Marcos Jr.'s rise to power calls to mind UK's Tony Blair and Japan's Junichiro Koizumi

First word

SOMEDAY, historians and political scientists will place Ferdinand "Bongbong" Marcos Jr.'s rise to the summit of Philippine politics in the company of Tony Blair's emergence in Great Britain and Junichiro Koizumi's burst to power in Japan.

Every successful national leader probably believes that his march to power is sui generis (one of a kind).

To seasoned political observers, however, there is nothing new in politics; there are only ingenious reinventions of the wheel.

It doesn't really matter whether one seeks the presidency of the United States or the post of prime minister in countries as different as the United Kingdom and Japan.

The struggle for power comes down finally to a contest between strategies and tactics and visions. The one who prevails is the one who masters best the strategic calculus.

What Blair, Koizumi and Marcos share in common is their deft use of the politics of reform as the key to winning political power.

Blair broke the stranglehold of Margaret Thatcher and the Tories on UK politics, by renewing the Labour Party with a program called New Labour. British voters turned to him en masse in the elections of 1997.

Koizumi rose from obscurity to lead his political faction to the top of the long-entrenched Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) in 2001, by pressing for the transformation of Japanese politics.

Marcos has risen to power this year after decades of exile and toil in the political wilderness, by transcending the morass of weak political parties in the Philippines with a political coalition that cut across political divisions, geography, socioeconomic classes, generations, professions and gender to prevail in the battle for hearts and minds in the general election.

Each was a compelling political lesson in his own way.

Tony Blair and New Labour

In four consecutive elections from 1978 to 1997, the Labour Party went down in defeat against the Conservative Party, which had found a new and dynamic leader in Thatcher.

Labour lost repeatedly while it was under the control of a coalition of labor unions and leftist unilateralists.

In 1994, Blair assumed the leadership of Labour. He turned the party decisively forward by dethroning the union bosses and adopting a policy of giving unions "fairness, not favors."

The key to Blair's success was his recognition that he could only win by genuinely convincing most party members of the need for the party to change.

Blair's galvanic reform was the revision of clause 4 in the Labour Party constitution, which committed it to the wholesale nationalization of production. This led to a new commitment to social justice, equality, responsibility and prosperity.

Through this party reform, Blair battled Thatcher's measures to rein in union power and curb the unfettered right to strike.

Under Blair, Labour was victorious in two successive elections, and stood to win one more, but for Blair's unexpected exit from power in 2007.

Without apology, Blair described his political approach as "permanent revisionism," a continual search for better means to meet the party's goals based on a clear view of the changes taking place in advanced industrial societies. (Let's see how critics of Marcos for 'historical revisionism' will wrestle with Blair's idea of permanent revisionism).

Koizumi reforms Japan

The lesson of Blair's triumph in the UK was not lost on the world.

Halfway around the world, in Japan, another politician was also anxious to employ the politics of reform to secure political victory and jumpstart national transformation.

In 2001, Koizumi reformed his own party, the LDP, which had ruled Japan since the 1950s. He led it to victory in Japan's parliamentary elections.

The LDP is essentially an ongoing political deal, constantly renegotiated to preserve a balance of power among its factions.

The LDP not only controls the Diet (parliament), but also dominates the civil service bureaucracy whose regulations shape every aspect of Japanese life.

There is no real distinction between career bureaucrats in appointed positions and elected officials of the LDP.

The politicians exist happily alongside the bureaucrats, without bothering the supremacy of the other.

But then came Koizumi, an LDP politician who had spent his career in relative obscurity. He climbed to the top of one of the party's many factions. As no previous politician ever had, Koizumi grasped the need for fundamental reform. Like a Japanese Mikhail Gorbachev, to use a phrase from Dick Morris, Koizumi challenged the LDP's elders from within.

Koizumi burst into the Japanese political landscape at the beginning of the 21st century like a rock star. Unlike the elderly staid political leaders, whom the nation had endured for decades, Koizumi thrilled the people. They saw in Koizumi a new style of leader and a real commitment to reform, so different from the slow-moving prime ministers who stumbled in and out of power in dizzying succession.

In a series of hard-fought political battles, he challenged his own party, pulled it back from the verge of extinction, and led it to victory in the Upper House election of 2001.

Koizumi was prime minister of Japan and president of the LDP from 2001 to 2006. He retired from politics in 2009, and he remains the sixth longest serving prime minister in Japanese history.

Marcos Jr.'s unity coalition

It was generally assumed or hoped by many Filipinos that Marcos would run for the presidency in the scheduled elections of May 9, 2022.

When he finally announced his candidacy in October 2021, public reaction was tepid at first, even among those who wanted him to run. Many worried that he was too laid back as a political leader. Many could not understand how the clueless Maria Leonor "Leni" Robredo could have bested him in the 2016 vice-presidential balloting, and how the late former president Benigno Simeon "Noynoy" Aquino 3rd blatantly cheated him of victory, while he cowered against the victorious outgoing President Rodrigo Duterte.

In the 2022 election, some were worried that BBM would not have the fire in the belly to wage a successful campaign for the presidency. They questioned whether he could build a campaign team and campaign organization that could prevail in a heavily contested electoral fight.

BBM found the answer in the strategy of reform politics that he picked as his core campaign message.

He rejected the policy of negative campaigning against political rivals, in favor of a policy of civility and search for common ground.

He surveyed the political landscape and concluded that there was no political party that could effectively carry him as its standard-bearer, and effectively withstand the mudslinging and hysterics of the Yellows and Marcos haters.

He opted to forge a new kind of political coalition built around core Filipino values and traditions. He put his faith in an alliance that would cut across political parties, geographical divisions, attract the support of all the socioeconomic classes, and varied ethnic and religious groups, appeal to all generations and genders of voters.

Marcos summed up his campaign message in one word, "Unity." He knew its potential because he had tested it in his earlier campaign for the vice presidency in 2016.

While the Liberals and rival candidates clung to a strategy of negative campaigning, Marcos rejected all tactics of smearing his opponents and questioning their integrity or worthiness. He stood firmly on the coherence and power of his message, and hoped that his character and personality would do the rest in face-to-face meetings with voters.

When BBM stood before the nation as a candidate, he was able to plausibly put forward a vision and program of government that the people could believe in. He could be believed when he promised to lead an administration that would seek the welfare and well-being of all, and the certain stability and security of the nation.

The authenticity of this message is what attracted mammoth crowds to his campaign rallies and motorcades.

Public opinion pollsters correctly read the public pulse when they reported the voting public's response to Bongbong as electric and unprecedented. Pulse Asia, the country's leading pollster, said it had never seen in all its years of polling such a declarative and unshakable majority in favor of one candidate.

Marcos built it all from the recognition that he could not win by rooting his candidacy on Philippine politics as usual.

He refused to accept the decadent and weak party system as given.

He rejected the idea of just working patiently with traditional mainstream media. Instead he treated social media and the internet as a new formidable force in national politics, which he could nurture as his own media network for his campaign,

In short, Marcos became more than just a candidate for change, but a transforming or transformational leader, to use the term of the political scientist James Macgregor Burns.

Churchill echo

This will incense the Marcos haters. In a way also, BBM's rise to centerstage echoes the topsy-turvy story of Winston Churchill

It took Winston more than 30 years to find his way back to the summit of British politics.

It took Marcos 36 years of living in exile and many years of toil in the wilderness to find his way to the Philippine presidency.

When appendicitis prevented Churchill from appearing in public in the 1922 campaign, he lamented that he was "without an office, without a seat, without a party, and without an appendix."

Amid frustration in peacetime, Churchill became a transformational leader in the demanding challenge of World War 2, indubitably one of the greatest.

Marcos discovered hidden reserves of character and rays of insight in the elections of 2022, and in the harrowing crisis wrought by the coronavirus pandemic on nations and economies. Here he found his moment.

Marcos is stepping out of his father's shadow to claim his turn to lead our people and our country.

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Source: TheManila Times