New frontrunner emerges in the Philippines
By Joel D Adriano
MANILA - Presidential aspirant and senator Benigno "Noynoy" Aquino has surged
in recent opinion polls, dramatically changing the calculus of general
elections scheduled for next year in the Philippines.
A Social Weather Station (SWS) poll taken between September 5 and 6 showed that
around half of the respondents would vote for Noynoy, the most skewed result in
the polling agency's 20-year history.
Senator Manuel Villar, the Nationalista party frontrunner in previous polls,
fell to a distant second with 14% while criminally convicted former president
Joseph Estrada dropped to third with
13%. Incumbent Vice President Noli de Castro placed a distant fifth with only
7%.
Two months ago Noynoy was neither in the running for the presidency nor
considered a likely running mate for earlier Liberal Party (LP) hopeful Senator
Manuel Roxas II, who has fared poorly in opinion polls despite heavy spending
on political advertisements.
The massively attended funeral procession last month of Noynoy's 76-year-old
mother, former president Corazon "Cory" Aquino, catapulted the family back into
the national spotlight. In that emotive wake, several groups launched signature
drives to convince Noynoy to carry on the family tradition and run for the
presidency.
That symbolically mirrored the signature drive that catapulted Corazon, who,
riding the public outcry over the 1983 assassination of her husband and leading
opposition figure Benigno "Ninoy" Aquino, unified the fragmented opposition in
a 1986 snap election she won over then dictator Ferdinand Marcos.
Noynoy has emerged in the Senate as a measured critic of President Gloria
Macapagal-Arroyo's scandal-tainted administration. The Arroyo administration
has dismissed the SWS survey as propaganda, discounting the results because the
poll was taken only in Manila and its immediate outlying regions. (The four
regions featured in the survey notably account for nearly 40% of the national
vote.)
Due to term limits enshrined in the 1987 constitution, Arroyo cannot seek
another term in office. On several occasions her allies in the House of
Representatives have proposed changing the charter in ways that would allow her
to seek re-election as a prime minister rather than president. Those bids have
been met with howls of protest, particularly from the opposition-led Senate.
Now political analysts wonder whether Noynoy can sustain his leading position
in the polls until next May's elections. In the run-up to previous elections,
early frontrunners have been hit by political mudslinging and often lost steam
as the election season progressed.
In the 2004 elections, LP candidate Raul Roco consistently topped surveys a
year before the elections, but in the run-up to the actual polls was outpaced
by popular action movie star Fernando Poe Jr, an ally of former president
Estrada. Both Roco and Poe eventually lost to incumbent Arroyo amid a welter of
poll fixing allegations.
After years of scandals and corruption allegations under Arroyo, LP stalwarts
intend to market Noynoy as, comparatively, honest, moral and unassuming - the
same virtues that made his house wife-cum-president mother popular with the
Filipino masses. They note he has authored various bills in the Senate,
including legislation that has aimed to rein in official corruption and promote
workers' rights.
His critics portray him as an over-deliberate legislator, noting that he has
authored only nine bills in over two years in the Senate, and claim he
lacks the charisma of his popular forebears. Yet the administration's top
candidate, Defense Secretary Gilbert Teodoro, is barely registering in opinion
polls, receiving just 0.2% in a Pulse Asia survey in August.
The Harvard-educated Teodoro recently won the Lakas-Kampi party's executive
committee's nod to represent it at next year's election, winning out over vice
president and Arroyo ally De Castro, who has ranked higher than Teodoro in
opinion polls but wasn't an official member of the party. Some political
analysts contend in the current political environment that Arroyo's endorsement
would doom any candidate's chances.
Arroyo is the most unpopular Philippine president since opinion polls were used
and has consistently received negative ratings in quarterly SWS surveys since
October 2004. In the latest Pulse Asia survey conducted from July 28 to August
10, Arroyo received a negative 20% net trust rating. Nearly all of Arroyo's
favored candidates lost the Senate race during the 2007 elections.
In the Estrada camp, the poll chances of the former president took a hit from
fresh accusations that he blackmailed businessman Alfonso Yuchengco into
selling a stake in Philippine Long Distance Telephone (PLDT), the country's
largest telecom group, to a preferred foreign company by threatening to arrest
Yuchengco's youngest son on trumped-up drug charges.
The allegations were first made in a privileged speech by Senator Panfilo
Lascon and were confirmed in a public statement released to the media last week
by Yuchengco. Securities and Exchange Commission chair Perfecto Yasay claimed
during the impeachment hearings against Estrada in 2001 that a kickback of 1
billion pesos (US$21 million) was paid to Estrada to facilitate the PLDT
transaction.
Estrada denied the allegations and filed libel charges on Thursday against
Yuchengco and the Philippine Daily Inquirer, which along with nearly all of the
local newspapers in the Philippines had published detailed accounts of the
alleged intimidation. But media coverage of the still unproved allegations has
reopened old political wounds and put Estrada on the defensive in the run-up to
the election season.
The likely bigger challenge to Noynoy will come from the influential Catholic
Church, which has a history of swaying votes among the devout masses in the
provinces and militant labor groups. Archbishop Ricardo Cardinal Vidal has
publicly expressed his dismay over Noynoy's stand on a pending reproductive
health bill, which seeks to increase awareness and information on family
planning and pre-natal care, and has suggested he may launch a drive against
the authors of the bill.
The Catholic Church is strongly opposed to the bill, which it views as an
"anti-life" policy. Aquino, who is part of a legislative committee on
population and development, has hedged his position by saying he is not
technically campaigning for the use of contraceptives, but has simultaneously
raised concerns about the country's rapidly increasing population. The National
Statistics Office estimated the national population at 88.6 million in August
2007 and projects that figure will grow to 92.2 million by the end of this
year.
Meanwhile the militant labor group Kilusang Mayo Uno (KMU) has challenged
Noynoy to follow through on his vow made earlier this month to give up his
family's clan-held Hacienda Luisita, a 6,400 hectare land holding dedicated to
sugar production in Central Luzon. Land reform is a hot button issue in the
Philippines, where an elite class owns the majority of the land and the masses
remain landless.
Hacienda Luisita was controversial during president Cory Aquino's tenure
because she spared it from the Comprehensive Agrarian Reform Program, or CARP,
and instead placed it under the stock distribution option (SDO), a scheme
allowed under CARP that gave farmers stocks rather than land title deeds.
Noynoy has never run the estate and holds just 1/32 of its total land.
The Presidential Agrarian Reform Council (PARC), the highest policy-making body
on agrarian reform, revoked the SDO in 2005 on grounds that it failed to
improve the lives of the more than 5,000 farmer-beneficiaries. PARC's decision
is now under appeal at the Supreme Court.
The Arroyo-run Department of Agrarian Reform has said it is ready to
redistribute the sugarcane plantation's lands among poor farmers if Noynoy
makes good on his pledge to forego ownership, the department's chief Nasser
Pangandaman recently said. Meanwhile KMU chairman Elmer Labog said Noynoy's
promise is likely a political gimmick, aimed at bolstering his popularity among
the rural poor in the run-up to elections.
But if recent public opinion polls are any indicator, Labog's is a minority
perception of Noynoy's intentions, at least at this early stage of the election
season.
Joel D Adriano is an independent consultant and award-winning freelance
journalist. He was a sub-editor for the business section of The Manila Times
and writes for ASEAN BizTimes, Safe Democracy and People's Tonight.
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