The 1992 Presidential election was a seven-way race with then-candidate Defense Secretary Fidel V. Ramos winning with 23.6% of the total votes cast. He was a minority president, so it was politically important for him to build a broader coalition to actively support the priorities of his incoming administration. He set out early to articulate the steps he intended towards binding the social wounds created by the election campaign, and to restore civility to political competition. His amity talks with his opponents in the presidential race and the nation’s leading figures who opposed his candidacy forged an early reform constituency for the new President Ramos.

At the outset, initiatives to build consensus and to consult and form alliances seemed to be succeeding but, with a handful of allies and absent a ruling party in Congress, the Ramos administration faced a lack of momentum with its legislative reform package and priority bills. The administration needed a coalition led by President Ramos’ LAKAS Party to move its socio-economic agenda forward. Following an analysis of the prevailing political factors and players, a strategy of “power-sharing and burden-sharing” was devised, with the Executive and the leadership and members of both Houses coming together on specific agenda items. The Rainbow Coalition was built and it did take off.

While political work gained ground, President Ramos saw the need to institutionalize a concrete stakeholder engagement mechanism to build consensus and drive swift action. Discussions with coalition members centered on the President’s idea of legislation to achieve that specific objective. This resulted with the enactment of Republic Act No. 7640 in December 1992, one of the first laws passed by the 9th Congress, that created the Legislative-Executive Development Advisory Council (LEDAC) in support of President Ramos’ development plan and to ensure consistency in policy development, planning, and budgeting. The President chaired LEDAC himself, and along with his Cabinet, he sat with representatives from the bicameral Congress.

The LEDAC identified and prioritized development initiatives that required legislation, serving as the main venue for consensus building between the executive and legislative branches of government. While the law mandated quarterly LEDAC meetings, the President convened these weekly to monitor the status and progress of proposed legislation; address issues and gaps relating to priority legislative measures; and deliberate on related proposals for inclusion in the Common Legislative Agenda (CLA), a list of priority legislative measures that LEDAC agreed to submit to Congress to ratify and pass into law. Philippines 2000 hinged on new supportive laws, and its success relied on a Congressional buy-in to a strategy collectively created by the full range of stakeholders. By the end of the Ramos presidency, the Rainbow Coalition had enacted two hundred and twenty-eight reform laws that lent cohesion to national development strategies.