ANALYSIS
Arroyo battles Lopezes in failed ways
By Amando Doronila
Philippine Daily Inquirer
First Posted 03:07:00 05/05/2008
Filed Under: Politics, Electricity Production & Distribution
MANILA, Philippines—President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo has reopened the wars waged by two former Presidents – Ferdinand Marcos and her father Diosdado Macapagal – against the politically influential Lopez family.
On Friday, Ms Arroyo called on two friendly federations of business chambers to join the government in a "tough legal fight" to wrest control of the utility firm Manila Electric Co. (Meralco) from the Lopezes.
In the epic battles mounted by Macapagal in the 1960s and by Marcos in the 1970s, the two Presidents demonized the Lopez family as the "oligarchy" and an "enemy of the state." They deployed the full force of state power in their crackdown, with Marcos using the weight of the martial law dictatorship to the extent of confiscating the Lopezes' economic assets, including Meralco.
They failed. The Lopez power bases – Meralco and the media network ABS-CBN Broadcasting Corp. – have survived.
The Arroyo administration is wise enough to know the "oligarchy" battle cry is no longer resonant in rallying public opinion behind attacks against Meralco, although the new war is no less a demagogic campaign than those waged by Marcos and Macapagal.
This new war does not echo blatantly the "rich-versus-poor" theme redolent in the Marcos and Macapagal campaigns. This has been so grossly abused by the vulgar catchword "para sa masa" and cheapened by Joseph Estrada that Ms Arroyo is not using it as a slogan in her campaign.
She instead is mobilizing the Government Service Insurance System (GSIS) as the cutting edge of a takeover bid of Meralco. This action disguises her offensive that is, in reality, an extension of her vendetta against the Lopezes.
Ms Arroyo appears to be running a feud with the Lopez family for, among others, thrashing her father's presidency and aligning with Marcos in the 1965 election, which Macapagal lost, and more recently the savaging of her administration by ABS-CBN for her repressive police crackdown on media coverage of the coup attempts against her.
Sobering lessons from past
The ruins of the Marcos and Macapagal campaigns haunt the Arroyo administration as it enters the battleground of the legal system which the Lopez patriarchy has used successfully to repulse assaults of the previous administrations. They serve as a sobering lesson on the limits of the Philippine presidency, even though it is armed with strong executive powers.
This reality check was probably the reason she was careful in her address to the Federation of Philippine Industries and the Filipino-Chinese Chamber of Commerce.
"Please be there with all your legal luminaries because you will be beneficiaries, your workers will be the beneficiaries, your consumers will be the beneficiaries, the Filipino people will be beneficiaries," Ms Arroyo said.
"You are the ones with the means and articulateness to be able to make a good case before the Energy Regulatory Board," she said, referring to the independent body which starts hearing on Tuesday a government petition to force Meralco to lower power rates in Luzon, including Metro Manila.
Meralco is the country's biggest electricity distributor, with 20 million customers nationwide, 30 percent of whom live in Manila. Electricity bills rose by 67.17 centavos last month. The call to enlist the trade chambers to join the legal battle was no less a threat to let them stand up and be counted and to show the government was not browbeating the ERB to approve the petition.
Takeover bid by GSIS
Ms Arroyo's move to confront the Lopezes takes a leaf out of the coercive mentorship of two failed models – her father, a populist at heart, and Marcos, whom she resembles in her authoritarian tendencies. She is the only President since the fall of the Marcos dictatorship in 1986 to resort to emergency powers in 2005, when she faced an alleged coup attempt.
Behind the Arroyo campaign lurks what appears to be a takeover bid by the GSIS to grab control of Meralco management from the Lopez family. The GSIS now owns 23 percent of Meralco, according to Newsbreak magazine. Combined with the remaining 10 percent shares distributed among PhilHealth, LandBank, Social Security System and Pag-Ibig Fund, the government in effect now holds 33 percent of Meralco shares.
The Lopez family has consolidated its shares in Meralco up to 33.4 percent, fractionally larger than the government's, making the family's control of management vulnerable at the annual shareholders' meeting on May 27.
Populist card
The government is playing the populist card, also used by Macapagal and Marcos, to appear that it is acting to bring down the cost of electricity when the administration is under siege from the rice price crisis. The crisis has stoked demands of the poor for cheap rice subsidized by the government, whose massive rice imports have prompted producers to cut down on exports and raise the price of the staple.
Squeezed between the pressures of food price inflation, the rising tensions in the rice queues, the breakdown of public order, and public demand for cheap electricity, the government is playing with fire by shuffling the populist card.
It is looking for new enemies to be used as a lightning rod to deflect public unrest over the potentially explosive issues of food price inflation and electricity bills. The oligarchy scapegoat is no longer the same as it was during Marcos' and Macapagal's times. The Lopez oligarchy and Meralco's structure have changed since the demise of the Lopez patriarch, Eugenio Lopez Sr., who, in his time, called the political shots with his sugar bloc in Congress.
Not her father's daughter
The heirs of the defunct Lopez "oligarchy" have embedded themselves in post-Edsa corporate structures, less overt in their political interventions than their Grand Old Man. They have changed colors, but Ms Arroyo is fighting the Lopez family with weapons that Marcos and Macapagal failed to crush the Lopez dynasty.
Above all, she does not fit into the armor of a populist. She is not her father's daughter. As a sedulous ape to Marcos' authoritarian model, she is a clumsy and pathetic protégé.
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