Back to the future in the Philippines

Back to the future in the Philippines

It's back to the future in the Philippines.

Benigno Aquino III has surfed to the presidency on the crest of a wave of nostalgia for the episodes of more than 20 years ago, when his parents put the Philippines at the centre of world attention.

His mother and father, Benigno Junior and Corazon, were the main characters in scenes that fundamentally changed the course of Philippine history.

I am a "martial law baby" who grew up in exile in London. My parents had managed to get out of the Philippines before Imelda, the wife of Ferdinand Marcos, the late strongman, could have my mother imprisoned for writing a biography of her.

For my generation the shock of seeing Benigno III's father assassinated in a pool of blood on the tarmac of Manila International Airport is a kind of emotional bookend. It was the beginning of the end of the conjugal dictatorship.

The other emotional bookend was the wonder of Corazon's rise to the presidency after a non-violent uprising combined with a military rebellion forced the Marcoses to leave the country in 1986, hounded out by fury over their human-rights violations and plunder of the nation’s coffers.

Anti-Arroyo backlash

Benigno Aquino III, known as Noynoy, is the only son of the formidable Aquino couple. His campaign capitalised on his parents' reputation, and the allegations of corruption against the now deeply unpopular current president, Gloria Arroyo.

He campaigned on a slogan that without corruption there will be no poverty.

Already at least one economist has questioned whether there really is any link between the two - but that has been politically irrelevant in the context of these elections.

Aquino and his campaign have criss-crossed the country, singing the songs that his mother and her supporters used to sing, to try to recreate the emotions of 1986.

On his campaign there have been crowds of supporters wearing yellow, his mother’s trademark colour, in reference to the old song Tie a Yellow Ribbon.

Aquino has an uneventful record as a congressman - to the point that people joke that his top qualifications are his parents. But that's where anger and disappointment at the current regime come in.

The majority of voters in the Philippines apparently want a less controversial leader like Corazon Aquino: one with integrity, and who has nothing to do with Arroyo.
 
So they waited in queues, sometimes kilometres long, to vote on a blisteringly hot day across the Philippines’ more than 7,000 islands.

Throughout election day, the local radio and television stations interviewed ordinary Philippine voters who waited for hours to choose their candidates for around 18,000 local and national posts. Some complained and stayed; others complained and left.

At a precinct in the former shoe manufacturing area of Marikina near the capital Manila, a friend described a kind of fiesta atmosphere, with entrepreneurs setting up shop to sell drinks and snacks to families settled in for the tedious, sweaty wait.

Elsewhere, another friend said he arrived with trepidation - drinks and towels in his backpack - only to find no one there; so it took a snappy five minutes to vote.
 
Philippine voters in every corner of the country refused to be put off by the new technology - and, in some cases, outright intimidation. If you put those scenes in regional context, it was a bracing sight.

Nearly all of the other countries in Southeast Asia have limited democracies, but here on Monday, it was a celebration of the right to vote for a candidate of your choice.

Marcos family returns
 
Aside from Aquino, that's also meant a political comeback for the Marcos family.

Imelda, she of the many shoes, will be clicking her heels into congress.

Her son will serve as a senator, under the administration of the son of his father’s greatest opponent, who was shot dead for his trouble.

But about half of the voters in the country are under 25 and never experienced the Marcos regime.

There are also those for whom local loyalties to the Marcos clan are more important than their secret Swiss bank accounts or the thousands who were tortured or "disappeared" during their rule.
 
We did many of our live reports from the Associated Press office in Malate; other foreign reporters trooped in and out to file their reports via satellite, too.

Among them was a young Chinese reporter from the main state television station; she was trying her best to understand what was going on, and to decide which bits were newsworthy for her audience of hundreds of millions of people - none of whom get to muddle through a democratic process.

I wonder what her vast audience made of her reports on the Philippines' colourful version of democracy.