Oscillating between populism and liberalism in the Philippines: participatory education’s role in addressing stubborn inequalities

ABSTRACT

This paper seeks to address the wider questions of populism and its seeming contemporary rise within the specific context of the Philippines, regarding education. Starting from the assumption that neither politics nor education sits above cultures or spaces autonomously acting upon them but instead emerges with/because/against particularities; after a brief overview of populism, I explore the conceptual characteristics in context. This is informed from my own experiences of living and researching in the Philippines, including experience of the Mindanao conflict but also the failure of liberalism in the Philippines more generally, the failure of western education to ‘develop’ the nation and the reactions that led to the populists rise of Duterte. The paper offers an understanding of the complexities of populism and offers some hope to how education can meet the challenge through a specific example of critical participatory community education.

KEYWORDS:

• Philippines
• populism
• community organising
• education
• Duterte
• liberalism

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 This is by no means a comprehensive list, and we see an increased focus on the western societies of Europe and the US in contemporary times (Mudde and Rovira Kaltwasser 2012); however, I pull out these illustrations as a simple reminder that populism is not only a risk to (western) democracy in its places of origin but also where (western) democracy has been exported to non-western contexts. The arguably global rise of populism may speak to an accompaniment of democracy’s discontents, which will be varied and nuanced in different contexts. In the Philippines, this will involve an exploration of ‘western’ democracy, as in liberal democracy, and its amendments and modifications to a different geography.

2 Benigno Aquino III was the incumbent president. The Aquino name has an illustrious heritage in Filipino political history with his father Benigno Aquino, Jr. allegedly assassinated on the command of the populist President Ferdinand Marcos, and whose widow Corazon was elected after the EDSA people power movement that ousted Marcos. The name, therefore, carries strong associations with this moment of liberation and renewed liberalism in the Philippines, as much and as paradoxically a political dynasty ironically subverts such associations. Benigno Aquino III signifies this potent association through adopting the same yellow colour as the yellow ribbon of ‘Ninoy and Cory,’ thus clearing identifying himself as their successor.