The stakes in Philippine elections have been fundamental. For many, what is at stake is their future and their hope for a better life.

by Manuel Quezon III

ELECTIONS are like water, missed only in its absence. For the overwhelming majority of Filipinos who have no recollection of life before martial law, elections are like water: a requisite for political life, as essential for the body politic as water is for the human body. But for the older generation, elections are like water: In that, as they view the arid desert that is our current political culture, they yearn for a time when the political landscape was lush, abloom with idealism, fragrant with the virtue of the leaders and the led; far, far removed from the horrifying sight of a nation tearing itself apart at the polls and beyond. Elections are like water: a means for cleansing the body politic, a roaring torrent of votes, channeled, like a river, to clean out the Augean stables every administration seems to become.

	Artwork by Arnold Beroya

In 1935, when the country had its first national election, fully a third of the voters didn't bother to cast their ballots. We had a million and a half registered voters then, all male, all literate. We were looking forward to self-rule preparatory to full independence; it would seem logical that the voters would be interested in participating in the creation of the foundations of their future nation state. But a significant number were not, and the reason they were not should come as no surprise. The choices at the time were limited: three candidates for president, and of that limited number, one was the overwhelming favorite to win. The result was a foregone conclusion, and at a time when all seemed to be going well, a third of the electorate found no reason to even bother. Manuel L. Quezon won by a landslide, 68 percent of the votes, against Emilio Aguinaldo and Gregorio Aglipay, neither of whom managed to get even 18 percent of the votes cast. In 1941, with women added to the rosters of qualified voters, the turnout remained about the same, that is, a third continued to find it pointless to vote, even though the incumbent, Quezon, this time got 81 percent of the vote.

In the democracies we Filipinos like to envy, a turnout of 66 percent of the registered voters would be phenomenal; the United States regularly involves a far smaller percentage of its population in elections that do not only determine the direction of their country, but which profoundly affects the rest of the world as well. The turnout of voters in the supposedly halcyon days of Philippine democracy before the war points to a defining characteristic of our democracy, which is that a sizeable majority of Filipinos have put, and continue to put, great stock in the voting process. The difference is that the predictable nature of our political and national development before the war was ended by a series of shocks and disappointments: the national trauma that was World War II.

Between 1941 and 1946, the Philippines went through six heads of government: Manuel L. Quezon, Jorge Vargas, Jose P. Laurel, Sergio Osmeña, and Manuel Roxas, within that five-year period having two leaders contesting the title of legitimate president of the Philippines (Laurel sponsored by the Japanese at home; Quezon then Osmeña sponsored by the Americans in exile). Taking sides was no longer a political business, it was a bloody business. There were collaborators and guerrillas, officials in exile and officials in the hills, officials in Manila claiming to be secret guerrillas or who were overtly pro- Japanese.

The end of World War II, and the first national elections held after the wartime trauma, set the stage for elections as we know them today. The pretense of political virtue, so carefully nurtured prior to the war, was difficult to sustain in a nation for which voting was a life-or-death matter. Before World War II, elections were like water in that they took on a sacramental aspect, the anointing of a leader by his people. After World War II, elections were like water in that they were viewed as not only a means to cleanse away filth, but as a fundamental requirement for survival. Voters torn and divided, who were guerrillas, fake guerrillas, genuine collaborators or unfairly accused as such, landlords who had fled their estates to seek refuge behind Japanese bayonets (and who now clung to America for dear life), disgruntled peasants-whatever their circumstances, survivors all-now had a desperate stake in the outcome of elections.

In the elections of 1946, genuine guerrillas, radicals, and leaders ruthlessly defeated during the two decades of Quezon's ascendance in national life, fought desperately for their time in the sun. Behind Roxas rallied the orphaned apparatus of Quezon's party machine, both guerrilla and collaborator, but most importantly those accused of collaboration for whom political survival offered their only prospects for rehabilitation and not disgrace. Both sides courted a destitute nation that viewed independence with mixed excitement and dread, having been conditioned to think of 1946 as the year in which the carefully-built-up development of the prewar years would find fruition, only to find independence would a flag waving over ruins emanating the stench of death and decay.

A nation literally parched, its infrastructure in ruins, its population decimated, its ideals proven woefully hollow by the war, viewed elections like water: And like parched people, the fight for the elections was desperate. 1946 saw no landslide, but a simple majority. It also saw vote buying, allegations of vote rigging, and election related violence on a scale previously inconceivable. It would only get worse in 1949, when Elpidio Quirino won in an election that achieved shocking notoriety around the world for even raising the dead and drafting flora and fauna to cast votes. Yet in 1953, the much-anticipated deluge came, when Ramon Magsaysay beat Quezon's 1935 record by getting 68.9 percent of the votes. But by 1957 Magsaysay was dead; his successor became the first president by plurality, in a period when the Philippines of today was being born.