Last week, the saint of the Senate, the ambassador of Jesus Christ and all things compassionate, Senate Minority Leader Alan Peter Cayetano, called for a snap election and the mass resignation of all government officials, from the President all the way down to legislators, to purify the land of the sins of corruption.
How radical of him, right? If we didn’t know any better, we would have mistaken him for a revolutionary who wants to smash the system. But let’s not delude ourselves. Alan Peter is the poster boy of political dynasties, not of social change. He sits in the Senate together with his sister, while his wife conveniently runs Taguig. His political dynasty embodies the very decay that he now pretends to cure.
Just like the snap election called by the late dictator Ferdinand Marcos in 1986, Cayetano’s ‘national reset’ has nothing to do with purging corruption, but a mere resetting of the scoreboard for the same old players. Back then, Marcos wanted to cling to power through a rigged election. Today, Cayetano wants to cleanse himself and his fellow dynasts with the holy water of a ‘fresh mandate.’
Yes, he said that incumbent officials, himself included, should be barred from running for one election cycle. But come on, do we still believe anything this man says? This is the same guy who agreed to share the House speakership with Representative Lord Allan Velasco, only to cling to the Speaker’s chair when his time was up. Only when the House majority overwhelmingly rejected him did he embarrassingly vacate the post.
Alan Peter’s call for a snap election is less about eliminating the corruption and more about tainting everyone with it. He wants to turn corruption into ‘a shared sin.’ The trick is simple. If everybody is corrupt, then no one is corrupt. If everybody is guilty, no one goes to jail. Nobody could demand transparency and accountability because we are ‘collectively guilty.’ This narrative is not only an attempt at evasion, but a way of convincing the public that corruption is inevitable, that everyone is tainted.
It’s no coincidence that Cayetano’s call came just as Senators Ping Lacson and Risa Hontiveros, two of the Senate’s most consistent anti-corruption crusaders, were being smeared. The corrupt are desperate, and they are trying to drag everyone into the mud. But the difference is glaring. Senators Ping and Risa have spent decades fighting corruption. In contrast, those implicated in the corruption scandal have spent their whole political careers trying to perfect it, their reputations reading like criminal rap sheets.
It’s also no surprise that Cayetano’s snap election call came right after his rumored Senate coup fizzled out. No less than Pablo Virgilio Cardinal David and the Catholic Bishops’ Conference of the Philippines (CBCP) warned against any leadership change meant to stage a cover-up. Of course, Cayetano denied there was ever a coup attempt. Why admit to an embarrassing flop? Not once, but twice! It’s like someone who dreams of becoming the company president but gets ignored for the promotion and, out of bitterness, calls for a mass layoff instead.
Even his brother, former Taguig mayor Lino Cayetano, couldn’t stomach the hypocrisy. Lino dared him to resign first and lead by example. He even said the Senate and Taguig would both be better off without any Cayetanos. Now that’s a reset the whole country can get behind.
Former Supreme Court Associate Justice Antonio Carpio also frowned on Cayetano’s idea, calling it destabilizing and patently unconstitutional. This is where his farcical antics turn dangerous. While ridiculous, his call is populist and seductive. It tries to weaponize the public’s frustration with politics and redirects it towards an undemocratic political project. It easily fits the script of military adventurists and power-hungry opportunists, who are either in favor of impeached Vice President Sara Duterte or paving the way for a military junta. Reports that the country came close to a military takeover last Sept. 21 should remind us how fragile and complex the current situation is. One misstep, one small indulgence in this kind of populism, and we could easily slip into the waiting arms of the fascist right.
Cardinal David, ever grounded in the people’s pulse, knows this well. He urged the people to continue expressing their outrage against corruption within the bounds of the Constitution and warned against those who would take advantage of the people’s anger. Quoting the Bible, he reminded us to be ‘as innocent as doves, but wise as serpents.’
And he’s right. Our fight is a long struggle for democracy, one that has required, at certain times, leaps into the extra-constitutional, such as the February 1986 People Power Revolution, which toppled the dictator Marcos, and EDSA Dos, which ended the corrupt Estrada government. But these moments were not the creations of political dynasties and generals. They were organic eruptions of the people’s collective will, a coming together of ripe conditions and a people prepared for action. This is what separates real People Power from a power grab.
The choice of whether to wage that battle against corruption within the Constitution or beyond belongs to the sovereign people, not the Alan Peters of this world, the Dutertes, the plunderers, or the political opportunists, who mask their narrow interests as salvation.
Right now, our task is to read the conditions correctly, apply the appropriate tactics and shield the people’s movement against corruption from hijacking. The corrupt will try to speak the language of change to confuse us. The challenge is to ensure that our anger does not become the fuel for another cycle of dynastic rule.