The second Marcos administration has deteriorated from a ‘stable era’ to a ‘chaotic’ one. Here’s a possible explanation. Published in Rappler on April 1, 2024.
The success of the Marcos-Duterte electoral alliance in 2022 was so massive it could be said that the political equivalent of Newton’s law of inertia applied to it. A body moving at constant speed in a straight line will continue moving at constant speed in a straight line unless a force acted upon it. The alliance—if all went well, if the different parts moved at the same speed and kept to the same line—had a lock on the 2028 presidential election, which in our part of the universe determines other political possibilities.
And then a force acted upon it. Now the alliance has descended into a war of the dynasties, between the Marcoses and the Dutertes, and an opening is starting to form, not necessarily for the political opposition but perhaps for a political third force led by someone like the populist, and popular, Senator Raffy Tulfo.
But the reality of politics has always been messy; perhaps Newton’s laws of motion cannot really explain it. For some analysts, the break between the Marcoses and the Dutertes was inevitable; inertia was never an explanation. But some politicians believed in the alliance, and continue to do so even in the middle of the dynastic war; the law of action and reaction governs their pragmatic attempts to end it.
Another way to look at the political situation today, to understand the “chaos” affecting the political class, is to borrow the theory at the heart of the popular Netflix series, 3-Body Problem, based on Cixin Liu’s The Three-Body Problemtrilogy.
What is the three-body problem?
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John Nery | Newsstand 