PHILIPPINE ELECTION RESULTS BY REGION - Languages - http://maxpages.com/defender/election

By Edwin Camaya

Since President Arroyo has been proclaimed winner of
the May 10 elections and is scheduled to be
inaugurated, I’m contributing my proverbial two cents’
worth in the form of the following election analysis.
The results have a lot to do with language matters, as
you will see later on. The following is a breakdown
of the vote according to major ethnolinguistic
group/nationality, plus the two constitutionally
mandated autonomous regions, the ARMM and the
Cordillera:

Bikolano: Roco

Cebuano: GMA

Ilokano: split
(overall FPJ victory, but GMA won in key areas like
Ilocos Sur and
Baguio, which balanced big wins in provinces like
Ilocos Norte; almost evenly divided in many Ilocano
areas like Quirino and Northern Tarlac)

Ilonggo: GMA

Kapampangan: GMA

Pangasinan: split (narrow FPJ victory)
Waray/
Samar-Leyte largely GMA

Tagalog FPJ

ARMM split (overall GMA victory, but GMA won in
provinces like Sulu)

Cordillera GMA

I noticed several trends in the results. One is the
myth of the “masa” vote. This observation, I must
admit, is not original with me. I first saw it
explicitly stated in an article of Carmen
Navarro-Pedrosa in the Philippine Star (I disagree
with Ms. Pedrosa on some points, though, which I will
mention later). Anyway, Pedrosa observed that the
Cebuano, Cordillera, Ilonggo and Kapampangan masa, who
gave GMA a landslide, obviously did not vote for FPJ.

Another observation is that the Marcos factor is no
longer a major
factor in the election, unlike in past elections.
Again, this is not an original observation, but was
already articulated by Manuel Quezon III in an
Inquirer article. An indication of this is the fact
that the Ilokano vote was far from solid for FPJ
despite the endorsement of Poe by the Marcoses. Imee
Marcos herself conceded that Ilocos Norte (for FPJ)
and Ilocos Sur (for GMA) canceled each other out,
except that La Union went for FPJ, which clinched the
Ilocos vote for him. In Ilokano areas outside the
Ilocos proper, the vote was not solid, either. Baguio
went for GMA, while Quirino and Northern
Tarlac were more or less split, with a small FPJ
margin of victory.
This is significant because, if we go back in history,
it was Ferdinand Marcos who defeated Diosdado
Macapagal in 1965, an election where the Ilokano vote
for Marcos was overwhelming.

Contrast this with the case in 1992, when Fidel Ramos,
who is a
full-blooded Ilokano (although he was born in
Pangasinan) and is in fact a relative of the Marcoses,
did very badly in Ilokano areas outside of Pangasinan,
because he was the anointed candidate of then
president Cory Aquino, who in turn replaced Ferdinand
Marcos during the original EDSA Revolution. This is
one point on which I disagree with Pedrosa, who said
that the Ilokano masa voted for FPJ. The wide GMA
margin of victory in Ilocos Sur and Baguio certainly
includes the votes of members of the Ilokano masa,
whose vote was also reflected in the split electorate
of several other Ilokano provinces and
districts.

Then, this election has also debunked the myth of the
“Lingayen-Lucena Corridor.” It is said that whoever
wins in this vote-rich area, which contains half of
the population of the Philippines (including the
almighty Metro Manila), would be almost certain to win
an election. This didn’t happen in the case of GMA,
who won in only two provinces within the Corridor
(Pampanga and Tarlac; Ilocos Sur and the Cordilleras,
where she also won, are outside the Corridor). Apart
from the Kapampangan areas , she got the bulk of her
votes in the Visayas, in which she won in all three
regions (Regions VI, VII and VIII), with vote-rich
Cebu alone giving her a margin of a million votes over
FPJ. This corresponds to her margin of victory in the
final tally. In Mindanao, the Caraga Region also
notably gave her a
landslide.

Another observation is that the election has finally
shattered the myth of a “Central Luzon Region.” The
voting patterns only confirm that Region III does not
constitute a region in any real sense, whether
linguistic, cultural, historical, geographic or
political. It does not correspond to the Central
Plain: Bataan, Zambales and Aurora, narrow coastal
plains separated from the rest of Luzon by mountain
ranges, are clearly outside it. OTOH, Pangasinan,
which is geographically part of the Central Plain, is
not included in Region III.
In fact, the nationalities in Central Luzon voted
independently of each other. The Ilokano vote,
especially in Northern Tarlac, was split, with FPJ
winning narrowly, the way he did in Northern
Luzon. OTOH, the landslide for FPJ in the Tagalog
provinces of Central Luzon (Bataan, Bulacan, and Nueva
Ecija) mirrored the similar
overwhelmingly FPJ vote in the Southern Tagalog Region
(more on that later). For their part, the
Kapampangans voted en masse for GMA, giving her a
margin of 90% in Pampanga. They did the same in
Tarlac, producing a landslide in Kapampangan-speaking
Southern Tarlac (three towns plus the capital, Tarlac
City) so large that it was sufficient to overcome the
FPJ victory (albeit a narrow one) in all 14
non-Kapampangan towns. As a result, GMA won the
overall Tarlac vote, 210,171 votes against Poe’s
166,248.

Should the country federalize, the President would do
well to abolish
Central Luzon and create a separate state for the
Kapampangans, who
form over a quarter of the regional population, and
reorganize the Tagalog and Ilokano areas accordingly
with their respective states. After all, the election
has proven conclusively that Region III does not
constitute a single political unit, any more than it
forms a unified linguistic, cultural, historical or
geographic one. GMA obviously could not rely on the
artificial Central Luzon as her political bailiwick,
because in fact it does not exist, so the logic of
Manila commentators that she lost in her own region is
pure hogwash. The people of the Kapampangan Region
(not just in
Pampanga but in Southern Tarlac as well) gave her an
overwhelming
mandate, so she did win big in her home region. They
have earned their right to a state of their own.

OTOH, a political truism that was once again proven in
the last
election was the fact that Manila was once again the
bastion of the opposition, the way it has always been.
But the Manila vote is only part of a larger trend,
as we shall see later.

A final observation is the emergence of a Tagalog
voting bloc. This
is very significant. In the 1990s, before Estrada
became president, the late Sen. Blas Ople observed
that of all Filipinos, it was the Tagalogs who were
the first to lose their regionalism, citing as proof
the fact that they do not vote as a unit, and that no
Tagalog became president after Jose Laurel during the
Japanese Occupation (does this mean that he did not
consider Cory Aquino, whose father was from Barasoain,
Malolos, Bulacan, and whose mother was a Sumulong from
Antipolo, Rizal, a Tagalog?).

I wonder what he would say about the results of the
recent election,
where Tagalogs voted solidly for FPJ, so that GMA did
not win in a single Tagalog province, not even in
Mindoro, from which her running mate Noli de Castro
comes. In addition, FPJ did not just win narrowly but
by a landslide, in practically all areas except Metro
Manila, which is not “pure Tagalog” anyway (he won
Metro Manila by a smaller margin, getting 40%, against
29% for GMA). The Tagalog provinces of Central Luzon
are supposed to be demographically different from the
Southern Tagalog Region, and yet their voting patterns
in this election were uncannily similar. In Central
Luzon, Bulacan voted 2 to 1 for FPJ, Bataan 3 to 1,
and Nueva Ecija 3 to 1, reflecting the ratio in
Southern Tagalog, which ranged from 2 to 1 in Rizal to
over 4 to 1 in Laguna. In Cavite, the only Tagalog
province where FPJ did not win, GMA was a poor third,
with 183,71 votes, after FPJ’s 239,74. Lacson, a
native of Cavite, won with 347,539. The only possible
conclusion is that a Tagalog voting bloc now exists,
and it is for FPJ.

The Tagalog vote for Poe (who is not ethnically
Tagalog) is remarkable, especially when contrasted
with that of Pangasinan, which FPJ considers his home
province, and is supposed to be his bailiwick.
Instead, this vote rich-province gave him 487,463
against GMA’s 445,230, a rather unimpressive margin of
victory, especially when one considers the landslide
obtained by FVR in 1992 and de Venecia in 1998 in
Pangasinan [parenthetically, Pangasinan also deserves
a federal state of its own; of the eight major
ethnolinguistic groups, only Pangasinenses and
Kapampangans do not have their own regions at
present].

Nationally, there seems to be a contrast between the
Tagalog and
non-Tagalog votes. As seen in the figures above, FPJ
got a solid vote only in the Tagalog provinces, while
the other major groups were either largely pro-GMA
(Cebuano, Cordillera, Ilonggo, Kapampangan, Waray/
Samar-Leyte) or split (ARMM, Ilokano, Pangasinan).
[Bikolanos, who were neither pro-GMA nor pro-FPJ, were
the exception, going for native son Roco]. It is
noteworthy that the ARMM vote, which was supposed to
go strongly for FPJ, was not as solid as expected (the
Muslim vote was split, as Pedrosa observes), limiting
the FPJ landslide to the Tagalog Region. Any
explanations for this?

What is the significance of these electoral results?
IMHO, one is that perhaps for the first time in
history, the President’s principal
constituency is outside Manila and its surrounding
provinces, which
explains her decision to hold her inaugural in Cebu.
The realization that Metro Manila is not the
Philippines has far-reaching implications, not just in
the economic sense, but in political and cultural
matters as well.

Also, one thing about the recent election is that the
electorate was so deeply divided between candidates.
The GMA margin of a million votes is small in
proportion to an electorate of around 40 million. And
yet, if we are to believe the FPJ camp’s claim of
victory, Poe’s supposed winning margin of 500,000
would have been even smaller. Clearly, the President
has a lot of fence-mending to do. Whoever would have
won as President, over half of the voters did not vote
for him or her.

The declaration by GMA in today’s newspapers (“I am
President of all the people, President of all the
islands”) should be historic if it results in a
concrete recognition of and real respect for the
diversity of the nations which comprise the
archipelago. It should be done now. Ironically, it
could be our last chance to truly unite the country.

Edwin

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Page Updated Fri Oct 8, 2004 10:23pm EDT