Edsa at 40: Remembering the lines we drew
Forty years ago, Filipinos stood on a highway and reset the moral boundaries of power. They did not gather along Edsa simply to remove a single man from office. They gathered to reject a system that had lost its moral right to govern. That distinction matters today.
As the country marks the 40th anniversary of the People Power Revolution, it does so amid renewed public unease. Trust in politicians and public institutions is again eroding—not because of one defining scandal, but because corruption has taken on a scale and sophistication that feels systemic.
The recent controversy over the national budget captures this anxiety. It is tempting to treat it as just another corruption case—another cycle of accusations, hearings, denials, and fatigue. But what unsettled many Filipinos was not only the magnitude of the funds involved. It was the realization that what had been exposed was not a one-off abuse, but something closer to an architecture: a way of bending lawful processes so abuse can be repeated, normalized, and shielded by procedure. That realization should take us back to Edsa.
Edsa was never just about the removal of Ferdinand Marcos Sr. It was about restoring moral boundaries in public life—about reasserting that there are lines power must not cross, no matter how clever the legal justification.
It is often remembered through images: the crowds, the prayers, the soldiers who defected, the flowers on tanks. But its deeper meaning was institutional. Filipinos rose up because governance had ceased to be accountable, truth had been distorted, and public resources had become instruments of personal and political survival. In other words, Filipinos revolted not only against corruption, but against organized impunity.
Edsa succeeded in ending authoritarian rule. It did not complete the harder task of building institutions strong enough to prevent its return in new forms.
We restored elections, but did not dismantle political dynasties. We restored Congress, but did not fully insulate it from patronage. We restored a free press, but allowed money and disinformation to corrode public discourse. We restored constitutional checks, but tolerated their gradual weakening through convenience and compromise. Most of all, we never fully confronted how power reproduces itself—not only through personalities, but through control of resources.
That unfinished work matters today because corruption no longer depends on secrecy alone. It thrives in complexity. It hides behind processes that are technically legal, procedurally dense, and difficult for ordinary citizens to follow. When abuse becomes embedded in systems rather than individuals, removing one official does not end the problem. The structure remains. This is precisely the kind of challenge Edsa did not fully prepare us for—because it requires vigilance after victory, not just courage during revolt.
Public trust does not collapse overnight. It erodes when accountability appears selective, when investigations stall, when responsibility is diffused, and when consequences fail to match the scale of wrongdoing. Over time, citizens stop expecting redress. Cynicism replaces outrage. Democracy weakens—not because it is rejected outright, but because it is quietly abandoned.
This, too, is an Edsa lesson we neglected: democracy is not self-sustaining. It depends on sustained citizen pressure, credible enforcement by institutions, and moral clarity from leaders and opinion-shapers.
At 40, Edsa does not ask for nostalgia. It demands reckoning. It reminds us that massive abuse does not begin as spectacle; it begins as accommodation. That systems fail not only because of villains, but because of enablers. And that reform is never secured by one historic moment—it must be renewed, generation after generation.
The task before us is not to recreate Edsa’s drama, but to recover its discipline: the insistence that public power exists only for the public good, and that no design—however legal-looking—should be allowed to subvert that principle. Anniversaries invite comfort. But Edsa at 40 should resist it.
The budget controversy will eventually fade from headlines. Others will take its place. What must not fade is the question it raised: whether we still possess the collective will to confront wrongdoing when it is systemic and exhausting to challenge—or whether we have learned to live with it because it has become familiar.
Edsa’s enduring lesson is not about protest. It is about limits. It is about the moment a society decides that certain practices—no matter how normalized, no matter how carefully justified—are no longer tolerable.
Nations do not decay because citizens forget how to rise up. They decay when citizens quietly lower their expectations of what government owes them.
Forty years ago, Filipinos refused to lower them. Whether we still remember how—and why—may be the most important question Edsa asks of us now.
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Atty. Florencio “Butch” Abad is a former secretary of budget and management and former chair of the House committee on appropriations. He is currently a professor of Praxis at the Ateneo School of Government.
