Splitting the Ticket

On election day Typhoon Kit howled across the northern Philippines, flooding villages, blocking roads, making thousands homeless. That night, sallow little President Carlos Garcia. 61, sat in a friend's home outside Manila, listening to the election returns and playing game after game of chess with an aide. When the radio reported that both the Liberals' Jose Yulo and the Progressives' Manuel Manahan were running ahead of him in Manila, Garcia played so badly that the aide won. But as the counting went on, the President's chess got better. By the next afternoon the typhoon that had swamped his rivals' Luzon strongholds had blown out to sea, the aide had been hopelessly outdistanced in the marathon chess series, and Garcia knew that he was the Philippines' President for four more years.

Thus Charley Garcia, the poet-politician from Bohol, won the right to keep the office he had inherited last March after the tragic death of Ramon Magsaysay. Garcia's victory was not impressive. Polling only an estimated 41% of the vote v. 28% for the Liberals' Yulo, he was returned to office more by the power of the Nacionalista Party machine than by any popular conviction that he could fill his predecessor's unfillable shoes. Independent Manahan, who tried so hard to shrug into the lost leader's mantle that he retouched his campaign photos to heighten his physical resemblance to Magsaysay, finished a respectable third with 20% of the vote. Fourth: Senator Claro Recto. 67, candidate of landlords and anti-American intellectuals.

Many a vote was bought (Garcia and Yulo dispersed an estimated $13 million), but as Philippine elections go, the election was relatively honest and there had been little violence (only 20 dead).

Coming Man. But neither machine-made Garcia or airbrushed Manahan carried off the hearts of Filipino voters. By a turn unprecedented in Filipino history, that was achieved by fiery Diosdado Macapagal, 47, who not only won election as Vice President on the opposition Liberal ticket but racked up more votes than President Garcia himself. In doing so, he defeated the man the U.S. most wanted to see defeated--Garcia's running mate, Jose Laurel Jr., a pouchy-eyed lover of nightclubs and strong drink who remarked to one Nacionalista audience: "To hell with the Americans." Laurel's campaign was marked by handouts of cigarette lighters and switchblade knives, and the appearance of contraceptives inscribed: "Be safe with Laurel." (The Nacionalistas indignantly insisted that it was the Liberals who had passed them out.)

A big, self-made, self-assured man born in a rural Luzon slum and schooled in law and economics at Manila's Santo Tomas University, Macapagal (pronounced Mah-cah-pah-gahl) showed himself to be more like Magsaysay than any other candidate in getting through to ordinary Filipino voters. Sweeping 46% of the vote in his upset victory, he emerged as an odds-on favorite for the presidency four years hence.

Since a Philippine Vice President's only constitutional assignment is to keep himself in splendid health, past Vice Presidents have always been given a Cabinet post--customarily Foreign Affairs. Having served as Second Secretary of his country's Washington embassy, chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, and head of the Philippines' U.N. delegation, Macapagal expects to be named Foreign Minister notwithstanding his Liberal label. In the past he has suspected Garcia of "passive leanings toward neutralism," but declared that Garcia's campaign speeches had allayed his fears, thinks the two of them will have no serious difficulties on foreign policy. "I'm actively hostile toward neutrality," he says.

Undoubtedly the Nacionalistas will try to lure Macapagal into their party. But Macapagal, convinced that the country must develop a two-party system based on principles and not mere personalities, rebuffed his friend Magsaysay's own efforts to sway him through four years, and stuck with the Liberals in defeat, fighting its corrupt elements from within.

In rebelling against the Nacionalistas' cynical attempt to force on them Jose Laurel Jr., and splitting their votes to elect Macapagal, Filipinos had taken a major step toward mature democracy.

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