In their 2018 book “How Democracies Die,” Harvard political scientists Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt warn that 21st-century democracies rarely collapse through revolutions or military coups; they are hollowed out from within by elected officials who turn the institutions of accountability into shields for themselves and their allies. What we watched unfold in the Philippine Senate last week is a vivid, almost textbook example of this.
Gunshots were heard inside the Senate building, journalists scrambled for cover, and Senator Ronald “Bato” dela Rosa, who is wanted by the International Criminal Court (ICC) for crimes against humanity, was holed up inside the chamber. By the early hours of Thursday, around 2 or 3 A.M., as reported by Al Jazeera, Dela Rosa had slipped out of the building.
The Senate, under its new president, Alan Peter Cayetano, whose tenure may not last long considering how shameful last week’s episode in the Senate was, voluntarily assumed “protective custody” over a senator wanted for crimes against humanity. Its own acting Sergeant-at-Arms, Ret. Police Major General Mao Aplasca, admitted to firing the first warning shot at agents of the National Bureau of Investigation inside the building.
Over the weekend, 152 former student leaders from the University of the Philippines, drawn from rival student political parties SAMASA and Nagkaisang Tugon, signed a joint statement calling for Cayetano’s resignation. SAMASA and Tugon spent the 1980s and 1990s on opposite sides of the ideological fence, and Cayetano himself once served as a student councilor under Tugon. Whatever principled conviction and character Cayetano once inherited from that world of student politics at the country’s premier university are nowhere to be seen today. He, more than most politicians, should have known better.
Politicians, regardless of educational or ideological background, seem to have refashioned themselves according to the populist playbook of the Duterte brand. Treat the law shabbily --brush it off as an annoyance when it points at you, then invoke it as a shield when you can hide behind it. Dela Rosa went before the Supreme Court arguing that the ICC has no jurisdiction over him, while running from the very legal system from which he now seeks relief. As Ombudsman Jesus Crispin Remulla put it: “Flight is an indication of guilt. That’s a very basic tenet of criminal law.”
Levitsky and Ziblatt’s thesis feels less like a scholarly discourse today and more like a warning about the weakening of democratic institutions into something the people no longer respect. And weak institutions are not neutral. They are useful to dominant geopolitical actors in the region.
The troll networks, the disinformation campaigns, the politics of spectacle --they are not merely products of our internal politics. We should be on guard against outside forces that seek to destroy our institutions from within, geopolitical actors acting through networks of disinformation that sustain a political brand whose playbook, since 2016, has been to troll and gaslight our already-vulnerable democracy.
As I write this, the Philippine Senate is set to convene as an impeachment court. The body that spent the past week making a mockery of its own gravitas will be asked to sit in judgment of the vice president.
The nation is watching. Any Filipino who loves his or her country, regardless of political color, should want the democratic process to work, with both the process and its results marked by the gravitas of the rule of law. Anyone who does not want this betrays the nation, and our history is replete with such Filipinos who sell their country to foreign powers for cheap.