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The urban poor and principled partisanship

by Anna Marie A. Karaos
Philippine Daily Inquirer
May 11, 2010

IN PREVIOUS ELECTIONS, CIVIL SOCIETY groups mostly avoided campaigning or openly supporting candidates or political parties, implicitly propagating the notion that partisanship was not a proper role for them. Ironically, even though deeply committed to improving the quality of governance and increasing citizens’ participation in political processes, these groups chose not to publicly endorse candidates and confined their activities to conducting voters’ education, training volunteers for poll-watching or helping grass-roots organizations develop policy agenda which they would present to candidates.

In this election, a good number of civil society organizations opted to go partisan. They dared to challenge the long-held belief among NGOs and people’s organizations (POs) that engaging the elections in a partisan way would foment division, compromise the credibility of their organizations and make building constructive relationships with the elected officials, especially local ones, difficult if these had not been the favored candidates.

In a democracy, elections are the chief means by which citizens can make their leaders accountable. If this is so, should not elections then be used precisely as an occasion for citizens, especially the organized among them, to make public their choices and the reasons for these choices? By this logic, partisan engagement in elections is in fact an exercise in making leaders accountable. If civil society groups preach accountability, they ought to be prepared to transform this principle into something practical and efficacious during elections.

Early in the campaign period, urban poor groups belonging to some of the biggest urban poor national, regional and city-wide federations made a decision to support a presidential and a vice-presidential candidate on the basis of an urban poor policy agenda. One such network, the Urban Poor Alliance, decided on a process for choosing the candidates it would support and for seeking an agreement with the candidates on a reform agenda.

The first step in the agreed process was to screen the presidential and vice-presidential contenders based on a scorecard. The members decided on the criteria the scorecard would contain and formulated indicators for judging the candidates. Among the criteria identified were moral integrity, leadership and background, bias for the poor, including previous positions taken on issues of the urban poor, and chances of winning.

After hurdling logistical and other challenges along the way, the alliance chose Senators Noynoy Aquino and Mar Roxas as the presidential and vice-presidential candidates, respectively, that it would campaign for. The next step was to begin discussing with the two candidates the policy agenda which the alliance wanted them to pursue if elected.

Again this process took many weeks and much painstaking work. Consensus on the agenda had to be formed among the member organizations. The agenda contained specific executive actions and a few legislative measures which had been a product of numerous discussions within the alliance. Still, explicit approval of all the agenda items needed to be obtained from the members to ensure full ownership of the agenda by the alliance. Once consensus was secured, a dialogue with the two candidates was set.

This meeting took place on Nov. 27, 2009. Representatives of the member federations of the alliance took turns presenting and explaining the agenda to Aquino and Roxas. The two candidly responded to each of the items, accepting some of them, qualifying or presenting alternatives to others and promising to further study some others. After this first dialogue, the members of the alliance discussed whether they were satisfied with the responses of the candidates. Reaching consensus was not easy. Further talks were held with the policy team of the Noy-Mar campaign, even as many members in different cities began campaigning for the Liberal Party candidates. There was a strong commitment on the part of the alliance to campaign for their chosen candidates but at the same time it wanted to secure the candidates’ acceptance of its policy agenda.

After months of discussing and refining the agenda, a Covenant with the Urban Poor was finally agreed and signed by Aquino and Roxas and published in a major daily and in a tabloid. What distinguished this covenant from most other candidates’ platforms was that the agenda contained not motherhood statements but specific executive actions which were supported by an identifiable constituency of urban poor and civil society organizations and had gone through a careful process of study, deliberation and dialogue between this constituency and the candidates.

Many citizens’ groups and even politicians have been calling for principled politics and a politics of change but have done little to translate this into action. The urban poor took the initiative in developing a process by which principled politics in a partisan way can be practiced. Candidates cannot but respond to serious initiatives from citizens. If there had been more of such exercises in this election across a broad range of sectors, the tenor of the campaign could have veered away from the mudslinging, name-calling and false advertising that degraded the quality of the present electoral contest.

There will be other elections in the future. The urban poor have shown that partisan principled politics on the basis of an agenda developed not instantly but over years of informed advocacy can become the stuff of campaigns in future elections.

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