Many Filipinos remain torn between similarly non-compelling choices — on one hand Arroyo, who had been widely censured for "lying, cheating, stealing" her way to the presidency, and on the other, the fractious political opposition. The aborted impeachment proceedings signalled at best a reprieve, if also a most tenuous one, for Arroyo as well as the nation.

To be sure, the political impasse has simply filed out of the halls of Congress and moved on to the streets, now the terrain of periodic rallies organised by militants and opposition leaders. To be as sure, the rallies are getting bigger at each turn, prompting Arroyo and her deputies to insinuate that perhaps it is time for her to seek emergency powers, a la martial law.

And even as the political tension has ebbed and flowed over the past few days, fact is the tinderbox that all Filipinos rich or poor, powerful and powerless, could not just wish away is the slowing down of the domestic economy.

More than a deadly combination of high inflation, the constantly swelling ranks of the unemployed and underemployed, mere spurts in the volume of portfolio investments and a weakening peso, rising crude oil prices hobble the economy.

An expanded value-added tax law that Arroyo had managed to get Congress to enact has been shackled by a restraining order issued by the Supreme Court. From that law, the government had hoped to raise 80 billion pesos in revenues by 2006, or a cool $1.4 billion that could help bridge a yawning budget  deficit.

Her political allies in Congress have rescued Arroyo from impeachment but she has hardly moved over the hump. 

Unrelenting protest actions paired with a ceaseless slide in the local economy define the intractable situation that she now faces amid the uneasy political peace that her lawmaker-friends had secured for her presidency. She escaped trial for alleged impeachable offenses but could not now wiggle out of the crisis in the national household.

Small wonder then despite the relative political calm, Arroyo remains as restless, as listless. This week, her deputies announced that the administration had shifted to a policy of "calibrated pre-emptive response", in lieu of the policy of maximum tolerance, to deal with rallyists.

Arroyo’s executive secretary, Eduardo Ermita, tried to explain the policy riddle that sounds like George Bush’s "pre-emptive strike" policy on Iran. In the end, Ermita managed only to befuddle even more. "Calibrated pre-emptive response," he says, means "the authorities will not stand aside while those with ill intent are herding a witting or unwitting mass of people and inciting them into actions that are inimical to public order and the peace of mind of the national community."

It looks like apart from courting their cabal of allies in Congress with pork and other perks, Arroyo and her deputies now want to chase out of the streets the protesters they have so judgmentally dismissed as a mindless, witless mob.

The President herself has voiced her exasperation with the rallies. In an expurgated cliché, days ago she uttered that she had grown tired of "chasing the bully around the schoolyard." The new policy toward street protests in gist means that government will henceforth disperse rallies without permits and arrest supposedly "illegal" protesters, she explained.

In her unflinching desire to remain in office, Arroyo seems to have forgotten that no less than the Philippine Constitution declares that the rights of the people to free speech, free expression and peaceful assembly for redress of just grievances are inalienable, the most superior of all rights.

Curiously, it is not the opposition that the people deem to be the most inimical element in the Philippine body politic. In its latest public opinion poll of 1,200 respondents last July, the creditable PulseAsia survey firm established that seven in 10 Filipinos disagree with the need to impose martial law, despite the volley of problems buffeting the county.

A third of all respondents judged a coup to be one of the political scenarios most inimical to the country’s interest.

The most telling finding has to do with what Filipinos believe to be the most inimical or the most destructive scenario: Arroyo continues governing, until she finishes her term of office in 2010.

 Malou Mangahas is a senior journalist based in Manila