Political dynasties, celebrities and rich business groups now swarm the partylist elections. With stronger, more blatant push, they continue the trend of marginalizing the marginalized in an election that is supposed to be reserved for the marginalized.

The party list system is part of the democratic reforms or concessions realized in the struggles of the masses against the Marcos dictatorship. Under Republic Act No. 7941 or the Party List System Act, party-list representatives are to constitute 20 percent of the total House members.

The framers of Philippine reactionary constitution, legislators and Supreme Court were unlikely just being muddled when they phrased, asserted and reinterpreted, respectively, some time bombs in the people power-inspired provisions of the 1987 Constitution.

Serving a semicolonial semifeudal state, they were not out to change it. But to effect reconciliation and “democratic” transition after Edsa, some concessions and reforms were made. They just built-in to these certain leeways to renege. From this perspective, the worsening “perversion” of the party list system in the Philippines can more clearly be seen.

Like other concessions, this system only offers a meager slice of the vaunted democratic space. And this meager space is slippery. The masses of marginalized people and their organizations have to fight all the way to bringing their representation to Congress.

Decades after the first people power uprising ousted the Marcos Dictatorship in 1986, facts show that the democracy “restored” remains a democracy for the few ruling classes of big landlords, bourgeois compradors and bureaucrat capitalists. The real solutions to the recurrent crises plaguing the country still lay in the national democratic revolution which is advancing a 12-point program for genuine change and development and implementing it as allowed by the conditions of civil war in the country.

In 2025 elections and in the future elections, if the situation and trend continue, the ruling cliques of the reactionary government will only make it clearer to the people that their government of a few is getting worse and worse.

The partylist system they designed is faulty from the start. It offered a very limited and emasculated representation that steadily disappeared back to the hands of the elite and their dogs. From the start it has never been about democracy but deodorizing the crisis-wracked reactionary government. It has perverted its own deodorizer. As the truly marginalized groups flex their organized strength and struggle for reforms, they can only be expected to open the eyes of the masses to the true color of the reactionary state, starkly showing in the process that the national democratic revolution is the clear and only viable solution to the recurring crises. (Pinky Ang) ###