campaign.

Filipino elections, in its worst form, has no losers – only those cheated out of imagined victories.

The rally planned for May 1 elevates this worst element of our electoral culture to an extravagant scale: all the probable losers will converge to say they have been cheated in an election that has not yet happened.

I hope the people behind this activity thought carefully about the consequences of this mad effort. With scarcely any evidence of electoral wrongdoing, they are undermining the credibility of a vital democratic process. They are breeding hatred and distrust as quickly as a cesspool breeds bacteria.

They are playing into the hands of the usual malignant forces constantly plotting coups and are now actually setting up to abort the expected results of the May 10 polls.

I doubt, however, if these guys are still capable of thinking carefully about the larger good and the national interest. Over the last few days, they declamations have become shriller, their idolatry of their candidates more suffocating and their version of the world more fanatical.

Until a few days ago, I had some guys from the Alyansa ng Pagasa in my personal list of senatorial choices. That was until I saw the entire slate make fools of themselves in the last episode of Pia Hontiveros’ Strictly Politics.

I can understand that the candidates of Alyansa ng Pagasa are under great pressure since their Beloved Leader was forced to abandon the campaign for urgent medical reasons. They had to show élan. They had to project confidence while their political world collapses.

But they overdid it. They all sounded like arrogant clones of Raul Roco. Their interpretation of things was completely incongruent with reality.

What took the cake was the gall of one candidate from this unremarkable and beleaguered senatorial slate to lie barefacedly on camera and claim that K4 bribed him with P30 million to switch sides and replace a candidate from the ruling party. And this guy’s poll rating was nowhere near K4’s weakest senatorial bet! He was completely out of the radar screen.

In these inflationary times P30 million seems to be the metaphorical equivalent of Judas’ thirty pieces of silver. This was the same figure Roco claimed, early in the campaign, that Rodolfo Biazon received in exchange for enlisting with the K4 slate. Roco stopped making that claim when Biazon threatened to file libel charges against him.

After watching that episode of Strictly Politics, my personal list of senatorial preferences just got shorter.

Let’s see what happens to this joint rally planned by the marginal candidates. It would have been easier to suspend doubt about their real motives if this were a rally organized by ordinary citizens.

But this is a rally intended to achieve partisan ends. It happens exactly at that point in this campaign where those slipping in the surveys will try the most desperate measures to reverse the trends. We are at that point where those who failed to get enough support from the voters will try to compensate by resorting to shrill demagoguery and by indulging in black propaganda.

By scheduling the campaign on a day traditionally reserved for militant action by the unions, the minority candidates are intending this activity to have as dramatic an impact as possible. So, too, is the decision to hold this activity along Edsa, the scene of previous uprisings and the staging area of one black riot.

By scheduling this joint rally, the marginal candidates are, by design or not, opening an opportunity for dark forces to come out and play during a very critical moment when our people prepare to go to the polls and decide the nation’s fate.

Over the last few weeks, it has become more and more difficult to discuss anything sensibly with the leaders of the marginal candidates. They are in a phase of intense denial. They are in a hysterical mood, increasingly unable to see things in proper proportion.

Unable to convince our people that they deserve to win, they are now doubly unable to convince themselves that they had lost.

We can only pray that the naïve will also be sober.

The curious thing about the marginal candidates is that they have managed to foster personality cults among their followers. In the effort to hold their votes against the tide, the leaders of the marginal campaigns have stepped up their denunciation of all major indicators of reality: the surveys, the word of the business associations, the behavior of the major candidates.

The May 1 rally will be a carnival of these personality cults. It will be a convention of losers.

But after that, we hope they begin reconciling with reality.