Unfinished Revolution: Why EDSA Still Matters

On 25 February 1986, something remarkable happened on a stretch of highway in Metro Manila. More than two million Filipinos — armed only with rosaries, flowers and an unshakeable moral conviction — faced down tanks and toppled a dictatorship without a single shot being fired.

The People Power Revolution was not merely a Philippine event. It was a defining moment in the history of democracy itself, one that inspired popular uprisings from Eastern Europe to Latin America and demonstrated that the collective will of a people, grounded in courage and faith, could dismantle even the most entrenched authoritarian power.

To understand what that revolution on Epifanio de los Santos Avenue (EDSA) meant, one must first understand what preceded it.

In 1972, then President Ferdinand E. Marcos. Sr. declared martial law, suspended the Constitution, imprisoned his political opponents, and silenced the press. His regime became responsible for thousands of documented cases of human rights violations.

When Marcos Sr.’s political nemesis, former Senator Benigno “Ninoy” Aquino Jr., was assassinated on the tarmac of the Manila International Airport upon his return from the US in 1983, the regime’s brutality could no longer be tamped down.

The killing of the Philippines’ most prominent opposition leader was the spark that ignited a nation. The snap election of February 1986, which was marked by fraud, was the final provocation. The Filipino people had had enough.

What followed was nothing short of miraculous. Once staunch loyalists — former Defense Secretary Juan Ponce Enrile and Marcos’ cousin, Armed Forces vice chief of staff and National Police chief Fidel V. Ramos — turned against Marcos, holing up at Camp Aguinaldo before crossing EDSA to the police headquarters, Camp Crame.

Cardinal Jaime Sin then got on the radio and appealed to ordinary citizens to mass on EDSA to protect Enrile and Ramos and their men. And the people came in droves. Nuns and priests knelt before the tanks, children offered Marcos’ soldiers flowers, everyone shared what food they had brought. The soldiers abandoned their tanks to join the people they had been ordered to suppress.

Ninoy Aquino’s widow, Corazon Aquino, a soft-spoken housewife, became the living symbol of a nation reclaiming its freedom from autocracy. On the fourth day, Marcos and his family fled to Hawaii — and Philippine democracy was restored. The world watched in awe. EDSA became a template, proof that nonviolent people power was not naïve idealism but a formidable political force.

Four decades later, the question of EDSA’s relevance has acquired an almost painful urgency.

Ferdinand Marcos Jr., the son of the dictator, now sits in Malacañang, the palace his family had earlier fled from. His election in 2022 was preceded by a relentless, well-documented campaign of historical revisionism on social media, effectively rehabilitating the Marcos name among younger Filipinos who had no experience of martial rule.

This is precisely why EDSA must be remembered, taught and commemorated with seriousness. When a society forgets the conditions that made a dictatorship possible, it risks recreating them.

Filipinos should not merely commemorate EDSA annually as a holiday. They should treat it as a living civics lesson. Schools must teach the full, unvarnished history of the regime of Marcos Sr.

Museums and institutions must preserve the testimonies of the survivors. Civil society must remain vigilant against the erosion of press freedom, judicial independence and democratic norms, the erosion of which allowed authoritarianism to take root in the first place.

The anniversary of the People Power Revolution should be an occasion not for nostalgia but for an honest national reckoning. The revolution must be invoked, clearly and unapologetically, as a warning.

Every generation must know that the Filipino people paid an enormous price for surrendering their democracy — and they rose up at tremendous personal cost to reclaim it. EDSA is that price written in history. It is both a testament to Filipino courage and a reminder of Filipino vulnerability to strongman politics dressed in the language of order and national greatness.

The world too should remember EDSA. In an era of global democratic backsliding, it remains one of history’s most powerful demonstrations that authoritarianism is never permanent, that a people, united by conscience, can prevail.

The People Power Revolution on Epifanio de los Santos Avenue was never truly finished. Each generation of Filipinos must choose, deliberately and actively, to complete it.