Philippine general election, May 10th 2016

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>Mfw when you write a YUGE screed on politics in an island country that has never been covered at Atlas forum only (to my knowledge) to accidentally reload the page and lose it all.

The island nation of the Philippines is up this coming May. And when I say "up" I mean freaking up. I kind of want to make it my own personal project due to the amount of intrigue surrounding it but the sheer scale of the elections is quite overwhelming:

What's at stake:

The Pres and VP are both up (FPTP, two separate tickets).

Half the Senate is up (12 seats elected via at large plurality.) As it is a presidential year, every presidential campaign will have his or her own chosen slate (as opposed to midterms, where there are typically only two big-slates, one pro- and one anti-incumbent policy). These slates are normally big names, often celebrities - I don't think any country in the world elects more actors and stars to office - to attract a large and widespread vote.

The House is fully up. 80% is provided by very localised FPTP campaigns, and the remaining 20% by PR, although parties are capped at only three PR seats, which is a bit weird from western eyes.

Add to that every single gubernatorial, city and local election are all up. This is perhaps most important in the mysterious Autonomous Muslim region (more on this later) which is caught up in an interesting and painful constitutional change that incumbent president Aquino has staked his political career on.

Politics in the Phillippines is very very surreal, much like most of the country's history and culture. In the years since Mr and Mrs Shoes were kicked out (well partially in the case of the latter, as we may find out later) the country has been through scandal, attempted coups, a peculiar overthrowal of a sitting President, communist and Islamist insutgency, crippling debt, economic crisis, violence, religious drama and bickering with a certain large neighbour. It is also ludicrously non-ideological and filled with personal drama. So it's fun. I want to start with some context, and it is impossible to really get a picture of the 5th Republic without delving into the man who shaped the Fourth Republic of the Philippines.

The Marcos Years: The Fouth Republic
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After 1945 and independence from the United States the nation seemed to have settled into a stable (if somewhat corrupt, and occasionally outright undemocratic in the case of the 1949 election; as well as one constantly hounded by communists in early years) two and a half party system. But then along came Ferdinand Marcos

 Marcos was an ambitious man. Irritated at sitting President Diosdado Macapagal running again and blocking his rise to power, he changed his party record to the centre-right Nationalists (he previously shared the Liberal Party with the incumbent) and ran on a embellished war record as someone who got things done (Macapagal was reform aligned and somewhat on the left, but he had a terrible relationship with his congress). Marcos's first two terms were characterised by a large amount of infrastructure being built, the entry of the nation into the Vietnam War (which he had previously campaigned against) and, infamously, the corruption that would characterise his rule.

But 1970 would change the history of the nation forever, as a rising international student movement swept to Philippine universities. Moderate student activists quickly radicalised, supplanted by the Maoist and Soviet/PRC backed New People's Army. The army responded brutally, as you may expect.

Marcos managed to torch an even bigger powder keg in the primarily Muslim areas of the southern island of Mindano. The Mori people there had repeatedly repelled foreign invaders including the Spanish, Americans and Japanese. Obviously such a scenario would ideally be treated with careful hands. In fact, the Philippine Army decided to recruit among young Mori to forment chaos in North Borneo, a region that had been given to Malaysia following a plebiscite, but considered by Philippine irredentists as rightly theirs. When told (astoundinly late in their training) their mission was to kill fellow Muslims, the Mori recruits resisted and were promptly massacred. This led existing rumblings about Western Mindano's place in the primarily Catholic Phillipines to become a full-scale armed uprising led by the (secular) MLNF.

Faced with a crisis, Marcos took drastic actions. After a grenade attack on Liberal Party headquarters and terrorist attacks (but from who? The leftists? The separatists? Or the government itself?), he declared martial law arresting/liquidating the opposition, forcing every party to merge into a new organisation, forming a creepy personality cult, abolishing elections, banning the press and forming a "New Society", which urged all Filippinos to work for the common goal of advancement of their nation. typical mad dictator stuff.

Marcos' associates, nicknamed the "Rolex Twelve", became notorious for their appropriation of huge amounts of private business and land. Even with generous military aid from the Carter and Reagan administrations (due to Cold War stuff), public debt began to balloon under the swelling military budget and ludicrous amounts of thievery. The wars against separatists didn't go well either even as the secular opposition splintered into an Islamist group, ludicrously named MILF; and communists still violently campaigned against an ever less equal society. (As showed by the ostentatious displays by the elite, including yes, the shoes)

Things really came to a head when popular opposition leader Benigno "Ninoy" Aquinas Jr was assassinated, and Marcos called a snap election which he "won" against Aquinas's widow Corazon (Cory). Or did he? In what I believe is the world's only revolution started by computer programmers, the tech guys at the electoral count walked out in protest. The worm started to turn, as the powerful Catholic Church urged to join in civil disobedience. The era of Marcos was over and Cory Aquinas was installed in office.

Planned future installments

Part 3 : Presidents and elections of the Fifth Republic: Cory, Ramos, Estrada, Arroyo and Aquino III

Part 4: 2016 Candidates: Binay, Duterte, Poe, Roxas and Santiago

Part 5: Issues: MILF and the autonomous regions; Corruption; China; Economic Developmeng (yes, in the ultra personality-politic driven world of the Philippines "issues" seems almost silly right?)

Part 6: political geography: some demographics etc.