Quotes of the Day

Gloria Macapagal Arroyo's chopper swoops down beside a provincial squatter colony, and surprised residents swarm as the diminutive President of the Philippines descends in a tangerine pantsuit and five-inch cork heels. Arroyo settles into the front of a 15-seat Toyota van, opens the window and barks at aides in a startlingly mannish voice: "Candy! Candy! Get the candy!" As the van starts to roll through Laguna province, Arroyo distributes aquamarine peppermints in wrappers stamped with her name to children, and to children only. Adults get waves, a China-doll smile and a plea to support her in next week's presidential election.

But when the van hits a deserted stretch, the candidate transforms into President. She growls toward the back of the bus: "Mayor!" A local mayor seeking re-election stumbles forward, garbed in a clownishly colored campaign vest and a matching cap. He crouches behind the front seat, hand on Arroyo's headrest, and delivers a fiscal prayer. The funds for a road in his town have been held up by bureaucrats. He needs 3 million pesos (about $53,000). Arroyo sternly scans the road ahead, but then humans come into view—the local loafer, shopkeepers, bare-chested kids on bicycles—and the smile flicks on, the hand waves. When the potential voters disappear, the presidential pout returns. Arroyo waits, legs tightly crossed, for aides on cell phones to deliver information on the mayor and the 3 million pesos he desires.

Arroyo is both President and presidential candidate, and her main campaign tactic is to meld those roles into a winning combination. Her topsy-turvy three years in office have had few highs but some memorable lows, including a coup attempt against her last July and a Senate investigation of her lawyer husband, Miguel, for money laundering and keeping excess campaign funds. (He was ultimately cleared of the allegations.) Arroyo has bounced back by trying to show the people that her government is working for them. Four months ago she gave 660,000 people three-month jobs sweeping the dusty streets of Metro Manila. Two months ago she expanded health coverage for some 5 million poor Filipinos. The beneficiaries of this largesse know whom to thank as plainly as those kids sucking peppermints. The sweepers wear T shirts that read I LOVE GLORIA or GLORIA LOVES ME; the health-insurance cards show Arroyo's smiling face. The overall message is that she's already President and has the experience to tackle the Philippines' almost endless challenges: poverty, a perpetually underperforming economy, Muslim militancy and Asia's longest-running communist insurgency.

Unfortunately for Arroyo, her chief rival is Fernando Poe Jr., a half-American action star in Philippine films who's performing from his own script. In the movies, Poe often portrays the strong-but-silent type, and that's his campaign strategy, too. Poe doesn't pretend to have experience with health insurance, foreign affairs, Muslim rebels—although he played a police officer from the southern Philippines in Muslim Magnum .357—or building provincial roads. He refuses to hold press conferences, give interviews or otherwise describe what a Poe presidency might be like. His stump speeches could be transcribed on one side of a Popsicle stick.

But on campaign sorties, Poe stands on the back of a pickup truck beneath the sweltering sun bestowing a gracious, grateful smile on frenzied crowds, and people throw themselves on the road to halt his truck, to possibly touch his hand. Poe's admirers would probably give candy to him if they could afford it, which they can't—he draws support mostly from the poorest of the Philippine poor.

It's tempting to view next week's election simply as a contest between a not-too-popular President with a Ph.D. in economics and a popcorn idol who dropped out of the eighth grade. But the subtext of the Poe campaign runs deep. His real message is that Arroyo can't solve the Philippines' woes because the problem resides in her and her whole class of cynical, overeducated, profiteering, wouldn't-know-a-slum-if-their-housemaid-invited-them-to-hers supporters. The country, according to Poe, needs more than a President with brains or experience. It needs a savior. So far, Poe's messiah act appears to be playing quite well: surveys say the race is neck and neck.

The Philippines is widely described as the most freewheeling democracy in Asia, and if recent events suggest it could lose that crown—South Korea impeached its President in March, and Taiwan's recent election was a cliff-hanger marked by an assassination attempt on the President—think again. For one thing, Filipinos like their elections big. Next week, they'll be voting not just for President and Vice President but for nearly all the elected positions in the land, down to vice mayors and city councilors—17,000 in all. Some 100,000 candidates are running, making and breaking alliances, plastering the countryside with campaign posters and guarding against the mortal violence that always characterizes Philippine elections.

And Filipinos have a tradition so far unique to their country: reversing election outcomes they don't like by means that might be called democratic, although hardly constitutional. People Power was first used to eject strongman Ferdinand Marcos after he rigged a re-election in 1986. Three years ago, Arroyo became President after Joseph Estrada, the first action star to grab the presidency, was hounded from office by street protests when the Senate failed to impeach him on plunder charges. (That was immediately dubbed EDSA II, after Epifanio de los Santos Avenue, the Manila artery on which demonstrators usually gather.) The people who installed Arroyo in EDSA II considered it a triumph of virtue over venality and the just unmaking of an election in which movie-mad masses had put a knucklehead in Malacañang, the ornate presidential palace. Three months later, thousands of Estrada's supporters stormed Malacañang, almost ousting Arroyo. They called that EDSA III.

Poe's campaign can be seen as revenge against People Power: another screen actor is running, one who happens to be more popular than Estrada ever was—and with no experience outside the world of movies. (Before becoming President, Estrada was a mayor, Congressman and Vice President.) As in 1998, the people most likely to vote for the film star are the urban and rural poor, what marketing companies call the D and E classes—people who make less than $5,360 a year and who happen to constitute 91% of the nation's population. Arroyo's supporters tend to be from the richer, but tiny, A, B and C classes. They dominate Manila, however, and it's hard to find an office worker or professional who doesn't show an instant disdain for Poe and a visceral disgust when Estrada's name comes up. They say that if Poe wins, it will inevitably lead to EDSA IV—a toppling from the presidency, a public humiliation, a political crucifixion.

Filipinos loved The Passion of the Christ. It played during Holy Week, when Filipinos had themselves scourged and crucified, an annual tradition in Asia's only predominantly Christian country. If Mel Gibson were to visit a video store in Los Angeles' Little Manila district, he would discover a great simpatico with Philippine action films. Christ's torment is as central to Philippine Catholicism as it is to Gibson's traditionalist faith, and Philippine action melodramas are undisguised passion plays—a man of recognized purity and humility is brought low by an evil society threatened by virtue. He suffers mightily, but ultimately triumphs against perfidy, giving hope for salvation to his oppressed village or police force. Admittedly, this is always accomplished by gunfire and vengeful bloodletting, which isn't quite Christian, but movies have their own orthodoxies.

Poe (or FPJ, as he is known to fans) is the genre's king of kings, and he has portrayed them all: the slum leader cracking gamblers' heads, an environmentalist mayor, numberless corruption-busting cops getting the hairy eyeball from dirty colleagues. As a candidate for President, Poe is indistinguishable from the cinematic redeemer, offering nothing more—and nothing less—than virtue in a world sunk in corruption and despair. Humility is a vital element, and Poe's boosters make the most of that, saying his lack of tony qualifications or experience in the dirty game of politics will ensure a virtuous presidency. According to Eduardo Angara, former President of the Philippine Senate and one of Poe's chief aides: "The issue of this campaign is not experience and education. It's trust. What's the use of experience and education if our economy has been brought down to the ground?" Former First Lady Imelda Marcos is a Poe supporter, too. She brought the candidate to visit the preserved corpse of husband Ferdinand in the northern city of Batac last month. "In the end," she insists, "you need a leader not only with a diploma or a title but a soul."

A day with the Poe campaign in two northern provinces is full of dusty roads, determined crowds and Yummy burgers from Jollibee (a Philippine fast-food chain), but not a lot of substance. At the culminating rally in the city of Laoag, there's an endless series of speeches by candidates, and to quicken the pace, the campaign has laid on some déclassé entertainment aimed at those D- and E-class voters. An up-and-coming matinee idol sings ballads and hurls his own 8-x-10 glossies into the crowd. Next up is Mystica, a raunchy singer in thigh-high red leather boots, who's famed for performing full splits in mid-song. The final performer is Fred Panopia, the Singing Cowboy of the Philippines, who yodels. As midnight nears—the crowd has been standing since dusk—Poe himself finally appears, not so much a politician as a grandee receiving a lifetime achievement award. He gives a speech that lasts barely five minutes—shorter than a set by Mystica, and considerably less revealing.

To get anything close to a straight answer from Poe, journalists are reduced to ambush interviews, which TIME managed in a schoolroom in the city of Candon. He sits down warily and responds to questions with a kindly nod, but his answers are single sentences, sometimes just fragments. How's the campaign going? "So far so good." Will he win? "Hopefully." What's the first thing he will do if elected? "Address corruption." The second? "Total transparency." The essence of an ambush interview, of course, is that the ambushee can walk away whenever he feels the need, which Poe does after a few minutes. He can't be kept any longer from his more pressing responsibilities as a candidate: shaking hands, bestowing smiles, waving from the back of that pickup truck.

Technically, Poe's Coalition of United Filipinos party has a platform, but the planks are all motherhood and mango pie: schools should be improved, farmers aided. According to Juan Ponce Enrile, who is running for re-election as Senator with Poe's support, Poe doesn't need one. "The people who will vote for him don't care about a platform," explains Enrile, the former Defense Minister who sparked the 1986 People Power rebellion by splitting with Marcos. "The only people that care about a platform are the enemies that will use it against him. It is an undefinable thing that makes up what we now call FPJ. He brings hope."

Arroyo is conducting an altogether different kind of campaign, as tightly tailored as her pantsuits. Aides admit that the President can't pull Poe's kind of crowds without paying hoi polloi to attend. So Arroyo's whistle-stops must demonstrate the things she's delivered as President. During her swing through Laguna and Quezon provinces, she opens a bridge and buries a time capsule at the groundbreaking for a road. She dominates a rally at a local bandstand, pacing the stage with a microphone that appears giant in her tiny hand, lecturing about the importance of coconut-oil mills and aid to be secured from the Asian Development Bank. Arroyo has stage presence and uses it: a sway of the body, a Sinatra-like attention to all parts of the crowd. She repeats her "Six Promises for the Next Six Years": to create 6 million jobs, build 3,000 school buildings and 3 million homes, achieve national self-sufficiency in rice supplies, treble lending to small and medium-size enterprises, and provide health insurance and education for all.

Unlike Poe, Arroyo has no hesitation about sitting down with a journalist to describe her presidency so far and what it promises for the future. She describes "the mess that I inherited" in 2001, and says the election will be a "test of our will to move forward and finally defeat poverty." Arroyo is combative, determined and self-assured to an almost disturbing degree. During a 20-minute interview, she talks nonstop with absolutely no body language: her legs remain crossed, her hands folded in her lap. Her mouth works incessantly, but she simultaneously reads a briefing paper—seemingly absorbing its details—and yet also manages to maintain periodic, polite eye contact. She's acting presidential, if not entirely human, but she knows how to spin a difficult question: Does it hurt when even her own supporters describe her candidacy as the "lesser of two evils"? "My opponent is doing a great disservice to our poor citizens," she states. "They want answers, and he has not provided them."

The next stop is an open forum on a basketball court in the town of San Pedro. Arroyo, now spritzed with a Chanel perfume, confidently takes questions from the audience—the kind of public challenge Poe scrupulously avoids—and wraps up the meeting with a surprise. San Pedro is run by Felicisimo Vierneza, the running-for-re-election mayor who pleaded on the campaign bus for 3 million pesos for his delayed road. Arroyo has decided to give it to him. She hands Vierneza a check, to grateful applause from the crowd.

By shoveling out pork like a Spam factory, Arroyo is allowing herself to be branded as one of the old-time pols—the very class from which Poe is promising to save the Philippines. On his side, Poe's two-dimensional pitch to the masses has stripped his campaign of any meaningful debate. Which explains a thick pallor of election-time apathy and gloom hovering over much of Manila. The staff of the Prime Saloon & Bar in the capital's ramshackle Buendia district are all planning to vote for Arroyo, right down to the dishwasher. They are not bothered by the country's painful unemployment rate of 11%, a big budget deficit, the scary war on terrorists. Each of them hails from Pampanga, the President's home province, and that's the feudal loyalty that carries many a candidate in Philippine elections. Carlito Ibañez, a 30-year-old pedicab driver who plies the district, says he's voting for Poe. "I'm not sure he's the best candidate," he admits, but he is following orders from his neighborhood captain, who in turn takes his cue from the local mayor, a Poe ally. "Life is so hard," Ibañez continues. "And it won't make any difference anyway." Ronnie Pasco, a 36-year-old civil engineer enjoying a rustic bowl of beef marrow soup at an open-air dinner counter, says he's voting for Brother Eddie Villanueva, an evangelist who, with only 3% support in the opinion polls, is guaranteed to lose the presidential race. Pasco doesn't mind. "I'm sick and tired of the dumbos," he says. "I'm sick and tired of the intelligentsia. I'm sick and tired of the artistes. I want to cast my vote for someone who's not corrupt." The Philippines has gone through a lot of would-be savior-Presidents: Marcos in his heyday, Aquino in hers, Arroyo after EDSA II. Next week's election shows the Filipinos are still waiting for the real thing.

• Anthony Spaeth | Manila
• Will Filipinos vote for their brainy but aloof President — or anoint a popular movie star who offers nothing less than salvation?