My reflections on EDSA
First Instalment
On the occasion of the fortieth anniversary of EDSA People Power, I find myself uneasy with how carelessly we talk about it. The arguments have hardened into familiar scripts. One point of view treats EDSA as sacred ground — a completed moral triumph beyond criticism. The other dismisses it as an elite maneuver that hijacked a revolution and therefore deserves nothing but scorn. Both positions, in their own ways, avoid something more uncomfortable: accountability.
There is yet another view, one that has gained traction in recent years. It argues that the promises of EDSA were betrayed by those who led it — perhaps the liberal democrats — who, according to critics and political opponents, have ruled the country ever since. This misinformed view characterises the last four decades as a single, uninterrupted liberal order, and everything that went wrong can be laid at its feet.
It is an attractive argument because it is simple. It compresses forty complicated years into one ideological villain.
But it is not historically accurate.
Corazon Aquino presided over six transitional and deeply unstable years mostly under a revolutionary government. Fidel Ramos followed with a technocratic modernization program shaped as much by global market currents as by neoliberal philosophy. Joseph Estrada’s presidency was explicitly populist and rhetorically anti-elite. Gloria Macapagal Arroyo presided over fiscal consolidation and political survival for more than nine years. Benigno Aquino III governed for six reformist years focused on anti-corruption and institutional discipline. Rodrigo Duterte then steered the country toward an openly illiberal and authoritarian territory. And now Ferdinand Marcos Jr. leads under yet another political alignment, as if completing a political circle – one step up, two steps back.
To say that “liberals ruled for forty years” erases the shifts, contradictions, and power realignments that defined the post-EDSA republic, and flattens all this and the current authoritarian drift into one convenient label. It also obscures the more persistent truth: political dynasties, oligarchic families, and patronage networks have adapted fluidly across administrations, regardless of political allegiances.
This does not absolve liberal democrats of responsibility. Some reforms stalled. Some opportunities were missed. Structural inequality was not acknowledged and dismantled. But responsibility must be distributed honestly. Myth-making may mobilise resentment, but it does not clarify history.
I was part of the generation shaped by that period. Many of us believed – sincerely – that we were standing at the threshold of a different republic. Not perfect, not revolutionary in the romantic sense, but open. A republic where institutions could be rebuilt, where the social justice provisions of the new Constitution could slowly reshape the political economy, where democratic space could be used for deeper transformation.
EDSA was not a finish line. It was not a betrayal either. It was both a milestone and a beginning. Perhaps it was a squandered opportunity or an unfinished business.
What followed was not preordained by those four days in February. It was shaped by choices – alliances made and broken, movements that fragmented, elites who adapted instead of retreating, reformists who sometimes mistook macroeconomic stability for structural change, and citizens who, over time, grew tired of waiting for justice that seemed permanently deferred.
We also need to be honest about the context. The Marcos dictatorship did not fall because people gathered at a highway alone. By the mid-1980s, the country was in severe economic crisis. Output had collapsed in 1984 and 1985. Debt had ballooned. Legitimacy had eroded. The regime was weakened economically, morally, and institutionally. The uprising was the culmination of multiple, layered pressure – years of organizing, resistance, repression, fracture, and contested legitimacy. It was not a miracle detached from material reality.
What EDSA decisively restored was civic space. Elections meant something again. Newspapers reopened. Political prisoners were freed. A new Constitution was drafted with safeguards against the concentration of power. These were not small achievements.
But restoration is not transformation.
Liberal democracy is indispensable for preventing dictatorship. I will never argue otherwise. Yet liberal democracy, by itself, does not dismantle oligarchy. It does not automatically redistribute land. It does not prevent political dynasties from reconstituting themselves within electoral politics. It does not dissolve wealth concentration. In societies like ours — where inequality is historically embedded – procedural democracy can coexist with structural injustice.
When that coexistence persists for decades, legitimacy becomes fragile, not because people want another dictator, but because they grow tired of reforms that are either stalled or never seem to reach the roots of inequality. Fatigue becomes fertile ground for strongman narratives and resentment becomes political currency.
The restoration of liberal democracy in 1986 was necessary. It was immeasurably better than authoritarian rule. But it proved insufficient – under Philippine structural conditions – to produce a durable settlement of social justice.
We overthrow, we restore, we stabilize. Then we drift. EDSA became a symbol, sometimes more than a program. Those who benefited from democratic reopening often retreated from the harder work of institutional transformation. Meanwhile, democratic forces fractured – liberals defending procedure but constrained by elite capture; progressives demanding transformation but divided by doctrine, suspicion, and tactical missteps. Over time, these differences became perennial debates, then turned into identities. We learned to distrust each other more than we learned to build together.
And so the Marcos-Duterte axis did not rise from deception alone. It fed on real disillusionment. It fed on inequality that remained acute despite stability and growth. It fed on opposition movements that could not sustain unified moral direction. It fed on our own inability to convert democratic space into structural change.
There is also a geopolitical layer that complicates everything. The global shift toward neoliberal policy in the 1980s, the end of the Cold War, the rise of export-led East Asian growth, and the emergence of China as a strategic power all reshaped the terrain on which our democracy operated. China’s growing assertiveness in the South China Sea – and its rejection of the 2016 arbitral ruling – remind us that sovereignty and democracy today are contested not only internally but externally. Fragmented domestic politics makes meddling and manipulation by external forces easier.
So when we mark forty years since EDSA, the task is not commemoration for its own sake. It is reflection. It is asking whether we treated 1986 as an end point rather than the beginning of a generational reconstruction.
If EDSA is to remain historically meaningful, it must be reclaimed as unfinished – an incomplete republic-building project that still demands deeper institutional shifts toward something more socially democratic, more just, and more transformative.
Next:
What follows is not a morality play. It is a historical reckoning. We will revisit the fractures of the 1980s, examine administrations past the caricatures, confront the mathematics of reality, and ask whether liberal democracy — as practiced in an oligarchic society — is enough.
It may not be.
And if it is not, then the responsibility is no longer about defending or denouncing EDSA. It is about completing it.
