The Second Aquino Administration

The race for the top position in the land has finally ended: Sen. Benigno "Noynoy" Aquino was proclaimed on June 9 as the 15th president of the Republic of the Philippines. Sen. Aquino, son of former president Cory Aquino, is succeeding Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo, daughter of former president Diosdado Macapagal.

Aquino was a late entrant in the race. He only joined the race after the Filipino people came out en masse during Cory's funeral to accompany her to her resting place and to show their indignation over the Arroyo government. The Aquino/Liberal Party camp capitalized on this. The Aquino campaign was packaged as a fight between good and evil, the corrupt and the clean. It tried to reprise the fight between the dictator Marcos and the innocent wife-victim Cory in 1986. It was not difficult to do so as Arroyo was, by then, so isolated because of the numerous corruption and bribery scandals her family was involved in and the indignation over the spate of extrajudicial killings, enforced disappearances and other human rights violations.

However, the magic of the situation began to lose its luster by the early part of 2010 when Sen. Manny Villar began to catch up. It was then that a demolition job against Villar seemed to have intensified. There was the revival of the Senate investigation over the alleged C-5 budget insertion, the expose' of the alleged landgrabbing case involving Villar's real estate company, the questioning of Villar's claim that he came from a poor family, and the "Villarroyo" accusation -the floating of the rumor that Villar was the real candidate of Arroyo - which was, perhaps, the most damaging of all. After this, while Aquino's ratings did not surge, Villar's ratings went down.

By the tail-end of the campaign period, the presidential race could no longer be characterized as a fight between good and evil. There was no question about it, Arroyo was on the way out - the US made it clear that it would not tolerate her last-ditch efforts to stay in power - and her official candidate Gilbert Teodoro did not have even an iota of a chance to bag the presidency. It was merely a choice between the many candidates who packaged themselves as the opposite of Arroyo. Thus, even as Aquino won by more than 5 million votes, he did not get the vote of the majority of the Filipino people. The final canvass of votes for president showed that 15,208,678 out of the 50,000,000 registered voters voted for him or around 30 percent. If based on the 32,225,248 votes cast for president, Aquino got 47 percent.