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On election day, you get a very long ballot in which you have to
fill in very many names. The proposed shift from a bicameral,
presidential system to a unicameral parliamentary system will
change the names you get to fill in. It’s not mentioned in polite
company, but some people want to reduce the list because they
don’t like the choices voters have made.
But that’s what our leaders do after they’ve won. The first step is
winning. And all it takes to win is to get at least 1 more vote than
your strongest opponent.
The current proposals would reduce the national names you pick to
two: an Assemblyman, which would be the new name for your
congressman, and possibly, under the proposed changes, you may
have the option of picking a party for your party-list vote. But let’s
focus on your assemblyman, first.
Your vote for Assemblyman is what you will have to depend on, to
reflect your will as far as the national government’s composition is
concerned.
Second, who are the leaders of your party, and among themselves,
do they have assemblymen capable of holding the various
ministries to replace our current departments?
Third, even if your assemblyman, his party, and its leaders, aren’t
the biggest, would they be big enough to be worth including in a
coalition government? And if so, under what terms? Will it be
based on your party’s programs and principles? If so, good; if not,
what can you do about it? You can pray, I guess.
or, prior to its being divided, the LP with 34 seats, could make
possible a government.
Lakas-CMD plus Kampi, for example, would have 105 seats, two
short of a majority.
But wait- there’s more. Remember the party list? Wouldn’t that
affect the political math?
It would –and will, perhaps more than most people think. And
we’ll tackle that when the Explainer returns.
II.
http://sigawngbayan.com/abueva_primers_04.htm
Make the parties swear to behave like parties and have pieces of
paper to prove it.
“Section 12. Any elective official who leaves his party before the
end of the term shall forfeit his seat.”
That if you feel rebellious, you had better leave parliament –so you
can be replaced by your former political party.
And the third? Help parties help themselves by using our taxes to
subsidize parties –but based on how they did in the last elections.
This means, if you did well, you’ll get money. If you did badly, you
won’t get money. How do you measure doing well? The number of
representatives you elected. So this means, taxes for Lakas-CMD,
the NPC, and maybe for the LP. At least the lion’s share, anyway.
So you get taxes for doing well, and the two top dogs –and only the
two major parties- get to appoint people to supervise voter
registration, the counting, and so forth. Everyone else can watch,
but watching, as we know, is different from actually sitting in
bodies that do the counting and verification of qualified voters.
Now if the odds are so heavily stacked in favor of the big parties,
why even bother with party-list representation? Well, the two-party
system won’t happen overnight. So there will be a window of
democratic space for a time, where the little baby parties can elect
one or two party list representatives to do what they do now: make
noise but essentially remain irrelevant to the day-to-day business
of the House or our future parliament.
But as for the rest of the thirty percent seat reservation for party
lists. How will they be chosen? Abueva presents two options.
Proportional representation of the political parties, is the first. This
works by establishing a formula, ahead of elections, that will decide
how the seats will be divided ,according to the percentage of the
votes the various parties obtain. This is actually how many
parliamentary systems in Europe operate.
Now add 30%, which is the seats reserved for party list: that’s 42.4
or let’s round up to 25 seats. The 25 seats would be divided
according to the formula, whatever it is: 1 seat for every 2% of votes
cast, that your party gets? Maybe.
Whichever way the formula is decided, it’s actually what the 1987
Constitution intended for the present party-list system. For three
terms after the ratification of the Constitution, seats were reserved
for sectoral representatives appointed by the President. But after
that, it was supposed to be a free-for-all, in which parties that did
well, got more seats. But Congress seems to have gotten confused,
so that every party that gets 2% gets a seat, based on which sector
the party represents, which means that each party list party never
gets more than one or two seats at most, which makes them
ineffective parties in the House.
“this will give the political parties a great incentive to be united and
disciplined, to put up good candidates, and offer a good program of
government.”
III.
They say the presidential system works best when there are two
parties, because it means a clear winner. In Indonesia, they permit
many parties, but they have run-off elections to make sure only one
winner gets fifty percent or more. We haven’t had a president with
fifty percent of the vote since 1969. Blame it on the multiparty
system? They say, after all, it’s suited for parliamentary
government.
We often hear there are really only two parties in the Philippines:
the party in power, and the party trying to get in power. If the rules
make for stronger parties, who will benefit from these rules?
Parties currently in power, or powers that have yet to be born?
All I can say is, remember the old saying. Whoever has the gold,
makes the rules. And the proposed new rules present a golden
opportunity.