𝗧𝗵𝗲 𝗚𝗹𝗼𝗯𝗮𝗹 𝗕𝗲𝗮𝘁 𝗯𝘆 𝗚𝗲𝗿𝗮𝗹𝗱 𝗟𝗮𝗰𝘂𝗮𝗿𝘁𝗮

On February 25, 1986, somewhere between one and three million Filipinos stood on a stretch of highway in Metro Manila and, without firing a single shot, ended twenty-one years of dictatorship. Marcos fled to Hawaii. Cory Aquino was sworn in. The foreign press called it a miracle. Political scientists gave it a name: People Power, which inspired similar regime change movements in Eastern Europe and Latin America.

The revolution happened. The dictator left. Both things are true.

What we have been paying for since is the part that gets softened every February.

EDSA did not dismantle the system that produced Marcos. More precisely it handed the keys back to the pre-1972 elite. The ilustrado families and political clans that Marcos had displaced, and partially replaced with his own Ilocano-connected cronies, simply reconstituted themselves, this time in the language of democracy and human rights.

The revolution did not replace one power structure with another. It restored a prior one and called that restoration a “liberation.” Some of the old cronies stayed. Different families rose. The machinery of concentrated wealth and dynastic authority was never seriously touched. A serious revolution would have dismantling that machinery.

This is not historical revisionism. Reformers inside the Aquino government were already saying it by 1987.

The irony is not that the late strongman’s son Bongbong Marcos won the presidency in 2022. The clarifying thing is how he won. Not through force. Through votes, including the votes of Filipinos young enough to have no memory of martial law and old enough to have watched the post-EDSA governments deliver something real but incomplete. That is a different problem from Marcos nostalgia, and treating it purely as a memory failure — kung naaalala lang nila ng tama — misdiagnoses it entirely.

Depending on where you stood in ’86, the return of a Marcos in Malacanang elicits a feeling of denial or a very particular kind of grief.

What many of those voters remembered, and not incorrectly, was that the decades after EDSA produced genuine constitutional freedoms and real civil liberties alongside grinding poverty, generational trapo dynasties, and institutions that functioned well primarily for people with connections to them. That is not false memory. That is an incomplete revolution being evaluated honestly by people who received its partial benefits.

There is a word that makes this easier to ignore than it should be. Resilience. We hear it from foreign development workers, from Palace spokesmen during typhoon briefings, occasionally from ourselves. It sounds like admiration. In practice, it functions as an absolution for the state. “Filipino resilience” was a way to frame the distance between what governance promised and what it delivered as a test the Filipino people passed, rather than a failure the system produced. EDSA’s spirit was never supposed to be about enduring what the state fails to repair. It was supposed to be about refusing to accept endurance as an answer.

The revolution’s legacy has been moving in two directions that are almost never discussed together in the same breath.

The structural legacy is real, and it deserves its due. The 1987 Constitution, drafted in the revolution’s immediate wake, was a serious document. It abolished the authoritarian provisions of the Marcos years, restored civil liberties, created independent constitutional commissions designed to insulate certain state functions from whichever politician held power at the moment. To the plain eye, that is genuinely hard to see because constitutional constraints show up as things that did not happen. Philippine democracy has been put under serious stress multiple times since 1986 and has not fully collapsed. That just shows that the 1987 Constitution was a great gift born out of the EDSA revolt.

The cultural legacy is where the unfinished business lives. People Power as a political concept assumed something about Filipino civic capacity that the post-EDSA period never actually invested in building, and that is the idea that citizens would stay organized, watchful, and capable of acting not just in moments of acute crisis but in the ordinary, unglamorous work of holding institutions to account between elections.

That capacity does not sustain itself. It requires press freedom treated as infrastructure rather than a political convenience to be managed. It requires civic education that teaches people to read a GAA, not just memorize a date. It requires the space for dissent that does not carry a personal price. Most governments since Cory have paid this lip service while treating it, in practice, as negotiable when inconvenient.

What carrying on the spirit of People Power actually requires is less stirring than the phrase suggests when delivered at a Luneta stage on a February anniversary.

It means accepting that EDSA established a floor, not a ceiling. And that the floor has been under pressure. Press freedom rankings, the narrowing of civic space, the persistence of political dynasties across two and three generations in the same provinces: these are not the grievances of people who are against the Philippines. They are the concerns of people who take the revolution’s promise seriously enough to measure how far the present still is from it.

It means building organizations that survive individual leaders and single election cycles. People Power’s structural weakness as a political form is that it concentrates moral authority in singular figures such as — in Ninoy, in Cory — whose deaths and departures leave movements institutionally unprepared. That is not a criticism of those figures. It is an observation about what kind of civic infrastructure is needed for a revolution to become something durable rather than a memory.

And it means being honest about class, a topic conveniently avoided in our political conversation. The crowd on EDSA in 1986 was disproportionately urban, educated, and middle-class. To the farmer in Negros, the contractual worker in Tondo, the fisherfolk in Samar, the revolution and its fruits was always more complicated.

The systems that replaced Marcos still required, and in many ways still require, their economic marginalization to function. Carrying forward what EDSA began means making the question of para kanino ba talaga ang demokrasya natin a permanent feature of the political conversation rather than an awkward footnote tucked behind the celebration.
The revolution was real. The people who stood on that highway did something that mattered, in ways both measurable and not.

But a revolution that removes a specific dictator while restoring the prior elite is not the same as a revolution that transforms how power is organized. Thirty-eight years is long enough to say that plainly. This is not to dishonor what happened in February 1986, but to respect it enough to finish the work.