YESTERDAY’S news feed was abuzz with mayor Sara Duterte’s meeting with Bongbong and Imee Marcos in Davao City. By her body language, the presidential daughter appears poised to attempt to replace her father when the latter steps down as president in July next year.
When she was alive, Miriam Defensor-Santiago, fiery Ilongga Senator and Rabiya Mateo’s idol, authored Senate Bill no. 2649 that sought to prohibit the establishment of political dynasties in the Philippines.
The Constitution already directs the State to prohibit political dynasties. But there remains a need for an anti-dynasty bill because the constitutional provision is not self-executing.
A law must be enacted in order to define the concept, enumerate the relationships that fall within the definition, and lay down the process by which to disqualify those who run for public office in violation of the law.
Had Miriam’s bill been passed into law, Mayor Sara would have been disqualified from running for reelection as Davao City Mayor in 2019. Her brothers Paolo and Sebastian would not have run and won as Davao City first district representative and Davao City vice mayor, respectively in the same year. The bill does not allow close relatives to run in the same district where an incumbent national elective official is a registered voter.
Importantly also, there would be no talk about Sara running for President in 2022. Under Miriam’s bill, “no person within the prohibited civil degree of relationship to the incumbent shall immediately succeed to the position of the latter.”
Miriam explained her filing of her version of an anti-dynasty bill in this wise: the extended family system finds its pernicious effects in the political arena where public office becomes the exclusive domain of influential families and clans that are well-entrenched in Philippine politics.
Miriam added that voters, in many instances, elect relatives of these politically dominant families for convenience and out of a misplaced cultural mindset of looking up to these ruling families as dispensers of favors.
Close relatives running for public office is also intended to skirt the term limits set out in the law. The same family can harness political power for decades.
The Philippines is a republican state. One hallmark of republicanism is representation. Those who are in public office do not hold it as a birthright. Elective office is not a heirloom that can be passed on from generation to generation.
The 1987 Constitution is now 34 years old. Yet all the Congresses that have since convened failed to enact implementing legislation reflecting constitutional intent to ban political dynasties in the Philippines. The framers of the Constitution did not realize that those dynasties would themselves compose Congress.
Sara Duterte was hailed as the first lady mayor of Davao City in 2010. She was elected to the position when her father had to slide down to vice mayor after exhausting term limits. Now the same daughter-father tandem is being floated as the team to beat in the presidential campaign in 2022.
This team is being actively endorsed by chief presidential legal counsel Salvador Panelo. As the top lawyer for the President and as a longtime practitioner he must be aware that the prohibition against dynastism is a state policy under the Constitution.
It is safe to surmise, however, that Secretary Panelo, along with a herd of lawyers supportive of Sara’s candidacy, would rather be legalistic and argue that it is a dead policy without implementing legislation.
What is more troubling is that Sara’s candidacy is being discussed by pundits as a done deal, i.e., as a highly marketable option, and not as a looming national amplification of Davao City’s long-lasting dynastic tradition that is contrary to the spirit and intent of the anti-dynasty policy set out in the Constitution./PN
