PHILIPPINES : Best-Laid Plans Lead to Ballot Triumph for Reform-Minded President Ramos : He cast the election as a referendum on his economic liberalization policies.

When Fidel V. Ramos was elected president of the Philippines three years ago, he won only 23% of the popular vote, and the only member of his political party to win a Senate seat was his sister.

With such a thin mandate, Ramos immediately ran into difficulties trying to push his program of economic reforms through Congress. For a while, there were fears that he would follow in the footsteps of his predecessor, Corazon Aquino, as the head of an administration characterized by inaction.

But Ramos, 67, confounded his critics by carefully forging a coalition over the past 18 months with another reform-minded political party, Laban, which helped provide the momentum to get some key economic liberalization measures enacted into law. In the run-up to last week’s congressional and local elections, he declared that he wanted the vote to be a referendum on the first three years of his administration.

The results gave him plenty to crow about.

Although official returns are still weeks from being completed, unofficial estimates suggest that Ramos’ coalition won nine of the12 seats being contested in the 24-member Senate, Congress’ upper house. Out of 204 seats in the House of Representatives, the coalition picked up 180, almost 90%.

Ramos’ Lakas Party and its Laban partners also won 65 of the 76 governorships being contested and 83% of the mayoral races. For Ramos, a rather colorless, cigar-chomping politician who likes to be known as Steady Eddie, the landslide was an especially sweet victory.

“This is a clear signal to go ahead full steam with our reform and development program for the country,” Ramos said. “Naturally, I could not be more pleased by this popular endorsement of my administration. But I must say that I am just as happy with the credibility and relatively orderly conduct of the elections--and the growing political maturity of our electorate that these qualities imply.”

Alexander R. Magno, a political scientist at the University of the Philippines, said there was a perception among voters that the Ramos coalition would help create more jobs.

“There was a very clear shift in voter attitude away from political issues to economic issues,” Magno explained. In the process, opposition nationalist candidates, who supported protecting domestic industry behind a wall of tariffs, were swept from office.

It doesn’t take a political scientist to perceive the changes that have occurred in the Philippines in the past three years. For one thing, the roar of generators, which used to line the streets of Manila to compensate for almost daily electrical brownouts, has disappeared thanks to Ramos’ decision to throw the power-generation industry open to foreign, private ownership, a radical step even by Asia’s free-market standards.

The overall economy has roared ahead too, especially compared to the stagnation under Aquino’s government, which was beset by coup attempts and natural disasters. Gross national product, a measure of the total output of goods and services, grew 5.1% in 1994, and its growth is expected to hit 6% this year.

In addition to endorsing Ramos’ reforms, the election results also indicated that Philippine voters have become a good deal more independent than in the past. They turned out a number of incumbents who were poor administrators or tainted by corruption, rather than simply voting for lists of candidates handed out by village mayors--the traditional manner in which machine politics has worked in the Philippines.

The Senate victory of former Health Minister Juan Flavier, who earned the wrath of the Roman Catholic Church hierarchy by promoting contraception in this overwhelmingly Catholic nation, appeared to show voters no longer obey their parish priests either, at least on political matters.