The presidential election of May 1992, in which Aquino was not a candidate, was a seven-way race in which the winner, Fidel Ramos, received less than 24 percent of the overall vote. Ramos was a former army chief of staff and defense minister under Aquino; he was unpopular in some quarters because he had headed the agency charged with enforcing martial law under Marcos before turning against Marcos to give crucial support to Aquino in 1986. Some observers had wryly noted during the election that the winner might come to envy the losers, and indeed Ramos inherited the onus of having to deal with insurgencies from the right and the left, a severe energy crisis that produced daily electricity outages, an infrastructure in decay, a large foreign debt, and the troubles of a population half of whom lived in deep poverty.
The Ramos administration remedied the energy crisis and proceeded to create a hospitable environment for economic recovery. Peace was successfully negotiated with the military rebels and the MNLF; it proved to be more elusive with the NDF. A more open economy was created through a series of macroeconomic reforms. Consequently, by the time of the Asian financial crisis that swept the region in 1997, the Philippine economy was stable enough to escape serious damage. A proactive foreign and security policy prevented the deterioration of relations with China, one of several countries with which the Philippines disputed a claim to certain islands and islets in the South China Sea. Ramos’s foreign policy also earned positive diplomatic gains for the country abroad.
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