Disunity

It’s said that the campaign for the next presidential race starts as soon as the official results of the latest one are out.

This time, at least it seems to have taken over 10 months from election day 2022 before alliances of convenience frayed and the battle lines for 2028 started being drawn.

President Marcos has said people shouldn’t read too much into what he described as “run of the mill” turbulence in the House of Representatives, arising from his cousin’s demotion of former president and now Pampanga Rep. Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo.

But the speculation about the breakup of the vaunted UniTeam is unavoidable, especially after Vice President Sara Duterte resigned from the ruling Lakas-CMD following GMA’s demotion from senior deputy speaker to deputy speaker.

In a statement, VP Sara decried “political toxicity” and “execrable political power play.” Davao del Norte 1st District Rep. Pantaleon Alvarez surely agrees.

VP Sara then let loose last Sunday with what, even to non-Visayan speakers, sounded like an insult: “Sa imong ambisyon, do not be tambaloslos.”

She’s her father’s daughter after all.

Our Davao-based reporter who is fluent in the dialect said that in Cebuano slang, tambaloslos is a pejorative word referring to a useless or inept male.

Non-Visayan speakers, scrambling to find out what the word means, learned that in Visayan and Bicolano folklore, tambaloslos refers to a mythical creature with a large mouth and oversized genitals that befuddles and leads its victims astray.

Like Rodrigo Duterte’s reference to a cocaine-using weakling in the 2022 presidential derby, the tambaloslos has remained unnamed.

But because VP Sara posted her comment online following her resignation from Lakas-CMD, speculation on the identity of the tambaloslos focused on the party’s president, Speaker Martin Romualdez.

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The Speaker seemed unfazed by the VP’s viral post, releasing his own statement later on Sunday about the need to “nip in the bud” any move to “destabilize” the House.

This came after GMA released a lengthy statement saying her recent activities might have been “misconstrued” as an attempt to stage a coup and install her as speaker. Such a coup would have been a repeat of her messy takeover of the top House post from Alvarez in the previous administration. That coup was widely believed to have been orchestrated by Sara Duterte, supposedly to the consternation of her father.

Because of her track record, GMA suffers from a credibility problem in this area. From Romualdez’s statement, it looks like he did not buy GMA’s denial about the coup plot, which she allegedly discussed with some congressmen whom she treated to a junket in South Korea during the recent House break.

While GMA’s statement was conciliatory, saying she understood that a speaker must have the full confidence of the President to get the Palace legislative agenda moving smoothly, her allies are seen to be doing the opposite.

Her camp is believed to be fanning speculation that from the theme of unity in the 2022 campaign, Marcos 2.0 is now focused on continuity of the clan’s hold on power, with Romualdez being groomed to succeed him in 2028.

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This will put the Speaker on a head-on collision course with VP Duterte, who is widely believed to be gunning for the presidency in 2028, after agreeing to slide down last year reportedly through the intercession of GMA.

Such speculations were reinforced by the VP’s advice to the unnamed tambaloslos about reining in ambition. According to the Marites network, the tambaloslos camp’s response was, look who’s talking…

The trapo or traditional politician image has always been an albatross on the presidential aspirations of House speakers. Post-EDSA revolt, no speaker has ever won the presidency.

But Romualdez being a member of the current ruling clan, and considering how Ferdinand Marcos Jr. won the presidency, we could be in for a surprise in 2028.

Or maybe the UniTeam breakup, which was really just a matter of time considering the egos and ambitions involved, will allow someone neither deeply aligned with either camp nor clearly identified with the other colors in the political firmament, to break the stranglehold of the dynasts that are unable to moderate their greed for power. You wish.

BBM had also downplayed Duterte’s resignation from Lakas-CMD, saying she has “too much work to do” as VP and concurrent education secretary and co-vice chair of the National Task Force to End Local Communist Armed Conflict. There was no “maybe” in that presidential statement. Public school teachers will agree that the VP has too much work.

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Speculations about a rift in fact already percolated when BBM, in his last foreign trip to attend the ASEAN summit in Indonesia, designated for the first time ever a committee instead of just the VP as government caretaker in his absence. While Duterte was designated as chair, the committee was jointly convened by Executive Secretary Lucas Bersamin.

GMA’s purported destabilization and the breakup of UniTeam have triggered speculations about political realignments and the composition of the Cabinet now that the one-year ban on the appointment of losers in the polls has lapsed.

Officials identified with the Duterte and GMA camps are well known. Last Monday, Jay Art Tugade quit as Land Transportation Office chief, citing differences with Transport Secretary Jaime Bautista. Tugade is a son of Rodrigo Duterte’s transport chief, Arthur Tugade.

With VP Sara going after BBM’s cousin and de facto SAP (special assistant to the President) in vintage rude Duterte fashion, have the bridges been burned?

Last Monday, Romualdez accorded GMA a traditional Filipino gesture of respect when she attended the swearing in of her replacement as senior deputy speaker, Aurelio Gonzales Jr. If they were feeling each other’s backs for the best place to plunge the knife, it didn’t show. Filipinos have seen such Orocan moments in Congress often enough.

Ordinary folks worried about high prices and their livelihoods couldn’t care less who’s at the helm of the House, a.k.a. the HOR, where people with the same surnames merely switch seats during elections.

But with 2028 still five years away, the view from the peanut gallery is getting interesting. Pass the popcorn, please.