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Philippines Opposition Parties
The New Society Movement fell apart when Marcos fled the
country. A former National Assembly speaker, Nicanor Yniguez,
tried to "reorganize" it, but others scrambled to start new
parties with new names. Blas Ople, Marcos's minister of labor,
formed the Nationalist Party of the Philippines (Partido
Nationalista ng Pilipinas) in March 1986. Enrile sought political
refuge in a revival of the country's oldest party, the
Nacionalista Party, first formed in 1907
(see A Collaborative Philippine Leadership
, ch. 1). Enrile used the
rusty Nacionalista
machinery and an ethnic network of Ilocanos to campaign for a no
vote on the Constitution, and when that failed, for his election
to the Senate. Lengthy negotiations with mistrustful political
"allies" such as Ople and Laurel delayed the formal
reestablishment of the Nacionalista Party until May 1989. Enrile
also experimented with a short-lived Grand Alliance for Democracy
with Francisco "Kit" Tatad, the erstwhile minister of information
for Marcos, and the popular movie-star senator, Joseph Estrada.
In 1991 Enrile remained a very powerful political figure, with
landholdings all over the Philippines and a clandestine network
of dissident military officers.
Vice President Laurel had few supporters in the military but
long-term experience in political organizing. From his family
base in Batangas Province, Laurel had cautiously distanced
himself from Marcos in the early 1980s, then moved into open
opposition under the banner of a loose alliance named the United
Nationalist Democratic Organization (UNIDO). Eventually, the
UNIDO became Laurel's personal party. Aquino used the party's
organization in February 1986, although her alliance with Laurel
was never more than tactical. UNIDO might have endured had
Aquino's allies granted Laurel more patronage when local
governments were reorganized. As it was, Laurel could reward his
supporters only with positions in the foreign service, and even
there the opportunities were severely limited. The party soon
fell by the wayside. Laurel and Enrile formed the United
Nationalist Alliance, also called the Union for National Action,
in 1988. The United Nationalist Alliance proposed a contradictory
assortment of ideas including switching from a presidential to a
parliamentary form of government, legalizing the Communist Party
of the Philippines, and extending the United States bases treaty.
By 1991 Laurel had abandoned these ad hoc creations and gone back
to the revived Nacionalista Party, in a tentative alliance with
Enrile.
In 1991 a new opposition party, the Filipino Party (Partido
Pilipino), was organized as a vehicle for the presidential
campaign of Aquino's estranged cousin Eduardo "Danding"
Cojuangco. Despite the political baggage of a long association
with Marcos, Cojuangco had the resources to assemble a powerful
coalition of clans.
The Liberal Party, a democratic-elitist party founded in
1946, survived fourteen years of dormancy (1972 to 1986), largely
through the staunch integrity of its central figure, Senate
president Jovito Salonga, a survivor of the Plaza Miranda grenade
attack of September 1971. In 1991 Salonga also was interested in
the presidency, despite poor health and the fact that he is a
Protestant in a largely Catholic country.
In September 1986 the revolutionary left, stung by its shortsighted boycott of the February election, formed a legal
political party to contest the congressional elections. The
Partido ng Bayan (Party of the Nation) allied with other leftleaning groups in an Alliance for New Politics that fielded 7
candidates for the Senate and 103 for the House of
Representatives, but it gained absolutely nothing from this
exercise. The communists quickly dropped out of the electoral
arena and reverted to guerrilla warfare. As of 1991, no
Philippine party actively engaged in politics espoused a radical
agenda.
Data as of June 1991
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