THE United Kingdom (UK) has just held its election which gave Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s Conservative Party a big majority in the British Parliament. In the United States (US), President Donald Trump is preparing for his reelection drive.
We in the Philippines tend to emphasize personal considerations in our politics but we should benefit from seeing how issues dominate in the elections of other countries, such as the recent one in the UK and the coming one in the US.
Analysts see the strong Conservative Party win in the UK – a very strong majority of 365 in the 627-seat Parliament – as a sign of rejection of the opposition Labor Party’s moving too far to the left, with its platform of huge public spending and nationalizing of utilities. The British electorate, it now appears, is much more conservative, more traditional, more to the center and right of the political spectrum.
In the US, Donald Trump won in 2016 with the support of a similar mass of voters who were conservative, conventional, working-class. He is convinced his mass of supporters will ignore his unconventional and “unpresidential” actions and return him to office in November.
Today Trump is facing impeachment in the US Congress on basically two issues – (1) abuse of power in freezing nearly $400-million security aid to Ukraine now engaged in war with Russia, while asking the Ukraine president to investigate his potential election rival Joe Biden; and (2) obstruction of Congress in its investigation of the Ukraine and election charges.
The Democratic Party-controlled House of Representatives is likely to impeach him, but the Republican Party-controlled Senate is sure to clear him. For such is the nature of impeachment – it is a political, rather than a judicial process, and parties tend to protect their own. In 1998, the Republicans impeached President Bill Clinton on an even more flimsy issue of perjury in a sexual harassment lawsuit, but the Democratic Party-controlled Senate cleared him.
The general expectation in the US today is that it is the American electorate – not Congress – which will decide the whole thing in the November election. And Trump is betting that the American voters today are – like the British voters – essentially conservative, traditionalistic, rather than the more progressive, more left-leaning Democratic leaders today.
Today we are closely following the US elections, for our electoral system is patterned after theirs. We have the same impeachment process. And we have five million Filipinos now living in the US, many of them now voting citizens.
Our political leaders should learn from these ongoing political events in the UK and the US, for as our own electorate matures, it will become less personalistic and more concerned with issues that matter such as a decent way of life, freedom from economic excesses, respect for our social and religious values, and ultimately our freedom.
