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Before Cory Aquino’s death, a close third behind news about Michael Jackson and Manny Paquiao was, it seems, Filipino concern about the upcoming election. Is this concentration of interest perhaps because all three—Jackson, Pacquiao and the election—belong to the same industry, the entertainment industry? Or is there real hope among the people that elections will somehow change their lives?

I have at times suggested that for many Filipinos elections are similar to cockfights: one enjoys them as entertainment, but does not expect the result to affect one’s life. Yet that view strikes me now as a cynical one, failing to do justice to the seriousness with which many take election issues, even to the point of risking their lives in protecting the ballots. Those who take such risks and others hope that elections will make a difference.

I would hate to see these hopes disappointed, and so I suggest that we take a hard look at the election process against the background of Philippine social structure.

Elections have historically been exercises of the elite and for the elite. In the election of 1907, property and literacy qualifications, and the exclusion of women, permitted only 1.4 percent of Filipinos to vote; Quezon and Osmeña emerged in that year as national leaders and remained so for the next 40 years. Provincial and national elites emerged around those two personalities and set up structures of land ownership and law and economic policy and political parties which would guarantee the continuance in power and wealth of their families and their social class. Those structures still exist.

Thus today, the ordinary Filipino gets to vote—if she wants her vote to count or even to be counted—not for a candidate of his or her own choice, but for one among those proposed by the political powers-that-be who have the party machinery behind them. He or she has no voice in choosing who the candidates will be, comparable to the primary election system in the United States, for example, which last year provided the dramatic head-to-head contest between Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton for the Democratic Party nomination.

Moreover, I am uncomfortable with what can be called messianic expectations with regard to a president. Ninety percent of election discussion focuses on “presidentiables” or “wannabes” who have their sights set on Malacañang, with the expectation that if the nation can only get the right person seated there, all of our problems will be on their way to solution.

Those with such expectations forget that the nation has—by short-circuiting the party system in the snap election of 1986—gotten at least one good person into Malacañang, Cory Aquino, and not all the nation’s problems were on the way to solution. She sat down and pushed the right buttons. She presided over the drafting and ratification of a Constitution embodying the nation’s hopes for social justice and a radical reform of the social structures—the land-owning system and electoral system and the lack of transparency in government, to take only some examples—which had kept the ordinary Filipino out of the mainstream of national development. She appointed a strong advocate of agrarian reform, Florencio “Butch” Abad, as secretary of the Department of Agrarian Reform.

Cory pushed the buttons indeed, but in many cases nothing happened. She had no political party committed to her program. With the congressional elections of 1987 the traditional provincial elites reasserted themselves—as they had done 20 years earlier following the Japanese occupation. Congress controlled the budget as it controlled the legislative process, and its Commission on Appointments could veto her Cabinet appointments, as it did that of Abad. Seven coup attempts threatened her administration, and so she had to tread lightly. Thus, 22 years later the farmers are still hoping for effective agrarian reform this time, while hopes are practically extinguished for the enabling legislation which would implement the constitutional provisions on political dynasties and the citizen’s right to information.

So where does the one who still has hope for the nation and for elections go from here? The first suggestion of this concerned observer is that—while not exaggerating its importance—one should not neglect the presidential race. Experience suggests that while a good president may be limited in what he or she can accomplish without a strong and united political party, there is no limit to the evil which a bad president can do. So the responsible voter would vote for the best of what may be a mediocre lot.

But secondly, the myriad non-government organizations and people’s organizations and basic ecclesial communities and local institutions might continue building from below, from the local level which is where it all begins. Congresspersons, including those who adamantly opposed agrarian reform, are elected by their local districts; farmers and those who believe in their cause might well make up a “hit list” of the “bad guys” and work to have them replaced. Municipal mayors and barangay captains touch people’s lives more directly than does the resident of Malacañang. Pampanga Gov. Eddie Panlilio has shown what can be done from the governor’s chair, and Mayor Jesse Robledo as mayor of Naga City. This is where the action really is, and without a solid foundation here, the nation’s politics will be forever built on sand.

This building from below is, in my estimation, the best and only way to assure the nation’s future, as these local initiatives coalesce, come together and eventually form a political party with its feet on the ground, a party the likes of which we have not seen since the Democratic Alliance was deprived of its seats in Congress by elite legislators, in 1946.

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