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Marcos has always paid careful lip service, and sometimes more than that, to democratic forms. Some of his more controversial authoritarian powers were ratified in a carefully orchestrated 1981 referendum, which he carried with 80%. The same year, he won a presidential election against a toothless opponent and also got approval for a constitutional amendment that stretched his four-year term to six years. In 1984 Marcos held elections for the Batasang Pambansa, or National Assembly. Opposition politicians won roughly one-third of the seats. Despite widespread accusations of cheating, the elections were judged acceptable by the Philippine community at large.
Lord Acton, the British historian who wrote that power corrupts, would have recognized a fitting subject in the Marcos regime as its authority continued to expand. For years, critics have focused on the extravagance of First Lady Imelda, a former beauty-contest winner who has channeled huge amounts of money into pet projects through her roles as governor of Metro Manila, the administrative unit that encompasses the capital and its sprawling suburbs, and as national Minister of Human Settlements. Last week a U.S. congressional inquiry was looking into allegations that the Marcos family has been secretly funneling money, possibly including U.S. aid funds, into American real estate.
Whatever the ups and downs of his health, Marcos has always insisted on keeping a patriarchal grip on the apparatus of power. An outsider who was allowed to visit a caucus of the ruling New Society Movement last year reported that the session resembled "a big meeting of all the warring tribes, in which the President was like the chief, called upon to arbitrate all of their family feuds." None of the burning national difficulties of the day, such as the Communist insurgency and the ailing economy, were discussed. Instead, local and provincial party bosses offered up their special pleading to Marcos, who listened, scolded, took matters under advisement and rendered judgment.
Nowadays, according to a Western diplomat, the lack of reality surrounding the governing machinery is even more pronounced. Says he: "It's as if the central nervous system of government has broken down. Orders are issued at the center, but nothing happens in the provinces."
The woman who has challenged the lame but still powerful Marcos machine has few formal qualifications for her dragon-slaying role. Corazon Cojuangco Aquino is nonetheless fully at home with the local perquisites of privilege and authority. Her family and that of her martyred husband Benigno are charter members of the Philippine political and economic oligarchy that was pushed aside by Marcos. Corazon Aquino's father was a sugar baron, and her maternal grandfather was a Philippine Senator. One of her cousins, Eduardo Cojuangco Jr., is reckoned to be the President's closest economic crony. He is controller of a national coconut monopoly.