Miriam: Duterte a very dangerous candidate
MANILA, Philippines - Davao City Mayor Rodrigo Duterte is a dangerous candidate as he and his supporters apparently would not accept defeat in the elections, according to presidential candidate Sen. Miriam Defensor-Santiago.
She told ABS-CBN News Channel that Pastor Apollo Quiboloy, the head of a religious group in Davao City, has declared that he would lead a revolution if his candidate loses the presidency.
“What kind of talk is that?” she asked. “That is almost seditious.”
Duterte has said he and Quiboloy have been friends for years. He has admitted to receiving pieces of real estate as gifts from the religious leader.
Duterte has also been using Quiboloy’s executive jet and helicopter in his campaign.
Santiago accused Duterte of being a candidate of the New People’s Army when she spoke before students of the University of Santo Tomas last Thursday.
In her television interview, Santiago justified her choice of Sen. Ferdinand Marcos Jr. as her runningmate.
She said the sins of the late President Marcos and his regime should not be blamed on the young Marcos.
Santiago also dismissed claims that the country would be the world’s laughingstock if Marcos is elected vice president.
“Of course not,” she said. “The world is engrossed with many problems. It has no time to make a laughingstock of a person in a country it has not heard of.”
Santiago disagreed with other presidential candidates that the national budget should be “decentralized” and released to regions and local government units.
“There is nothing wrong with centralizing the budget in Manila,” she said. “We are such a small country.”
Santiago said the Supreme Court should not have freed Senate Minority Leader Juan Ponce Enrile on bail.
“The basis used, which is humanitarian grounds, does not exist in the Constitution,” she said.
Enrile is facing plunder and graft charges in connection with the alleged misuse of his pork barrel funds.
As for the corruption allegations against Vice President Jejomar Binay, Santiago said, “There is a lot of evidence against him and no evidence in his favor. He just kept denying the accusations in the media.”
She appealed to voters to watch their votes on Monday.
“The Comelec (Commission on Elections) is working with imperfect machines,” she said, referring to the vote counting machines.
Santiago said the youth are likely to protest the election if the subsequent count would not reflect their vote.
“When I was not declared winner of the 1992 elections, many of my volunteers threatened to take to the streets to protest the election results,” she said. “Back then, the choice was clear to me: I cannot allow violence.”
However, she might not be able to stop any youth action against perceived electoral fraud on May 9, especially amid mounting youth clamor for moral leadership fueled by allegations of plunder against other candidates, Santiago said.
Some 40 percent of the total 54.4 million registered voters are aged 18 to 35. The candidate who can secure at least 75 percent of the youth vote would have numbers comparable to what made President Aquino win in 2010.
Santiago said the combined power of millennials will be sufficient to overcome any threat of violence from other presidential candidates.
“But it also means that if these voters stage their own protests, they will be a force to reckon with,” she said.
Santiago has urged her supporters to be vigilant against early efforts to rig the elections.
She has also criticized the results of commercial surveys, which she accused of removing her name from the survey forms to force respondents to vote for other presidential candidates.
To prevent pollsters from resorting to trending, Buhay Rep. Lito Atienza has asked the Comelec to prohibit surveys in the homestretch of the election campaign.
But Atienza’s appeal has fallen on deaf ears.
LP plan to win
The Liberal Party will put in place a “Plan B” to ensure the victory of its candidates in the congressional race and plans to initiate impeachment proceedings against Rodrigo Duterte if he wins the presidency, vice presidential candidate Marcos said yesterday.
He told reporters in Tacloban City that allies of President Aquino are now mobilizing the LP political machinery at the local level to get a majority number of congressmen so that they can dominate congress after the elections.
“The LP members are now desperate they will do anything just to win in the election, they are now seeing prison bars,” he said. – With Rainier Allan Ronda, Perseus Echeminada
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