26 Asia The EconomistFebruary 3rd 2018
T
HE coarse-talking, arse-kicking president of the Philippines is
not the sort to worry unduly about the finer points of the law.
Yet Rodrigo Duterte ismaking plain his priority in 2018: changing
the constitution in ways that will reshape the state. Last month
Mr Duterte announced a committee of politicians and worthies
to feed ideas to Congress. The plan is for Congress, armed with
the committee’s recommendations, to turn itself into a constitu-
ent assembly empowered to draft revisions. The country will
then vote on its proposals in a plebiscite. The task may consume
the rest of Mr Duterte’s presidency, at a time when much needs
fixing elsewhere. Many Filipinos are scratching their heads. Oth-
ers question Mr Duterte’smotives.
The least contentious of the president’s three desired changes
is the easing of the constitutional limits on foreign ownership of
companies, to attract foreign capital and encourage competition.
The other two goals are radical. One is to remove some of the
president’s powers and hand them to a prime minister, creating a
hybrid presidential-parliamentary system along the lines of
France, Taiwan or South Korea. The other is to turn the Philip-
pines’ centralised government into a federation of perhaps five
newly created states.Rumba in the jungle
Talk of “cha-cha” (short for “charter change”—amending the con-
stitution) is not new. The current constitution was promulgated in
1987 under Cory Aquino after the People Power revolution. It
aimed to prevent a repeat of the tyranny the country had suffered
under Ferdinand Marcos. The president was limited to a single
six-year term. A bicameral Congress was created in the place of
the unicameral one that Marcos had manipulated. Martial law
can be declared only with its approval.
The first push for cha-cha came towards the end of the term of
Aquino’s successor, Fidel Ramos. His supporters, too, advocated a
hybrid presidential-parliamentary model. The idea has never
gone away. Constitutional specialists backing Mr Duterte claim
that the change would remove the president as the fount of pa-
tronage in a winner-takes-all system. Above the fray of day-to-
day politics, he could play the wise statesman, guiding foreign
policy and guarding Philippine sovereignty. Parties, it is hoped,would acquire more ideological heft, to help build a majority in
Congress, instead of simply seeking the president’s favour. In this
set-up, the prime minister could be removed by a vote of no confi-
dence—no need for any more coups or mass protests.
Mr Ramos’s attempts at change were scuppered bysuspicions
that he wanted the postof prime ministerhimself, in order to ex-
tend his time in power. Mr Duterte’smotives are even more likely
to come under scrutiny. A populist and an autocrat, he scoffs at
the law, encourages extrajudicial killings of drug users and makes
light of human rights. It is hard to imagine him regretting a pow-
erful presidency—and many Filipinos love a strongman.
But Mr Duterte is merely making suggestions, his backers say.
Anyway, Congress, not the president, has the power of cha-cha.
Yet congressmen fawn on Mr Duterte. Some are bound to pro-
pose extending his term, which ends in 2022, or abolishing term
limits for the presidency. Meanwhile, little would stop the naked-
ly self-serving legislators from rewriting the constitution to suit
themselves—for instance, by bringing back a pork-barrel fund
that the Supreme Court ordered scrapped five yearsago.
The idea of a federal Philippines is appealing. Power—political
and economic—is now centralised in “imperial” Manila, the capi-
tal. Almost every function of government, from education to the
police, is administered from the metropolis, despite the country’s
mosaic of peoplesand languages. Mr Duterte’s calls for reform
went down well in the provinces during his election campaign.
His own base of Davao, in the far south of the country, feels far
from the capital.
Look closer, though, and doubts multiply. For one, what is to
stop families who already dominate politics and business in their
localities from further entrenching their power in the newly
created states—Mr Duterte’s included? The president’s main argu-
ment for sweeping federal change is oddly narrow: to bring peace
to the troubled Muslim areas ofMindanao, the island on which
Davao is the biggest city, home to a decades-old Islamist rebel-
lion. A national political consensus has long held that disaffec-
tion in Mindanao can only be countered by autonomy for the
4m-odd Muslims there, coupled with economic development.
The issue is whether the constitution blocks such an outcome.
A decade ago a peace pact with the main insurgents, the Moro Is-
lamic Liberation Front (MILF), offered more autonomy to Muslim
areas in return for abandoning the armed struggle for indepen-
dence. Yet the agreement was knifed by the Supreme Court,
which ruled that, since it created a state within the Philippine
state, the pact was unconstitutional. In response, one faction of
MILFbroke away, and now runsthe small but potent Islamic State
franchise in Mindanao.
A new and more comprehensive agreement was struck with
the MILFin 2014. The worry is that the court will deem the en-
abling legislation unconstitutional, too. The MILFhas yet to
threaten publicly to go back to war, but is impatient with the
peace process. For the president, peace is a big enough prize to jus-
tify changing the constitution.
Is he right? Surely not, at least until the national legislation
putting the agreement of 2014 into effect has actually been passed
and tested before the Supreme Court, which is increasingly wary
of crossing the president. Even then, overhauling the political sys-
tem that governs 100m people to please 4m of them seems ex-
treme—and probably will not appease the armed groups outside
the peace deal anyway. Filipinos would be running the risk of a
constitutional coup for meagre and uncertain benefits. 7Dancing the cha-cha
The pursuit of constitutional change in the Philippines may prove perilousBanyan