Why Losers are so Reluctant to Concede: the Philippine Case

By Ronald Meinardus

Advertising For the international media, the Philippine elections are a done deal, since the head of the Commission on Elections in an all-but-orthodox manner unofficially announced that President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo beat her main contender, ex-movie star Fernando Poe Jr, by more than 900,000 votes. This margin and the quality of the source were sufficient for the news agencies to declare the incumbent the winner.
For the Philippine media, however, the election saga is far from over. Manila's newspapers have focused on the legislative deliberations aimed at finding a solution on how best to canvass the votes.

The opposition seems bent on prolonging this procedure as long as possible. With the probable losers still far away from conceding defeat, it is not easy to identify their ultimate strategy.

Lack of cohesiveness was one of the major weaknesses of the Poe campaign before the elections, and this has not improved. Why should the opposition wish to draw out the process and further prevent the government from getting back to work, one may ask. More than one reason comes to mind.

Amid allegations of cheating and manipulation, it is reasonable to call for close scrutiny of the results. While some members of the opposition are concentrating on doing that, others give the impression they don't yet realize that the campaign is over.

The objective here seems to be to make life as difficult as possible for the incumbent administration. Reportedly, fringe elements in the opposition are even threatening mob rule and open rebellion.

A further explanation for the prolonging the political process is of a more psychological nature, having to do with what a Philippine commentator recently termed "the trauma of defeat." He says: "Today, a candidate either wins or has been cheated; the word `lost' has ceased to be part of the Philippine political vocabulary."

I find this observation intrig-uing. In the seemingly endless post-election statements, I have yet to find a confession from a losing candidate that the loss may also have resulted from one's own shortcomings. It seems that self-criticism by politicians is anathema in this country. This mentality may explain many of the problems in the political process since the elections.

In theory it is very simple: every election produces winners and losers. Selecting one or more individuals from a group of candidates is the very essence of the electoral exercise. Defeat is an integral part of the democratic equation.

The manner in which politicians and the political class as a whole deal with defeat says a lot about the political culture of a country. I have not come across a place where politicians have such a hard time conceding defeat as is the case in the Philippines. Most Filipino friends I have talked to about this phenomenon argue that this has to do with the losers' desire to avoid "losing face."

Having lived more than six years in Confucian South Korea, I am well aware of the importance of avoiding personal embarrassment in a social context. On the other hand, I have never quite understood (let alone accepted) why East Asians are supposedly exclusive in this regard. Europeans and people from other parts of the world have similar psychological conditions. They, too, dread losing face.

Still, in most countries defeated candidates seem to have no problem in publicly conceding defeat. In my country, Germany, the losing side routinely concedes defeat long before the official results are out. Usually this happens very quickly, as the main contenders possess empirical evidence from exit polls that often show the winners even before voting ends.

With reliable data published by the media, it is considered inconceivable for a losing candidate not to concede.

In most Western democracies the burden of doing just that seems far smaller than in the Philippines. Apart from the psychological imperative to avoid loss of face, institutional factors may also play a role. Unlike the Philippines, where all electoral campaigns are personalized (and therefore personal), elections in many other democracies are fought primarily between rival political parties.

In these countries too, politicians abhor losing, but their defeat is more bearable as it is at least in part perceived as a collective failure. The point I want to make is that, in contrast to the Philippines, candidates see themselves more as part of a larger collective (usually a political party), and, in case of defeat, the burden of "losing face" is shared by many others.

A personalized politics makes political parties weak; in the Philippine elections, parties hardly played a role at all. On the national level, the main contenders formed alliances of convenience with the sole purpose of winning votes, and many campaigns on the local level were dominated by dynasties and clans.

While the political antagonists continue to fight it out in the legislature, all sides agree that the Philippines faces daunting challenges. The ballooning budget deficit is considered the new administra-tion's first priority.

But for Philippine democracy to become stronger, political reforms involving both the electoral system and the political parties may be more important than the budgetary mess.

These issues have been dealt with in the past by governments, parliaments and also civil society. In spite of these numerous reformist initiatives, electoral politics in the Philippines continue to be conducted as they are, proving that powerful forces are uninterested in genuine change.

As long as this remains the case, Filipinos will continue to call their democracy a "demo-crazy."

Dr. Ronald Meinardus was the former Resident Representative of the Friedrich Naumann Foundation in the Philippines and will leave Manila late September for a new posting in the Middle East. He writes a blog at www.myliberaltimes.com