A Colorful Cast Vies for Philippine Presidency

It’s show time in the Philippines. The presidential campaign is in full swing, and for sheer razzle-dazzle, mudslinging, rough-and-tumble entertainment there’s nothing quite like it in Southeast Asia.

The original cast of 83 candidates, including one who ran as Jesus Christ, has been whittled down to 10. The remaining candidates include a former Rambo-like movie actor with a reputation for womanizing and hard drinking and a onetime cop known as “Dirty Harry” whose platform boils down to “Freeze, or I’ll shoot.” Until last week, the list also included a convicted felon of fabulous wealth, former first lady Imelda Marcos, who says, “If you know how rich you are, you are not rich.”

Though a few rallies have been canceled because of violence, most of the fireworks have been verbal. The actor has been accused by the opposition of contacting a police colonel to kill the president. The cop, who is part Chinese, has had to defend himself against charges that he is not “a natural-born Filipino” and has revealed on television that his parents were not married at his birth and that he never met his father. The candidate who used to run the state lottery has deflected attacks by the Roman Catholic Church by reminding everyone, “Priests and nuns play Lotto too.”

But histrionics aside, the May 11 election is a significant event in a region where countries such as Indonesia hold stage-managed presidential votes; others, such as Vietnam and Laos, don’t hold any at all; and elsewhere, political debate is largely muted and controlled by the government. For the freewheeling, flamboyant Philippines, the preelection show is confirmation that the legacy of late dictator Ferdinand E. Marcos has been relegated to the past and Southeast Asia’s most vibrant democracy is alive and well.

President Fidel V. Ramos, a West Point graduate, is reluctantly leaving office because the constitution limits him to a single six-year term. He is widely respected as one of Southeast Asia’s capable leaders and has helped the Philippines weather the regional economic crisis in relatively good condition. He also has moved his nation--an English-speaking, Catholic, former U.S. colony--into the Asian mainstream.

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Under Ramos, democratic institutions have been strengthened and major economic reforms initiated. All the candidates say they intend to keep those policies in place. But as newspaper columnist Fernando Barican puts it: “Debate in this campaign doesn’t really matter. People feel their lives won’t change much, one way or the other. What does matter to them, though, are job opportunities and law and order.”

Ramos is supporting House Speaker Jose de Venecia, a journalist turned millionaire businessman, and has suggested that the media conduct a “demolition” campaign against Vice President Joseph Estrada, who also is running for president. Ramos and Estrada have not spoken for months.

But Estrada, a 61-year-old former actor who received five Philippine best-actor awards while playing hard-bitten good guys in a score of movies, has a comfortable lead in the polls. “If there is no cheating, he is going to win,” said Catholic leader Cardinal Jaime Sin, who contends that Estrada does not have the moral qualifications to be president.

Estrada, a college dropout with a slick Elvis Presley hairdo, tells skeptical Filipinos that his womanizing, gambling and hard-drinking days are behind him and that his only remaining vice is smoking four packs of Lucky Strikes a day. He pokes fun at his own intellectual shortcomings and tells rallies not to be concerned by his responses, such as the one he gave in February to a question about globalization:

“Well, whether it’s good or bad, we cannot afford not to be included in the globalization. Because we cannot be, ah, I would say, an island. So we have to be included in the global, ah, trade, and global, ah, whatever. I would say that, in globalization, I would say everybody should be included.”

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Estrada was so smitten with a contestant in the 1994 Miss Universe pageant in Manila that he told the public: “If Miss Colombia will have me, I’ll leave my wife for her, or even have her assassinated.” And he once asked in the Senate, where he served a term, “Why do we pass all these laws when nobody follows them?”

The moneyed class scorns Estrada. But the masses adore him, and he has promised to make them the focus of his presidency. They delight in his self-effacing mannerism and his malapropisms, which have been collected in the book, “How to Speak English Without Really Trial.”

De Venecia has narrowed the gap between himself and Estrada in recent weeks. In a country where election fraud is traditionally rampant and journalists often expect favors for supporting a candidate, the strength of Ramos’ party machine could push De Venecia into the lead among 34 million registered voters. De Venecia also would be helped if other candidates withdraw from the race to form an alliance against Estrada.

Trailing Estrada and De Venecia is Alfred “Dirty Harry” Lim, former mayor and police chief of Manila. He is the favorite of former President Corazon Aquino. Lim was a take-no-prisoners beat cop who rose through the ranks. Once, after a mayor demoted him from a senior position in the criminal department to the traffic division, he took revenge by ensuring that the mayor got stuck in traffic jams on cross-city trips.

The candidate most pursued by the international media--Congresswoman Imelda Marcos--dropped out of the race Wednesday, citing fear that her candidacy might spur violence. Having barely campaigned, she had support from only 2% of respondents in polls. But she had been profiled by the New Yorker, had been scheduled to be on the cover of the Times of London Sunday Magazine and was awaiting a television crew from ABC’s “Prime Time Live.”