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there are very strong opposition candidates that are being filled in against him, of
course. He also has a very strong meaning popular sets, so it’s going to tell us
whether the Duterte hold on the Philippine Republic will remain. Although, at this time,
his popularity is still very strong, but going down.
The Philippine economy as you know, and this is very material because we have
been increasing in our GDP. We’re one of the best performing economies in Asia as
you can see from the chart on the right. But we are also one with the highest
poverty rates. One out of four Filipinos is below the poverty line, 25 %. So, you will
imagine that we’ve been a democracy for so long, yet so many people are poor.
So, you will wonder why not that the people are angry. They can see that the
reporter saying that the economy’s doing well, but their lives becoming nasty, brutish,
poor. And so, when Duterte came along, they were ready to take a chance.
Now, I thought I’m going to share some insights about social exclusion,
the quality of decisions, the use of justice, decentralization, readiness for civic
engagement, shared civic culture, campaign finance, electoral effectiveness, use and
misuse of social media, military outside politics, and alternative scenarios. And I’ll try
to be very fast.
Basically, we’re here talking about the rule of law. The Philippines accepts
the rule of law and we’ve done very well in this if, by that, we mean equality before
the law, checks and balances, and the use of power by individuals and government,
rights of the accused, right to silence, presumption of innocence, fair trial,
independent judiciary, right to assemble, democracy through the formal legal process,
access the justice, freedom of speech and media. And we get this, basically, straight
from the American tradition, the United States. So we have a very strong justice in
this area.
When the Americans came to the Philippines, they had a very strong legal
system, and because, I think this is important… The Españas, for 300 years,
they never taught us Spanish. So, we never learned Spanish. We have Spanish names,
but we never learned Spanish. The Americans, when they came, they came with
their best people, meaning to say, MAs and PhDs, two thousand of them from all
over the United States: New York, Chicago. So, when they came, they taught us
English. They taught us the legal system. They gave us education. The new public
administration that they just invented at the time. So, that was a very strong dose of
civic learning under the Americans. So, I think just to give you a background of why
it was not difficult for us to accept this.
However, the main problem is that because of the archipelagic and tribal and
family oriented nature of the Philippines, the family is the closest rival of the state for
ª£¸ª±¡¡²¥¸h¡¢h¢µÈ the loyalty of the citizens. That is something that we’ve never been able to remove
despite the idea that everybody’s equal before the law. Everybody’s equal before the
law, but when it is your son or daughter or husband or wife that is involved,
suddenly you break the law, right? And so there are two moralities in the Philippines,
