GMA: Pyrrhic victory?

Only time will tell whether President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo’s apparent triumph in the May 10 elections was cast in stone or wrought in crumbling clay. The ancients had an expression for the latter – a Pyrrhic victory. Victoire à la Pyrrhe. Meaning, a victory that had a lot of cheering and pounding the gongs but in the end proved empty and hollow and thus collapsed in the heat of succeeding events.

Let’s see how things look five days after the elections.

As Malacañang readies to pull out the champagne bottles, the opposition, mainly the FPJ forces today, claim there has been a lot of cheating, massive cheating in fact. Just last Tuesday evening, about 8000 loyalists of Da King rallied in Makati. No, it was not a protest rally, says Koalisyon ng Nagkakaisang Pilipino spokesman Mike Romero, but a prayer, an onward-to-victory rally.

I beg to disagree. It was a crudely disguised protest rally. It was a shot across the bow of Malacañang, a clear warning that later on they would march in outrage to the streets if they got the short end of the stick in the presidential polls. The Makati rally Tuesday was also designed to draw out the government, find out how much armor, how many troops Malacañang would unleash against them.

Right now, the FPJ leadership is seeking a street alliance with Brother Eddie Villanueva’s Bangon Pilipinas movement. Such an alliance, or entente cordiale, could pour millions of protesters in the Luneta with fists raised against GMA. I am beginning to think the May 10 elections were simply a prelude. The real, rip-roaring, gut-wrenching confrontations between Malacañang and the opposition are just around the corner.

Last Thursday, during the miting de avance of Brother Eddie’s Bangon Pilipinas at the Luneta packed by 3.5 million people, a lurid, fugitive, certainly nasty thought struck my mind.

What if those hordes at the Luneta, the largest political rally ever, decided in an instant to march to Malacañang, and confront GMA? They had no arms, they would come in peace. They would however demand to meet with GMA as was their right as citizens. What in tarnation would GMA do? Would she order her army and police troops to fire on them and therefore slay hundreds if not thousands of innocent Filipinos? Or would she agree to meet with them? And even that would shock and stun the world because it would look like GMA was in a state of siege Like President Eduard Shevardnaze in Georgia who fell in shame when the opposition swarmed into parliament. And refused to leave.

I speak these words, I depict these scenarios purposely.

President Arroyo must realize things and events are no longer what they used to be. She can coo, she can burble, she can boast she is virtually the next president. She claims to have a clear mandate. She therefore has all the right to call upon the citizenry to close ranks, achieve national unity, while she, GMA, will mount the podium. From there, she will unhand the lightning bolts that will straighten out the nation. To requote the words of a previous president, the Philippines will be great again. Hello. Oh, Jeezus!

Mrs. President, you don’t seem to know what awaits you in the coming weeks and months.

But let me guess. You just cannot silence the hordes of the opposition. They are convinced you won because you reportedly burgled the treasury and everything there was to burgle and used them as campaign funds to buy the vote. They are convinced the Comelec deliberately jumbled the records, depriving possibly millions of their right to vote. For the first time, they put SWS and Pulse-Asia in disrepute, refused to accept the results of their surveys. They intimated Mahar Mangahas and Felipe Miranda, formerly unassailable, were now Malacañang lackeys, if not cockamamies.

If henceforth, you, Mrs. President, can scrub the streets and Luneta clean, deny their use to the opposition for public demonstrations, then I salute you. You will have achieved the impossible.

But if you can’t, then Ma‚m, you are in trouble.

While you may own Malacañang, its many agencies and institutions, you don’t own Luneta and the streets. Ferdinand Marcos, for all his might, his vaunted glory, all the piles of gold and uniformed manpower at his command, couldn’t stop the opposition from flooding the streets when the crises came. And when he couldn’t, the dictatorship eventually fell.

You have another Achilles Heel, Mrs. President. This one is frightening.

The government is broke, the Treasury empty. The government can only survive by borrowing shamelessly and wantonly from foreign and local lending establishments. Already the national deficit amounts to over P56 trillion, the foreign debt to over $60 billion. If overseas working Filipinos suddenly stop transmitting home about $9 billion annually, the government collapses tomorrow. And like Argentina, we shall declare bankruptcy, and go down like 83 million frogs in a suddenly poisoned swamp.

You alone, or you in the company of your must illustrious advisers, cannot hold the fort, Mrs. President.

You will shake, you will convulse. The Philippines is the pariah of Asia, with hardly nothing to boast of, and hardly anybody really cares what happens to us. We have shot our bolt. We are a little island, worse an archipelago adrift in the Pacific. You cannot arrest, jail and punish the nation’s top crooks and criminals because they are part of the elite, which is also your elite. And quite a number of them occupy niche positions in the palace with you.

Which means you can never initiate meaningful and deeply-rooted reforms. Never. Jamais.

So long as the mass of Filipinos can stand living hell on earth, you will survive. But even patience – and we Pinoys are incredibly patient – has its limits. A deeply wounded bull is the most dangerous bull, as the best bullfighters will tell you. This is what struck me when 3.5 million Filipinos attended Brother Eddie Villanueva’s miting de avance at the Luneta. These are deeply wounded Filipinos. Never had I seen such an immense throng. Never had I seen a political and religious shepherd cast his spell on a flock whose salvoes seemed to be an augury for the future.

This is what GMA and her political confederates must understand.

The future no longer belongs to them. It belongs to a new breed of Filipinos who are now getting sick and tired of all the filth, the refuse, the garbage in their physical surroundings, the thieving elite, the political crooks, the ravenous apparatchik, the war lords and drug lords, the smugglers, the kidnapers, the pretentious senators and congressmen who spout the heady doctrine of democracy and republicanism but are in reality the real terrorists of the realm. They have stolen the country blind and, unless thrown back, will again steal the country blind.

That’s how I see the political-religious mission of Brother Eddie.

Where the margins, borders and frontiers of the country looked like manacles and steel walls and barriers, they are now lit by a moral fire that was not there before. Brother Eddie and his Jesus is Lord have started the process. They should sustain that momentum. For the first time in decades, the elite and the politicians are scared. They knew how to fight communism, Muslim extremism, the perfervid and perverted paladins of left and right.

But the Brother Eddie phenomenon is to them new and strange, an enigma.

This new breed fights with gospel fire, and how do you fight gospel fire? In the old days, they burned them at the stake, or impaled stakes into their hearts, or finished them off in charnel caves during the Grand Inquisition. They cannot do that anymore. A Filipino version of the Marquis de Torquemada of the Grand Inquisition is yet to be born.

Even China found that out when the world railed mightily against Beijing’s persecution of Falun Gong, a religious hybrid of fanatics willing to die for their faith. Jesus Is Lord is no fanatic. It simply went over the lines drawn by Iglesia ni Cristo and El Shaddai which put political labels on their religious faith. It was something like Evangelism For Sale. That was the undoing – or so it seemed – of Brother Mike Velarde and Ka Erdie. And now even the sacrosanct Couples for Christ breathes uneasily under a huge grey cloud. Are they now, as rumors go, in the pocket of GMA?

The battles I have long foreseen in this space have barely just began.