(Continued from yesterday)
AS IT IS ALSO supposed to be, the political parties are supposed to spend for the campaigns of all their candidates, and it would not really matter whether an individual candidate has money to spend or not, for as long as he or she is qualified to run for the position that he or she has been nominated for by his or her party.
As it is happening now however, the individual candidates seem to be spending for their own campaigns, as they say so in their own advertising announcements. One way or the other, this practice is not good for democracy, because running for public office has become an exclusive game for the rich, making it impossible for the poor to run, simply because they have no money.
If only our system of putting caps on campaign spending is in place, this would not be a problem because there would be limits to what all candidates could spend. As we all know however, that system is weak, and because of that, it appears that all the candidates could freely spend as much money as they want.
For whatever it is worth, it would not be too much to say that over a hundred years would have been enough time for our democracy to mature, and that also includes our political parties that should have matured by now.
As it is now however, the most we could say is that our democracy is still maturing in the same sense perhaps that we say that we are still a developing country. A few years back, we got away with that too, when we said that we are still industrializing, when we failed to achieve the status of being an industrialized country.
First things first, perhaps our political parties have to show first that they really have the broad membership nationwide that could actually vote when a real convention is called. Otherwise, they might just say that they are still recruiting.
Perhaps one obvious sign that our democratic system is still immature is that many candidates are being adopted by so many political parties left and right, never mind what the ideologies and platforms of these parties are, if any that is. Since ideologies and platforms are supposed to be inspired by principles, it would appear that these candidates have no principles at all.
By the way, it also seems that our political parties hardly know the difference between alliances and coalitions, since these two terms appear to be interchanged freely. As it is supposed to be, two or more parties could form an alliance without giving up their ideologies and platforms. A coalition however in the political sense is like a merger in the business sense. To coalesce is to become one, and that means having the same ideologies and principles.
If we have been unable to become a mature democracy after over a hundred years, how much longer would it take us to do it? Could we possibly do it in a hundred more years, more or less?
One thing for sure, we could never become a true democracy if our election system would continue to favor only those who have more in riches even if they have less in talents.
We could also never become a mature democracy if only those who are popular would win, even if they have no ideologies or platforms to speak of.
To get to the point of true political maturity, we should start with the only way to start, and that is to start with having mature political parties with real ideologies and platforms./PN
