VERA Files
Neither survey results nor mammoth crowds in campaign rallies can make a candidate win. But somehow, these indicate a candidate’s popularity or unpopularity. The actual votes we will cast next Monday are what will make candidates win.
He probably thought he was already close to the presidency if he got the endorsement of 1Sambayan, until Robredo gave in to calls for her to run for higher office.
The show of force for Vice President Leni Robredo on Macapagal Avenue in Pasay City on April 23 amply demonstrated her camp’s strength of purpose, and the burgeoning numbers — per estimates, 412,000 at the site and 171,000 on livestream (although often faltering by dint of a dropping internet signal) — foreshadowed a pitched battle with the survey front-runner Ferdinand Marcos Jr. at the polls.
Whoever loses in the May 9 elections for President will have a hard time accepting defeat, but for very different reasons.
Three candidates – Lacson, Moreno and Gonzales – tried to dictate their will in the upcoming presidential race from the opulent perch of their press conference at the plush Manila Peninsula Hotel over the weekend. How can these three candidates, haunted by shady and fraudulent credentials, have the moral ascendancy to prescribe which candidate should run and who should withdraw?
President Rodrigo Duterte’s recent veto of the proposed SIM card registration law should call attention to the legislators’ practice of inserting new provisions in bills during bicameral conference committee (bicam) meetings, no matter how well-intentioned the insertion may be.
Vice President Leni Robredo was the elephant in Manila Peninsula’s Rigodon Ballroom in the early part of three other presidential candidates’ Easter Sunday press conference, and it seemed that they could not quite bring themselves to identify her.
I speak as a layperson who has studied Catholic theology and catechism.
From the time he assumed the presidency in 2016 until now that he is about to finish his six-year term, President Rodrigo Duterte has consistently criticized the party-list system, saying it has been abused, particularly by rich politicians, who have managed to stay in power through this mechanism.
There are ten candidates for president of the Philippines, including one who refuses to attend debates as a matter of calibrated packaging and four who should have been declared as nuisance candidates.