(See Cover)
From Aparri in the north to Zamboanga in the south, Filipinos went to the polls last week. The election was, in some cases, quite literally a matter of life or death. Before the polls even opened, 96 people, some of them candidates, had been killed; more than 100 were kidnaped. On election day itself, 21 were murdered, one of them an election worker right in Manila's City Hall. There had never been so many casualties in a Filipino election. Nevertheless, just about everyone agreed that it had been a grand success.
For 4,000,000 Filipinos had left their nipa huts and tethered carabaos, their paddies and abaca fields, copra sheds and sugar centrals to cast their votes in a free election. After five years of catching their shirttails and mashing their fingers in the machinery of democracy, imported and installed for them by the U.S., the Filipinos had demonstrated that they were learning how to operate it.
Only Humans Vote. A fighting minority of Filipinos had threatened to make the election a shambles. But the Communist-led Huk* were too disorganized to carry out the threat. The Philippine army, which had dominated past elections as the gun-twirling bully of the politicians in power, dominated this one as the disciplined protector of the voters. Politicians who had ridden into office in 1949 on the votes of "the trees, the birds, the insects and the monkeys" could this time use only human votes.
The proof that the election was honest was incontrovertible: the ins took a terrible shellacking. President Elpidio Quirino, well-meaning but weak, the leader of a party infected with corruption, had come to power in an election as crooked as a hatful of fishhooks. Last week, in almost every reach of the islands, his Liberals lost to the opposition Nacionalistas, led by Jose Laurel, the able but embittered man who was President of the Philippines under Japanese rule. (Collaboration has largely ceased to be a political issue in the Philippines since the late Manuel Roxas, once No. 2 in the puppet regime, became postwar President with the tacit blessing of Douglas MacArthur.)
Nine of the 24 seats in the Senate were at issue. Laurel's Nacionalistas, with the returns almost complete, appear to have won them all, giving them possible control of the Senate. In Quirino's capital of Manila, a Nacionalista became mayor by a 3-to-1 majority.
When the returns were in, President Quirino took what comfort he could find. "The election," said he, "shows that democracy really works on our soil. Democracy will stand here."
Sparks & Singes. The democratic working was thanks primarily to one man, a tough-minded, energetic political pinwheel named Ramon Magsaysay (rhymes with bog-sigh-sigh). Magsaysay, who is only 44, first flashed into national view in September 1950, when President Quirino appointed him Secretary of Defense, and gave him broad authority. The sparks he has been shooting off since then have singed the once mighty Huks, ignited the tempers of bigwigs in his own Liberal Party, and fired the ardor of the common Filipino all over the islands.