Dealing with Marcoses’ charm o ensive

DURING the May 2022 presidential elections, thencandidate Ferdinand Marcos Jr. was not entirely the favorite of many in the scientific community, and in academia. Straw votes and informal polling conducted in many universities, including their faculty, revealed that Marcos was even at the bottom among the candidates.

A mere suspicion that an academic was favoring Marcos, more so if the person concerned was actually for Marcos, would position him or her for outright cancellation by peers in academe.

I do not have to go very far and cite the experience of others, like that of former national security adviser and retired professor Clarita Carlos, to attest to the heavy burden borne by people who were “Marcos-tagged,” rightly or wrongly. I experienced it firsthand. Even if I did not vote for Marcos, since I voted for Norberto Gonzales, and just because I was trying to be fair in my commentaries about the former, not to mention my critical stance toward his fiercest rival, I became the object of a vilification campaign. Until now, those who cannot move on from their resounding electoral defeat, and continue to dwell in their mistaken fantasies about my politics, remain convinced that I am a Marcos loyalist.

To put it simply, the academe, and the scientific community is not friendly territory for President Marcos. And yet, he braved the odds and spoke at the 2023 Annual Scientific Conference and the 90th General Membership Assembly of the National Research Council of the Philippines held last Saturday, March 11, at the Philippine International Convention Center. And in his speech he declared his support for the scientific endeavor, and his recognition of the value of scientists and their research to national development.

And this is not all political talk.

For several years, researchers kept on pushing for digital agriculture. It was President Marcos who eventually made a commitment to institutionalize the Department of Science and

Technology’s digital platform Sarai, which is a technology developed with the leadership of researchers from the School of Environmental Science and Management of UP Los Baños, that would provide agricultural stakeholders with site-specific crop advisories based on data gathered from the Diwata microsatellite. He expressed support for the establishment of the Virology Institute of the Philippines and the Centers for Disease Control. And even during his campaign, he already articulated his commitment to a robust scientific agenda. He commits to improving the internet backbone of the country, and for increasing more scholarships in science-oriented degrees. And five days after on Thursday, March 16, President Marcos once again ventured into what could be considered as hostile territory. He graced the groundbreaking ceremonies of a housing project in Naga City under the Pambansang Pabahay ng Pamilyang Pilipino of his administration. He also earlier attended the opening of a Kadiwa center in neighboring Pili, Camarines Sur. This is a province that awarded him with only 9.51 percent of the total votes, or 102,921 out of the 1,307,553 total votes cast. This lopsided defeat is simply because Camarines Sur and Naga City are the bailiwicks of his fiercest rival, former vice president Maria Leonor Robredo. Less than a year after, President Marcos, despite being preferred only by less than one out of 10 voters in Camarines Sur, has now become its adopted son by virtue of Resolution 133, Series of 2023, passed unanimously by the Sangguniang Panlalawigan of the province.

This is typical of the Marcos style of doing politics. And it is a clear answer to those who are demanding evidence of how he will forge unity in a divided political landscape, and continue to doubt his seriousness in reaching out to his critics.

The president’s sister, Sen. Maria Imelda Josefa Marcos, also conducted her own unity walk to match the talk that became the signature of her brother’s campaign. She invited the warring factions of her brother’s support base, particularly the bloggers and vloggers who are now at each other’s throats, to dinner. It was a symbolic gesture, and is symptomatic of the Marcos brand of a charm offensive. Recognizing that the root cause of discontent of some Marcos supporters is their view that supporters of former president Rodrigo Duterte have increasingly become more critical of the president, Senator Marcos made an effort to project unity between the Marcoses and the Dutertes by earlier posing with the former president in the Davao screening of the movie she produced, “Martyr or Murderer.”

It is too early to tell if such moves will appease the disgruntled supporters, considering that some of the discontent also stems from what they perceive as a palpable preferential treatment given to some vloggers, particularly by some powerful members of the Marcos family.

For the Marcoses, politics is always addition, even if it means bringing into their very large tent pretenders and sycophants, and those who would only obviously become allies simply because it is the most politically convenient and promising. But the acceptance of the Marcoses of these political opportunists and butterflies is but the other side of the courage the President has shown to venture into the most hostile territory inhabited by antiMarcos academics and scientists, and of that part of the archipelago that gave him his worst defeat in the last elections. It is a risk that the Marcoses will always take, not only to honestly forge unity, but perhaps to play the game of politics where you keep your enemies closer. Disgruntled supporters who feel taken for granted can only hope that their reliability and loyalty should not lead them to be ignored.

This should serve as a lesson to those who support the President and the Marcoses. In their game of politics where they reach out even to critics, it doesn’t hurt to play a bit hard to get. Blind loyalty may not be the best option. It is easy to take for granted those who are always there through thick and thin. That is true in personal relationships as it is in politics. (ManilaTimes.net)

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