[OPINION] A protest movement at war with itself

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We’re too old for this, I told a friend who’s a former reporter, as we chatted about the separate rallies that the anti-corruption movement mounted on November 30 in Metro Manila. 

But perhaps the protest veterans now mired in their own acerbic post-mortems should also ask themselves the same question: Are we not too old for this? 

Landing in our social media feeds in the past days were stones thrown at each other by activists from all shades and blocs in the Philippine Left and among Liberals in the aftermath of the two anti-corruption rallies that they organized on November 30. The Philippines faces its biggest corruption scandal in history — throwing the economy in a fit, scaring away investors, angering citizens across classes and ages, and unmasking a la-la land presidency. 

This is the Marcos administration’s Super Typhoon Yolanda, the disaster that brought the former Noynoy Aquino administration to its knees more than a decade ago and killed all prospects of continuity.

It also happens to be a once-in-a-lifetime moment for a protest movement that was maimed and constricted under the previous Duterte regime. While extrajudicial killings in Rodrigo Duterte’s brutal drug war fueled discontent that mobilized certain sectors, activists faced persistent and lethal state harassment in all forms, limiting spaces for recruitment. 

Today, the protest movement is not set back by the same challenges. Whatever troubles they’re having now are self-inflicted.

This came in full display the morning after the November 30 rallies in Luneta and EDSA, when anti-corruption groups unleashed their fangs against each other in defense of how and where they stand vis-a-vis the Marcos government. Resign all, including President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. and Vice President Sara Duterte, was the slogan carried by the protesters that gathered in Luneta.

We’re not in Luneta, declared Cardinal Pablo Virgilio David from his pulpit before a throng of protesters at EDSA, because we’re not ready to make the same call. He raised concerns that proposals for a transition council could be weaponized by sectors aiming for an extra-constitutional path to resolve the crisis.

The dam broke.

The ugliness of the yesteryears, the needless bickerings, the one-upmanships dressed in ideological discourse, the sloganeering and name-calling — they came in quick succession from the Natdems, the Socdems, the goddems, and the folks in between. 

These brickbats would thrill any journalist chronicling the unravelling of this period, but they infuriate us who have witnessed all of that in the last four decades of the protest movement’s speckled past. There were hard lessons from those years, which should have been learned by now. But nada.

Today’s anti-corruption blocs are so caught up in the cloud that carries their endgames and tactical goals and self-infatuation, that they could not rise above them, could not help but obsess about the end of the tunnel instead of the difficult but necessary steps that lead to it.

No hunger for radical collaboration

Let’s face it: the organized blocs that mounted the Luneta and EDSA rallies on November 30 see this period as an opportunity to broaden their base, add heft to their political muscle, and protect whatever they have earned over time — whether those are party-list seats, dominance in key sectors, sticky, smash-the-state messaging for the GenZ, or wide open spaces where they could agitate, organize, mobilize.

There’s no hunger for radical collaboration, even if the times call for it, because, I think, many of them figure they don’t need it at this point.

Which is true to an extent, but sad and annoying, right? 

The political system that breeds the greedy, the dynasts, and the sycophants is crumbling right before the very eyes of these veteran activists. And yet, they could not even sustain difficult conversations that could bring about a meaningful consensus on concrete steps for the here and now — and for the near future. 

Mae Paner, who’s exerted efforts to bring these disparate groups together, told John Nery in this week’s episode of The Public Square, that they naturally have different desired outcomes in these protests. But they could have at least come up with a minimum agenda for unity, she said.

Which did happen earlier, on September 21, when the different blocs held a joint press conference to convey one message — holding officials to account and punishing them. We need to remind ourselves that even at that point, they had already chosen to hold separate rallies: EDSA and Luneta (and we all know what happened later in Mendiola). Yet, thousands of unorganized Filipinos marched with them, those who did not know, nor cared for, the bottled-up divisions wracking the organized.

We assumed they’d spend the following weeks consolidating for a bigger push and sorting out differences for a tactical goal to build more pressure on public officials with concrete calls to action shared by all. But the violence at Mendiola on September 21, and the constant ghost of destabilization, may have partly doomed any of those initiatives. 

Marcos, Sara or none at all?

And then the penultimate question. What is a desirable endgame for these protests, when both Marcos and Duterte had grown unpalatable to the anti-corruption movement? Perhaps a transition council of multi-sectoral groups that would help craft changes in the fundamental law of the land and propose structural reforms to systemic problems? Fair enough, yes? 

Except this is based on the assumption that Marcos and Duterte would step down. Faced with a squabbling protest movement that can’t get its act together, why would they? 

Isn’t this as clear as day? 

What’s the point of a movement’s call to hold everyone accountable when its leaders can’t even take the bold step of turning that into a single message in one big stage, under one big banner, in one big show of force?

Why even dare to imagine a transition council of diverse groups when one can’t even bring the same groups to negotiate divergent agendas behind closed doors so they could put up a united front over the few, yet significant, things they agree on? Backed by public anger, they could set demands with the powers-that-be and, should they fail, can then rightfully elevate plans to the next.

Why use the military again as the bogeyman when there is no real threat emanating from that institution outside the angst of bored pensioners and retired generals and the cynicism of soldiers they had once misled and mismanaged? 

Recall that the last time the protest movement helped oust a president, Joseph “Erap” Estrada, in the 2001 EDSA II revolt, various groups stood side by side at EDSA even as they carried clashing placards and did not like each other. Resign all, screamed Sanlakas and its affiliates. Erap resign, insisted others. They proved they could be frenemies in one stage for one common goal. (Image above is taken from a story on Newsbreak Magazine in January 2011.)

But EDSA II had two elements that fast-tracked it: a relatively acceptable vice president, Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo, who was waiting in the wings and had a core team that opened talks and negotiated with the protest movement, and a defense-military establishment that was led by men with enough gravitas, command, and political instincts: the late general Angelo Reyes and then-defense chief Orlando Mercado. 

We all know how that transition went south. Arroyo later cracked down on the Left and Reyes shot himself to death over corruption allegations.

None of these are present in today’s crisis. Which is the point.

This time around, the protest movement is in a unique position to show that it’s capable of taking the lead — armed with shared plans that are both doable and long-term, gifted with an imagination that tears down walls, boosted with the ability to give room to young blood, and blessed with the stamina to talk, disagree, talk again, and build.

But that could be asking, or expecting, too much, no? – Rappler.com