Anti-corruption politics

Anti-corruption politics | Daily Tribune

Billion-peso flood control scams are undoubtedly fueling the sudden, amazingly massive popular rage against corruption. So much so that our brand of corrupt politics is on trial in these angry times and we’re now seriously searching for the correct anti-corruption model of politics which will resolve our current woeful predicament.

We’re no strangers to such searches. Our frequent struggles over what our politics should look like, as sociology professor Marco Z. Garrido recently pointed out, somehow always come up each time the public collectively throws up over intolerable corruption scandals.

In fact, throughout our political history anti-corruption politics always came in tandem with corruption scandals that each time the two came around, we also changed, specifically in how we politically, socially, and culturally related to corruption and politics.

Admittedly, in the present moment we can’t yet readily see what changes are in store nor is there a clear scenario for how our politics will be transformed.

We are still caught up in the raging waters of the flood control scams. And with emotions running high, we are in a situation, to slightly alter Italian social theorist Antonio Gramsci’s famous words, where “the old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born; now is the time of monsters and hunting for them.”

Nonetheless, our exploding rage over the flood control scams reveals no other crucial fact than that anti-corruption politics is once more ascendant. We’re in a reforming transition.

Consequently, we are on the cusp of engaging in what Garrido calls battling for the very “soul of our politics.”

How well or badly we embark on our soul-searching of politics requires calm discernment and re-examining and revising our criteria, which inform and explain why Filipino corruption persists.

But before that, we must realize that anti-corruption politics cuts across all social classes, that anti-corruption politics doesn’t only concern the so-called thinking urban middle class which historically held anti-corruption politics close to their hearts.

Keenly sensing the public’s present ugly mood, the numerous poor, the ones who directly suffer from the floods, are now very much as invested in anti-corruption politics as the other classes that there’s no need to “evangelize” them about corruption. We now need to listen even more to the poor.

How we arrived at our present moment is in itself interesting.

Today’s exploding rage against flood control scams comes with the backdrop of our previous “historical exhaustion” over anti-corruption politics.

And nothing says more about that “exhaustion” than the 2022 elections, when many Filipinos decided anti-corruption was simply not a priority unlike in previous elections and regimes.

“It seemed clear in 2022, at least, that it was no longer the predominant model of politics,” points out Garrido in his Philippine corruption paper for the journal “Comparative Studies in Society and History.”

Why? The short answer is the hangover from the “strongman” aura the Duterte regime propagated.

“Duterte represented a different way of dividing the political field — not in terms of corrupt and clean leaders but strong and weak ones,” says Garrido. Strongman Duterte, however, admitted in the end that he too failed spectacularly against the corruption hydra.

As a result, the anti-corruption winds are once again blowing hard and true, demanding resolute action. So much so that the biggest challenge now for the legacy-seeking Marcos Jr. regime is “good governance coupled with strong just governance.”