Marcos and Aquino Pull Out Stops; Watchdogs Check for a Fair Election

Ferdinand E. Marcos and Corazon Aquino have pulled out all the stops in their battle for the Philippine presidency, and the campaign is getting fierce. Whether the election will be fair, the weeks ahead will tell.

Marcos, 68, has ruled for 20 years, nearly half of that time under martial law, and he has been hammering his opponent as weak and inexperienced. He has made an issue of what he says are Communist links among her supporters.

Aquino, 52, accuses the president of conducting a witch hunt. “Let him keep on telling those lies,” she said last week. Marcos, she charges, has built “a regime with a record for rapacity and ruin.”

Filipino voters, most of them political junkies, are watching the contest with swelling interest. With Feb. 7, election day, less than a month away, the long-moribund pulse of politics at the presidential level is pumping again.

The public focus is on the campaigners and the issues. The politicians, feverishly working a step ahead, are cranking up the machinery to turn out the votes. And the watchdogs, domestic and foreign, have their eyes on Feb. 7. All sides say the Philippines needs fair and credible elections to settle the question of leadership and to right the foundering economy.

Communist Boycott

The only dissent is on the left. The Communist Party of the Philippines, which is directing an insurgency against the government, calls the election a contest between “reactionary forces” and is advocating a voter boycott. Last week, the militant Bayan organization, which has carried out anti-government street demonstrations across the country, joined the boycott forces.

Aquino and her running mate, Salvador Laurel, have been campaigning since Dec. 12, the day after they finally agreed on a unified opposition ticket. In appearances outside Manila, they lead the Marcos ticket by at least 3 to 1.

Crowds Enthusiastic

They have drawn large, enthusiastic crowds, fired up by Laurel’s strident oratory. But the crowds have come to see Aquino, who speaks softly but firmly, recalling the imprisonment and the 1983 assassination of her husband, Benigno S. Aquino Jr. She blames Marcos for his death.

Aquino is “too weak” and “an inexperienced pilot,” Marcos says. He told an interviewer he is embarrassed to be running against a woman.

Philippine political leaders typically are men who dispense favors, demand loyalty and rule from the top. Aquino promises that if she wins she will break the mold. She says her style will be consultative.

But if she is tentative on policy and politics, she is combative enough when attacked. If she is an inexperienced pilot, Aquino said, reelecting Marcos would be like “booking a flight on a plane full of terrorists.”

And, in a speech last week, Aquino declared: “Some who support my candidacy say that if I am elected my role will be that of mother of the nation. I am honored by the title, but I am campaigning to be president of our country. . . . And as president, I assure you, I shall lead. . . . For the male chauvinists in the audience, I intend as well to be the commander in chief of the armed forces of the Philippines.”

Aquino Untested at Polls

Still, “Cory” Aquino remains untested at the polls. Her honesty is not challenged, but practical politicians question whether that is enough to lead a government. After she said that she has no detailed program of government and that “the only thing I can offer the Filipino people is my sincerity,” Marcos said, “Mrs. Aquino apparently regards statecraft as no different from faith healing.”

The president’s latest line is that the voters must decide “between democracy and communism.” But last November, when he announced the snap elections a year before they were scheduled, he probably came closer to the truth when he said that “the issue is Marcos.”

In order to win, the opposition must not only convince the electorate that the president’s time is over but also defeat the formidable political machinery of Marcos’ KBL party (the New Society Movement).

The power of the machine was on display last week in Manila at a rally for Marcos and his vice presidential nominee, Arturo Tolentino. A huge crowd filled a park area near the Makati business area. Grandmothers and schoolchildren wore Marcos-Tolentino T-shirts.

While the crowd waited for Marcos, who was late, there was entertainment. The young film idols “Pops” Fernandez and Martin Nievera appeared, and the Makati Gay Society did a disco number. Free sandwiches seemed almost an afterthought.

Machine Runs Villages

The KBL machine has stood between the opposition and the presidential palace from the start. The vast majority of the nation’s villages, or barangays , are run by KBL supporters. The barangay leaders, nominally nonpartisan, are key men on election day. Like precinct captains in Chicago, they are expected to turn out the vote. Party funds flow through them. Vote-buying is a tradition in Philippine politics, and the KBL has more money than the opposition.

What political machinery the opposition has belongs to the United Nationalist Democratic Organization (UNIDO), the party built by vice presidential nominee Laurel. Aquino, although running under the UNIDO banner, was the candidate of a patched-together coalition called Laban Ng Bayan, which is translated loosely as the People’s Struggle. The two parties have joined on a ticket, but remain fractious allies.

“A bandwagon this is becoming, an avalanche,” UNIDO Secretary General Rene Espina said last week.

But he conceded that the unity ticket has trouble in the ranks. The “do-gooders,” he said, referring to Aquino’s supporters, “do not know how to run a campaign; they run around town like chickens without heads.”

Split in Cebu

The friction has splintered the opposition in Cebu, the country’s second-largest city and a city Aquino needs for victory.

Momentum is critical and it appears to lie with Marcos at this point. The president’s red-scare charges, true or false, have put Aquino on the defensive.

Richard Gordon Jr., the KBL mayor of Olongapo, outside the U.S. naval base at Subic Bay, said two weeks ago that he thinks that the opposition might win the vote-rich Manila area by a 9-1 margin. By Thursday he had scaled his forecast of the margin to 7 to 3 at most.

The opposition hopes to win more than 40% of the votes in Manila and elsewhere on Luzon Island, then pick up the victorious edge in Cebu or elsewhere. If Marcos can cut into the Manila-area vote, Aquino’s chances diminish sharply. In a close vote either way, the deciding factor could be election day fraud or force.

“The president will have to cheat to win,” Espina said.

Jose Concepcion Jr., chairman of the National Citizens Movement for Free Elections, a civilian watchdog group, said last week that he is satisfied so far with the precautions that have been taken.

Ballots Being Watched

The movement’s observers have watched the ballots every step of the way: at the mill where the paper was produced and watermarked, at the factory where it was cut into ballot-size sheets and, currently, at the printers. At every point, Concepcion said, his monitors have been assured that no extra ballots were being manufactured.

The movement is also pressing the government Commission on Elections to purge registration lists of so-called flying voters, people registered in more than one district.

Concepcion’s monitors are also watching the production of a special ink, which contains silver nitrate, that is to be used to mark the finger of each voter who casts a ballot, ensuring that no one votes a second time. An ink used in the 1984 parliamentary elections proved to be less than indelible.

But Concepcion admits that the major potential for fraud will be on election day. In past elections, armed men--in some cases, soldiers--barred some voters from the polls; ballot boxes were stolen, and vote totals were changed between the time they were recorded at outlying polling places and the time they were made public by the Election Commission.

Finally, there remains the question of whether the election will be held at all. Aquino suggested last week that Marcos was putting emphasis on the communism issue to prepare the electorate for a reimposition of martial law.

At a press conference Friday, Marcos denied planning to do so. He said, as he has before, that he would declare martial law only if there were fighting in the streets.

But the opposition expects Marcos to use every advantage of the presidency. An often-heard opposition comment: “Marcos would not call an election he expects to lose.”