How did Filipinos end up with one of the most corrupt governments after a long history of upheavals and even the intervention of the Supreme Court to end the pork barrel system?
In total, counting every documented revolt, uprising and revolution, from the smallest colonial era peasant revolt to the modern EDSA events, the Philippines has seen well over 200 instances of popular uprising.
The irony, according to political commentator and lawyer Carlos Serapio, who is the secretary general of the Christian Nationalist Union (CNU), is that such a long list of uprisings has yet to produce lasting systemic change.
Serapio’s paper titled, “The rule of law in the current state of our political life,” offers several interlocking explanations, starting with power being returned to the same corrupt institutions.
After the EDSA revolts and subsequent court decisions, the people and the military, which Serapio says are the sources of “basic powers,” surrendered their governance rights back to the very same institutional structures that had already been captured by entrenched elites.
Using a biblical metaphor, the author said “new wine did not go into new wineskins,” meaning the revolutionary energy was poured back into old, rotten containers. Nothing structurally changed because the vehicles of power remained unchanged.
The document argues that the law and its institutions, which are the presidency, Congress, the Supreme Court, and the Commission on Elections, were not neutral arbiters but were controlled by opposing factions of a self-serving elite minority.
Reform decisions made by these bodies were therefore always filtered through, and ultimately subordinated to, elite interests. Supreme Court rulings, however well-intentioned, could not escape this structural capture, the paper indicated.
The reform movements produced no genuinely new organs of political power. Organized people power constituencies and reform-oriented military elements were never institutionalized into new governmental structures.
Without new frameworks, the same old power relationships simply reasserted themselves with new faces.
The author illustrated a deep constitutional divide in which institutions meant to exercise the people’s sovereignty were actively working against the people’s interests.
Among the specific examples the paper gave were the “Hello Garci” controversy where the presidency and the Comelec were ranged against the electorate.
The scandals represented institutions that were supposed to uphold the law instead of being weaponized against the public.
The rhetoric of the law was used to preserve corruption, not fight it. The document argued that legal language and institutional processes became tools of misdirection and confusion, or what he called “the misleading and confusing rhetoric of the Law.”
Calls to “let the institutions work” were repeatedly used to delay, dilute, or derail genuine reform, giving the appearance of progress while preserving the status quo.
The people also grew cynical precisely because they recognized that successive post-EDSA administrations only offered a rotation of the same class of leaders doing the same things.
The public desire was not merely for new faces but for systemic change, new structures, new rules and new processes, which never materialized.
On a more philosophical level, Serapio argues that law functions properly only when the institutional “body” of the state is aligned with the “mind” (truth and justice) and “spirit” (the people’s will).
After People Power, the body (institutions) continued to function in ways that undermined the mind and spirit, creating a persistent legitimacy crisis that no court ruling alone could resolve, because the problem was structural and moral, not merely legal.
Serapio’s core thesis is this: People Power and the Supreme Court’s landmark decisions changed faces, not structures.
By leaving elite-captured institutions intact, they produced turnovers without transformation; power simply shifted from one faction to another.
