THE PHILIPPINE ELECTION CIRCUS : In the World’s Most Chaotic Democracy, Campaigns Are Entertainment, Votes Are Sold--and Imelda Keeps Singing.

THE DREADED “CHARACTER ISSUE” EXPLODED ONTO MANILA’S FRONT PAGES SHORTLY AFter the Philippine presidential race began this spring. Unlike in America, it wasn’t a cheesy supermarket tabloid but the outgoing president, Corazon Aquino, who blew the whistle on sex and politics. Without naming names, she implied on a radio show that some of the candidates campaigning to succeed her had been unfaithful to their wives. She urged the next president to focus on affairs of state, not the heart. “As a woman, I would really like husbands to be saints,” Aquino added, “but you have to accept certain realities.”

Asia’s only Roman Catholic country anxiously waited for the candidates to respond. After all, most men in power here are reputed, even expected, to have a mistress or two. One candidate, supporters boast, has fathered 100 children out of wedlock. Another openly campaigns with his mistress. What would they say? What would they do? Very little, as it turned out. Only two categorically denied womanizing: One is a woman. The other is in his 70s. “Saints are hard to find these days,” explained another contender’s wife. Exit the character issue.

Forget Bill Clinton and George Bush for a second. The Philippines is having a real election. Come May 11, every single elected office in the land--17,284 posts in all, from president to the lowest town counselor--will be up for grabs in one of the world’s most chaotic displays of democracy. Aquino isn’t running, but almost everyone else is: Some 70,000 candidates have registered. It’s half circus, half soap opera, a mad mix of Gabriel Garcia Marquez and the Keystone Kops, complete with squabbling families, blood feuds, political intrigue and betrayal, nepotism and greed.

Among the seven presidential contenders are a cigar-chomping ex-general, a bearded ex-crocodile hunter, a tycoon dubbed “king of the cronies” and a fiery former judge who has said running requires a “basic genetic difficulty.” Those are the serious candidates. Then there’s Imelda Marcos, the former first lady. She announced her candidacy after pleading not guilty to a fresh batch of corruption charges. The government says she stole $5 billion from this impoverished land. Now she pleads poverty as she campaigns in slums from a silver-gray stretch Mercedes limousine.

In some ways, the presidential race here is like America’s. Candidates campaign. Voters vote. The similarities mostly end there. Take money. Many voters apparently do. It’s a time-honored tradition, if only because an election is one of the few times the nation’s corrupt politicians pump money back into their poverty-stricken provinces. They buy supporters everything from calendars to coffins. They buy reporters. They even buy other candidates.

In all, a major presidential candidate may spend $50 million or more in the 90-day campaign. Some estimates run to $120 million, 35% more than the Bush campaign is allowed to spend all year. Nor does the money come from coffee klatches. Major contributors here are known to include illegal loggers, drug kingpins and gambling syndicates. This is not so surprising in a country where corrupt police and army officers are blamed for dozens of the recent kidnapings, bank robberies and shootouts that have helped turn Manila into one of Asia’s most dangerous cities.

Tired of pollsters’ predictions? Here an Air Force general, whose office is lined with garish paintings of nudes, consults his fortuneteller. “She said it’s going to be very bloody,” he confides. That’s not hard to see. In a land where politics is a blood sport, the elections commission has ordered an ambitious, if futile, ban on guns and about 142 private armies supposedly backing provincial warlords. Politicians--some of whose own weapons have been confiscated--are the most upset by the bans. “We are defenseless, like sitting ducks,” the nation’s mayors complained in a joint statement. One company hopes to cash in on their fears. “How will you protect yourself now that guns are banned?” it asked in a newspaper ad. The answer: “Bulletproof vehicles to make you worry-free from ambush and assault.”

At least that ad is allowed. Most election ads are banned on radio and TV and in newspapers under a new law aimed at curbing campaign costs. Also banned are most campaign posters, T-shirts and balloons. Still, the race isn’t dull. For the first time, all national, provincial and local candidates are running simultaneously in a multi-party free-for-all. There are no primaries or caucuses to winnow down the field, so each of the seven presidential candidates has a separate party and a separate slate of candidates: 24 nationally elected senators, 200 congressmen, 73 governors and so on. On election day, ballots won’t be much help: No names are listed. Instead, each voter must write in up to 44 names. By hand.

“The geniuses who designed this did it to guarantee it was idiotic, ludicrous, utterly devoid of rational thought,” complains Harvard-trained lawyer and Senate candidate Jerry Barican. And don’t expect gracious concession speeches. “If there are seven presidential candidates,” says an army general, “that means six will point their finger at the winner and say he cheated.”

The Philippines remains a plutocracy, still ruled by an elite handful of powerful feudal families, much as it was when the United States invaded and took its only colony nearly a century ago. It’s democracy by dynasty. That’s why 70% of the current members of Congress are direct descendants of the first Philippine Assembly of 1907--and why rival factions of Aquino’s own family, the Cojuangcos, are competing as candidates in her home province of Tarlac. No one accuses Aquino of corruption, but allegations swirl around several family members.

“We look like a democracy,” explains analyst Tony Gatmaitan. “We have a constitution, we have a legislature, we have elections. But democracy is still an alien culture. There’s a constant clash with tradition. And in the end, our tribal culture prevails.”

The 1986 “People Power” campaign that pitted Aquino against Ferdinand Marcos was a passion play: the saintly widow against the evil dictator. But Aquino proved feckless, indecisive. Her administration lurched from crisis to crisis, including seven attempted coups. Whatever Aquino’s achievements--and her spokesman recently told me her six-year term was “somewhere between a disappointment and a disaster”--the restoration of democracy did not bring peace or prosperity to this long-suffering land.

More than half the population of 64.2 million live in appalling poverty. The economy is stagnant, mired in $29 billion in debt. There’s runaway population growth--at 2.8%, the rate is higher than in Bangladesh. Rotting garbage and countless squatters continue to clog Manila’s squalid streets. Provincial warlords have returned in force. So have many of Marcos’ closest cronies. No wonder the national ambition is to leave: More than 600,000 Filipinos have applied to immigrate to the United States. Emigres already are the nation’s most profitable export: Paychecks sent home by overseas workers are the largest source of foreign exchange.

Will a new president do better in one of the world’s weirdest democracies? The top candidates are the ex-crocodile hunter, House Speaker Ramon Mitra; the retired general, Fidel V. Ramos, former judge Miriam Defensor Santiago and former Marcos crony Eduardo Cojuangco Jr. Here’s how the roadshow looked one recent week.

Tuesday, March 10

It’s Super Tuesday in America, and voters in 11 states are going to the polls. Here, a spectacular sunset is turning the sky over Leyte Island a brilliant orange and gold. I’m in Tacloban, the capital, to check on Eduardo Cojuangco Jr., 56, the president’s estranged cousin. “Danding,” as he’s known, has an image problem: He’s called “Pac-Man” for gobbling up hundreds of companies in monopolies sanctioned by Marcos. They were close; he was godfather to Marcos’ only son and named his own son Marcos Cojuangco. By the time he fled on the dictator’s jet to Hawaii in February, 1986, Cojuangco controlled, by his own account, up to one-fourth of the nation’s GNP, most of it in the coconut, cement and beer industries. He slipped back to Manila in late 1989, a few days before the last major coup attempt. Charged with dozens of crimes, the bulky, bull-necked man with a cement-mixer voice has not been convicted, or even seriously inconvenienced, in court.

If elected, Cojuangco promises to turn the economy around. But he is less than reassuring to those who see him as Marcos, Part II. “In a country that is backward, impoverished and violent, I maintain that it will be hard for a democrat to survive,” he said recently. “Either the democrat is taken over by a dictator, or the democrat himself gets to be a dictator.”

The main square in Tacloban already is packed. It’s a warm, sultry night, and Cojuangco’s aides have put out word that starlet Sharon Cuneta is coming. She isn’t, but it helps draw a crowd. An aide sports a button: “Progress is my game. Danding is my name.” One after another, a dozen of Cojuangco’s Senate candidates get up to speak. Each wears a crimson T-shirt or vest with his or her name on the back. “It’s the only way they can tell us apart,” one complains. Another candidate, introduced as “the fighting general,” dances to a disco beat. The biggest cheers are for two former basketball players. They too are running for the Senate.

Finally Cojuangco arrives in a jeep. As he mounts the stage, downtown Tacloban suddenly goes dark. Aides scurry for 20 minutes. There’s a generator, but no one connected it. Finally, as firecrackers explode nearby, Cojuangco leaves without speaking. The lights return as he drives away. Over dinner at a supporter’s house, Sen. John (Sonny) Osmena explains that a piece of wet hemp, carefully tossed over a transformer, can cause a power failure. “That’s the kind of thing you learn as a local politician,” he says. Cojuangco just smiles. “We’re in enemy territory,” he says.

Wednesday, March 11

U.S. Gen. Douglas MacArthur, liberator of the Philippines, has green fungus growing up his leg. An enormous statue of the World War II hero stands with six others, in a reflecting pool by the Leyte Gulf black sand beach where he led an invasion force ashore in October, 1944, to proclaim, “I have returned. . . . The hour of your redemption is at hand.” MacArthur, a brilliant general, was pompous, bombastic and an egomaniac given to flowery pronouncements dressed in religious imagery. Filipinos still revere him as the last American who really understood their culture.

I join some of Cojuangco’s Senate candidates for breakfast at a restaurant near the statues. Cojuangco has given them each $20,000 to join his campaign, but it’s barely start-up money. Some candidates expect $1 million. “Every time we hit a town, we get envelopes from different groups asking for money,” complains Senate candidate Gerry Espina. “In America, it’s the other way.” I ask which issues are important in the race. “Here, you never win or lose elections on issues,” he says. “It’s how many movie stars you bring to the rally. If you speak about substantial issues, and your opponent gets up and sings, people will remember and vote for him.”

Another of Cojuangco’s Senate candidates, Anna Dominique (Nikki) Coseteng, tells me, as we share a car to the next rally, that patronage and paternalism are the keys to Philippine politics. “That is a given,” says the former anti-Marcos activist. “The technocrats don’t understand that.” Even the presidential race is fought at the local level. “Look, your (barrio) leader asks who will you vote for. You say X. He says, ‘No! I’m for Y. And since his niece is the goddaughter of my close friend’s second cousin, I can call him. When you need medicine, when you need money for fertilizer, when your house has burned down, who will you go to? You’ll come to me. X can’t help you. I have to help you.’ ”

What about graft and corruption? “It’s a middle-class issue,” Coseteng says. “In the province, the politician who is honest and has not taken a cent, what will he say when you need money to send your child to school? It’s the politician who has built a big mansion who will pay the money. And he’s the one who will get your vote.” Fight the system, “and you are killed or put in jail. And people say it serves you right. Troublemaker. And they go back to the patron for help.”

What kind of help has she given? “I give out coffins. Got a heart problem? I’ll get your valves fixed. I’ve arranged kidney transplants. I give out basketballs, chess sets, allowances for teachers. People ask for money to fix their houses after a storm. They ask for paper. For prizes for math contests. For band uniforms. Church renovations. Bowling tournaments. Food for fiestas. They ask for money. They ask for material for curtains. They ask for fruit trees. They ask for Christmas gifts. They ask for jobs. They need medicines, fire extinguishers, TVs, VCRs, library books, computers. I give away pigs.”

A campaign poster taped to the car shows Coseteng in a jeweled necklace, hair swept back, in an off-the-shoulder formal gown that does not suggest pigs. We stop in a cloud of dust so she can hand out calendars in a roadside cluster of shacks. In the distance, lush green rice paddies lead to an azure sea. “Land is power in the Philippines,” she says after climbing back in. “A landowner who has 10,000 people, they’ll do what he says. He’ll tell a barrio leader, ‘You have 300 people there. They vote for who I say, or I throw you all out.’ So the landowner delivers those votes, and other politicians come to him. That is power in the Philippines.”

We reach Ormoc City by midafternoon. Last Nov. 5, freak flash floods from a tropical storm inundated the town and killed up to 6,000 in the deadliest of the disasters that have hit the Philippines in the last two years, including Mt. Pinatubo’s eruption, an earthquake, typhoons and droughts. “Pity the poor Philippines,” says the mayor, Victoria Locsin. “I despair for our future. Maybe we need a good dictator.” She and her husband, the local congressman, back a rival presidential candidate. But an aide says Cojuangco is hopeful--after all, Locsin was the classmate of his wife’s sister. Cojuangco arrives at sunset, flying in by helicopter and circling the gathering crowd at the town square. A singer in an open-necked shirt lip-syncs to Tom Jones records. Cojuangco, dressed in a red polo shirt, blue jeans and ankle-high boots, sits smoking Marlboros as darkness falls. A local toilet manufacturer introduces him. As he stands, the stage lights conk out again. The fuse box is locked. Nearby, people play tennis under bright lights. After 15 minutes, a generator chugs into action. Soon, Cojuangco chugs into his speech, a 30-minute promise of economic progress, hope and direct flights to Manila. “There’s a Philippine tradition that if someone makes a promise and doesn’t deliver, then a close relative must deliver,” an aide translates from Tagalog. “All the shortcomings of my cousin’s administration, of Cory Aquino, all the broken promises and squandered money, let me deliver.”

We retire for dinner at the toilet maker’s house. Afterward, I climb into Cojuangco’s car for the 90-minute drive back to Tacloban. Not surprisingly, he says that, if he’s elected, he’ll dismantle the singularly unsuccessful government commission created to chase the hidden wealth of Marcos and his top cronies--including Cojuangco. “It’s too vindictive,” he explains. He says election rules technically allow him to spend $180 million. “I can never overspend,” he says happily. We chat about Marcos, his friend and mentor. In 1972, Cojuangco helped Marcos plan and launch a decade of martial law. Was it a mistake? “I don’t think it really was a mistake,” he says as we bounce along. “The mistake was not doing it the right way. It was fine the first few months. Then they began playing with the rules. And it became a dictatorship.”

It’s nearly midnight, but Cojuangco invites me to fly back to Manila with his aides on one of his two eight-seat Beechcraft planes. At home, I read up on what happened in the first months of martial law. Up to 50,000 people were arrested and imprisoned without trial. Many were tortured. Free assembly was banned, free speech and free press severely curbed and labor banned from organizing and striking. After that, according to Cojuangco, came the mistakes.

Thursday, March 12

I’m off to see the wizard. My home fax has rung all morning with missives from Imelda Marcos’ press office. A news conference is set for 1 p.m. in the Imperial Suite, the $2,000-a-day Philippine Plaza penthouse she moved into last November after returning from nearly six years’ exile in the United States. She’s never punctual, so I go over at 3:30. Two dozen local reporters and photographers have waited 2 1/2 hours. Furious, they finally threaten to walk out. An aide rushes into a side room, and, moments later, the former first lady appears, billowy in a black silk dress and white scarf, draped in gold necklaces.

Imelda, now 62, sits on a sofa with lace-edged, heart-shaped pink pillows, beside a portrait of herself in younger, thinner days. She complains that Aquino’s government is pumping billions of pesos into the provinces as “development funds.” It’s legal but hardball politics, designed to shore up candidates Aquino has endorsed. “This is corruption of the highest order,” complains Imelda, who is listed with her late husband under “theft” in the 1991 “Guinness Book of World Records.” I ask about her dead husband, who still lies in Hawaii. The government has given her permission to fetch the body and bury it in his home province of Ilocos Norte after the election. It will be a “temporary burial,” Imelda says, until she can move the corpse to Manila. Pardon me? “We’ll dig him up and move him down here and bury him again,” she explains. “We do that all the time.” A caustic aide later confides that Imelda would prefer to take “Ferdie from the fridge” around May 1, their wedding anniversary. “It’ll be very romantic. She’ll be in white. He’ll be defrosting.”

The press conference quickly collapses. Hoping to help, a photographer on her staff politely asks Imelda’s plans if elected president. “As mother of the nation, I’ll uplift the Filipino people,” she begins. TV lights are quickly shut off, and the press starts to chatter and leave as she drones on. They’ve heard it all before. I wander off to check out her digs.

The 11th-floor suite, lined with rich woods and pink-veined marble, is a good spot for Imelda. Sitting at the baby grand, she can peer down at the Coconut Palace, a grandiose guest house that she had built when Pope John Paul II came to visit in 1981. He refused to stay there, and it now draws tourists who enjoy her extravagances. On the other side, her office overlooks a more telling tableau: a dismal sprawl of 100,000 squatters on a site that was to be Imelda’s crowning legacy. There, on a landfill, is her Parthenon-like Film Center, hurriedly built over the bodies of workers who died during construction. Now the Film Center is closed, condemned since the 1990 earthquake. Nearby are two even larger buildings. A huge structure with mirrored windows was to be the national bank, while a cantilevered complex was to be the government insurance center. Built amid multimillion-dollar scandals, neither was ever used. They are empty, trashed and looted.

As I leave, Imelda suddenly appears again, now dressed in white. We chat in the elevator. Always gracious, she invites me into the back of her limo for a 20-minute ride to the airport. Thick makeup gives her a woeful look. Her window glides down so she can wave at onlookers. A few wave back. “Look how they love me,” she says excitedly.

Actually, her campaign rides at the bottom of the polls. I ask why she bothers. “We have been the most maligned, most vilified family in history. So we are the ones who can heal the people and unify the country.” Any regrets from two decades in power? “Maybe, in a way, I was excessive,” she says. “But for the positive. For God, beauty and love.”

Imelda’s campaign is the most surreal by far. At a rally in Tondo, one of Manila’s poorest slums, she tossed fistfuls of coins to the cheering crowd, kissed a squirming baby and wept openly on the stage. “The government may have taken away all my wealth and possessions, but they have not and cannot take away my friends,” she said. Suddenly a sad-faced youth dressed in torn and filthy rags was lifted beside her on the flatbed truck. His legs were mangled, twisted under him, his hair matted with dirt. Imelda air-kissed his cheek. He was quickly hauled down again, and he crawled away through the garbage on the street. As an aide fanned her, Imelda crooned “Because of You.”

At the airport, Imelda flies off in a five-seater prop plane to campaign in the provinces. Due to a mix-up, her aides are left behind. I hitch a ride back in the limo. One aide warns that Imelda’s supporters will not rest easy if she doesn’t win. “We will take to the streets,” he says. “And we will launch coup after coup after coup. Until we win. We have failed six times. Next time we will win!” I can’t tell if he’s kidding.

Friday, March 13

Aquino has canceled plans to fly south to join a rally with Fidel (Eddie) Ramos, the retired general whom she has endorsed as her successor. She’s attending a niece’s wedding instead. So I’m headed to Legaspi, 10 hours and 340 miles down a rutted two-lane road to the Bicol peninsula of southern Luzon. As my driver drives, I catch up on a week’s worth of local newspapers.

The first major election violence has erupted in Ternate, in warlord-run Cavite province. The mayor, police chief and two aides were shot to death, riddled with automatic-weapons fire outside the town hall. Five police bodyguards of a local congressman have been charged.

In other news, a senior Aquino adviser is considering an Austrian proposal to build a $300-million toxic-waste incinerator at the Subic Bay naval base after U.S. forces leave next fall. “Surprisingly, we don’t have all that much garbage, so we’re going to be importing it--industrial waste, medical waste, what have you,” the adviser, Alejandro Melchor, is quoted as saying. Several weeks ago, Melchor proposed leasing old nuclear submarines from the former Soviet Union to generate electricity. He offered to send garments and pork in exchange. No word yet from the Russians.

And so to politics. The Philippine Daily Globe publisher is Aquino’s former spokesman, and he rarely minces words. I’m not disappointed. An unsigned editorial complains that a televised debate last Sunday was too mild. “The issues are nothing in an election,” the Globe complains. “Only cowards and crooks seek refuge in high-level discussions of issues.” The paper calls for “vicious debates” that “draw blood” instead. “We want the candidates tearing at each other so that we can, picking through the debris of shattered reputations, decide intelligently who among them is the least unworthy to lead this country for the next six years.” It’s sarcastic . . . I think.

Saturday, March 14

Ramos is meeting local officials at the seaside Mariners’ College outside Legaspi. Despite Aquino’s endorsement, he’s in trouble. Shortly after the campaign began, Ramos was spotted at the international airport. For three days, confused aides gave conflicting cover stories for why he flew to Zurich, stayed through banking hours and then flew home. Ramos said he’d gone to win the endorsement of Europe’s Christian Democrats, a claim they quickly denied. Now rumors are rampant. He went for a woman. A Swiss bank account. A woman with a Swiss bank account. Over lunch, I ask him about the trip. “I never said I’d explain,” he explains.

Ramos, 63, campaigns as the “coup fighter” who kept Aquino in power. Unfortunately, he was in charge of the military that kept rebelling. As a Protestant in this Catholic country, he’s also fighting Manila’s powerful prelate, Cardinal Jaime Sin. Ramos was Ferdinand Marcos’ second cousin and headed the national police during martial law. Sin has charged that Ramos “helped Marcos put up the structure of dictatorship.”

Ramos, a West Point graduate, is thin and wiry. He talks out of the side of his mouth, since an unlit cigar pokes out of the other side. He chews six a day, aides say. His is the “fight against the politics of patronage, the politics that kept our people oppressed and in the dark for all these years,” he tells the crowd outside Legaspi. Once again, he warns, “guns, goons and gold are being used” to corrupt the election. Beside me, a local reporter complains about Ramos’ staff. “They keep trying to give me money. I say, ‘No, I just want a schedule.’ ”

After a press conference, Ramos leads an hourlong parade of honking cars, trucks and busses to rallies in nearby towns. Stogie in mouth, he leans out the window of his big Mitsubishi Pajero and waves while aides pelt pedestrians with candy. Back in Legaspi, there’s a problem. Thirty small buses were hired to haul people to a nighttime rally there, but most turned back after the motorcade. Still, several thousand people cheer as fireworks explode overhead to introduce each Senate candidate. It’s a talented ticket. Aquino’s former budget secretary plays “The Marines’ Hymn” on a harmonica. The former solicitor general croons a love song. A well-known radio deejay plays guitar and wails a campaign song to the tune of “La Bamba.” Suddenly, sparks fly, fuses blow, and the stage goes dark. After 45 minutes, the lights come up. Ramos finally speaks. When he finishes, he leaps in the air and kicks his heels. Fireworks light the night sky. Half the crowd already has gone home.

Monday, March 16

Several “presidentiables,” as they’re called, have debated on TV. It was a chance to see Miriam Defensor Santiago, the feisty former judge who is the wild card of this election.

Santiago, the youngest candidate at 46, tops most presidential polls and draws huge, frenzied crowds. Polls are notoriously unreliable here, but her rivals are nervous. Her fans are mostly young, and nearly half of the 30 million voters are under age 35. She speaks to them in a shrill, singsong, rap-like patter laced with legalisms. It’s mesmerizing, like listening to a faith healer. Critics call her “brenda,” a play on “brain damaged.” Reporters invariably ask if it’s true she was hospitalized for a nervous breakdown. Her response is to “strongly recommend” her rivals “should also have a nervous breakdown to raise their IQ.”

Santiago is a kind of protest candidate. If elected, she promises to jail corrupt officials and impose “compulsory contraception to prevent them from reproducing.” If she loses? “It can only mean that I was cheated. If I am cheated, it means the next president will be the biggest cheat in the country.”

Santiago tried to clean up the notoriously corrupt immigration department several years ago. Barking orders, ripping out phones, she fired officials on the spot and threatened to cut them into “1,000 pieces and feed you to the sharks.” Tact was not a strong point: She called one congressman “fungus-faced” and told another to stick his finger in an electric socket. She posed with pistols and boasted she ate “death threats for breakfast.” Her bodyguards believe her. Outside the election commission recently, they badly beat a man carrying an ice pick. Turns out he was delivering ice.

Tuesday, March 17

Illinois and Michigan are voting today. House Speaker Ramon V. Mitra is in Naga, a political stronghold 280 miles southeast of Manila. “Monching,” as he’s known, seems the candidate to beat. He’s got the biggest party (the Fight of the Democratic Filipinos), the most warlords and the best-oiled political machinery. He’s also tacitly backed by key members of Aquino’s own family and Cardinal Sin. He promises that his running mate, a former Supreme Court judge, will prosecute anyone breaking the law. “That includes my relatives, from whom I probably need more protection than (I do from) my enemies,” Mitra said recently.

Mitra, 63, a soft-spoken man with a sad-eyed look, campaigns on his background: The illegitimate son of a prison warden in rural Palawan, he worked his way up from poverty to crocodile hunter to lawyer to congressional kingpin. Along the way, he was jailed by Marcos and nearly killed in a 1971 political bombing. He still carries 13 pieces of shrapnel in his body. It’s a compelling story, but critics deride him as a “trapo.” It’s Spanish for “rag” but also a play on “traditional politician,” which connotes smoke-filled rooms and corruption. Still, Mitra stands out as probably the only public figure who 1) has a beard, and 2) hasn’t dyed his gray hair black. His campaign manager, Luis Villafuerte, is the provincial governor, and he’s arranged quite a show. Starting in early morning, Mitra goes from rally to rally, promising a “healing presidency to cool down our overheated political culture.” He’s mobbed by young girls, applauded by local non-government groups at two hotels, cheered by 2,000 barrio leaders in the high school auditorium. It’s so hot on stage, Mitra uses a napkin to reach inside his shirt and wipe his armpits.

It’s cloudy, but not raining, when Mitra finally climbs on the bed of a red Nissan pickup truck for a parade. I stand beside him, but it’s too noisy to talk much. The governor has declared a de facto holiday, and Naga is ready to party. For an hour, the truck inches down jampacked streets, led by a blaring brass band and trailed by honking cars and scores of shouting people with streamers and placards. Sirens scream, and a blizzard of confetti showers down from rooftops and balconies. People pour from homes, offices and restaurants. “I tell them a vote for Mitra is a vote for me,” Villafuerte shouts happily. We end the day with two crowded late-night rallies broadcast on the governor’s two radio stations. It’s a little dull: No one sings, dances or cuts the electricity.

THE TWO REMAINING CANDIdates are darker horses. Salvador (Doy) Laurel, 63, Aquino’s estranged vice president, hovers at the bottom of the polls. His solution? He proposes banning publication of political polls. And once-popular Sen. Jovito Salonga, 72, the nationalist who masterminded the rejection of a lease extension for U.S. military bases last year, lost some anti-American credentials when it was revealed that his wife is a U.S. citizen. Voted out as Senate president several months later, he refused to concede. So his followers stole and hid the ceremonial mace, the symbol of office. Opponents then made a new one. After some tussling outside the Senate chamber, Salonga finally left his post. They or other candidates may yet quit the race or combine forces. Each day brings new alliances and ever-stranger political bedfellows. Joseph (Erap) Estrada, a movie star turned senator, gave up his presidential bid to run as Cojuangco’s vice president. The reaction to Estrada’s campaign appearances could be summed up in three words: Was he sober? Or so my friends repeatedly asked after I attended a nighttime rally in Batangas. Estrada slurred his words, but his fans didn’t care. A barrel-chested man with a Zapata mustache, he sneered and swaggered on stage like Elvis in his Las Vegas years. In six years in the Senate, he got one law passed--in favor of water-buffalo propagation. Estrada told me he was “bored” in the Senate. “Maybe we don’t need the Congress anymore. We have so many laws already.”

With so many candidates, and no runoffs, many fear the election will produce even more chaos. Aquino had overwhelming support after 1986 and was still largely unable to rule. What mandate will a plurality president have? Even worse, the next president may not have Aquino’s options. Cheered by the world, and Washington in particular, she attracted billions of dollars in foreign aid. Such largess is no longer available. The United States will cut aid nearly in half after the Subic Bay Naval Station closes this year. And no one is discounting rumors that the 180,000-strong armed forces may yet step in. Still, the biggest complaint I hear is that this is a boring election. Previous presidential races were far more violent, far more tense. Posters covered every house and light pole, campaign jingles and ads filled the airwaves, and thug-enforced cheating and intimidation were the way to win. By most accounts, this promises to be the fairest and freest election in Philippine history. Perhaps that’s the strangest thing of all.