MANILA
Once again we have a minority president here, meaning presumptive President-elect Rodrigo Duterte didn’t get at least 50 percent plus one votes (as of presstime, his vote total was in the 40 percent range).
It’s not Duterte’s fault to be a minority president, the fault is in the system.
All our presidents since Ferdinand Marcos won in 1969 have been minority presidents. In 1986 Marcos called a snap election which resulted in questionable tally numbers. The official tally of that election is in the books as Marcos 53.6 percent and Cory Aquino 46.1 percent. But later Marcos was deposed in the EDSA-I People Power uprising and Aquino was declared president.
In 1992 Fidel Ramos won 23.58 percent of the votes over Miriam Santiago’s 19.7 percent. In 1998 Joseph Estrada got 39.9 percent over Jose de Venecia’s dismal 15.9 percent.
In another controversial election, Gloria Arroyo won with 40 percent of the votes over Fernando Poe Jr.’s 36.5 percent. And Benigno Aquino III beat Estrada with 42 percent over 26.25 percent.
In the current case of Duterte, he is a minority president but his margin of victory of around six million votes over runner-up Mar Roxas is a great enough number to give him a strong sense of public approval. But it’s still not the majority’s mandate.
How to solve the problem of a minority president?
One, is to go back to the two-party system which we had until the 1992 elections (not counting the murky 1986 results). Under that system, every politician must join either of the two parties (or, in a few cases, be an independent). At presidential election time, only two candidates, one from each party, will contest the election. But before that, any number of nominees are vetted to come up with each party’s official candidate. This system ensures a majority winner.
Is the two-party system more democratic than a multi-candidate election?
Either system allows the vetting of multiple aspirants for the presidency. The only difference is that the vetting in a two-party system is done before the election proper. The “vetting” in the multi-candidate system is done by the voters in the election proper. The problem with the multi-candidate system is the nearly-always emergence of a minority winner.
Another way of ensuring a majority winner is to have what is called a runoff election if the first election result fails to produce a majority winner. In this system, another election between the two top vote-getters is held in order to come up with a majority winner.
Having a runoff election in case there’s no majority winner is expensive, especially for a poor country like ours, because of the cost of a second election. That’s the price to pay for having a multi-candidate system.
Many people think, as obviously the framers of the 1987 Constitution did, that a multi-candidate presidential election is more democratic. But, again, its flaw is in its nearly-always resulting in a minority winner which, in turn, defies majority rule.
Another feature of our election law that needs revisiting is the independent election of the president and vice president. This just doesn’t make sense. But, again, it was adopted ostensibly for “democratic” reasons.
The rationale was that a vice president who comes from a different political party serves as a “check” on the president. But that’s not the role of the vice president. The VP’s role is to support the president in running the affairs of the country, and to take over if and when the president is incapacitated. Check-and-balance is the responsibility of the legislature and the judiciary.
As an analogy, the vice president of a corporation must work in tandem with its president. They must be a team that works together, not independently of each other. Otherwise the company’s business will be in jeopardy if there’s no synchronicity in the work of the president and his or her vice president.
The Philippine Congress must sit down to ponder these two issues (and others, like the party-list system) in order to, one, always have a majority president who has the people’s full mandate and, two, have the president and vice president voted on as a team, rather than as independent of each other, for a smooth and solid functioning of the executive branch of government.
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