Fleeting power

The police’s arrest and booking of former president now Pampanga Rep. Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo over the weekend is a sobering reminder to government leaders from the barangay all the way up to Malacañang about the fleeting nature of power and the comeuppance that eventually overtakes those who misuse it.

Under arrest on charges of committing fraud in the 2007 midterm elections, Arroyo became the third Filipino head or former head of state to draw a badly tarnished historical record after leaving the presidential palace.

In a way, lupus-ravaged Ferdinand Marcos had it better when he and family fled the country after he was booted out of office during the Edsa People Power Revolution of 1986. Marcos at least received the medical treatment abroad that in her time eluded Arroyo after the Justice Department stymied her court-approved attempt to leave for Singapore.

Movie star Joseph Ejercito Estrada also had it better after he was ousted in the second People Power Revolt in 2001, jailed, placed under house arrest, convicted and granted pardon by Arroyo in 2007. Circumstances gave him the opportunity to show that he still commanded a following of at least 26.25 percent of the electorate who voted for him during his second stab at the presidency in 2010.

Neither the semblance of peace that attended Marcos’ exile nor something of the psychic relief that Estrada experienced last year appears to be in store for Arroyo. She will have to fight a host of illnesses on one hand and the string of plunder as well as the recent electoral sabotage suits on the other.

It took so many decades but Filipinos, as seen in the spine-tingling lack of public outcry against Arroyo’s arrest, have finally found the ability to be exacting in holding the high and mighty accountable.

The people made their peace with a dictator dying abroad, tolerated the eventual pardon of the ex-leader convicted of plunder but won’t forgive the bungling of the prosecution of Arroyo whom they feel reneged on her stated goal of wanting not to be a great president but at least a good president, not least by desecrating the ballot.

As the wheels of justice turns and Arroyo is given her day in court, pretenders in government offices have reason to shift uneasily in their seats. Citizens have come of age as constituents and are more and more intolerant of official chicanery. Those who enjoy the privileges of power as in a pleasant dream are headed for a highly hassling awakening.