“IF I AM no longer around it will be Bongbong. I will give him my advice at night while he’s sleeping with Liza,” Senator Miriam Defensor-Santiago said Tuesday.
She was referring to her running mate Senator Ferdinand Marcos Jr. and his wife Liza Araneta-Marcos.
Speaking at the Imelda Cultural Center in Batac, Ilocos Norte, Santiago said if she was elected President and something happened to her, “we want someone young and idealistic to replace me.”
“You are never too young to make a difference,” Santiago told the audience as she and Marcos kicked off their campaign for the May elections.
“You will choose one who is excellent, with good academics and with concern.”
Santiago had earlier said she had won her battle over stage 4 lung cancer but was still feeling its symptoms.
She promised their supporters in her opening speech that she will send all those involved in the multi-billion-peso pork barrel scam to “brand-new jails.”
She vowed to jail the corrupt once elected, and they could choose between a standard jail or a deluxe jail. She and Marcos will come up with three types of jail: ordinary, business class and first class.
Marcos told the crowd he chose Santiago to run with him because they’d been “desk mates” in the Senate.
“The one thing I learned from our candidate is meritocracy: the recognition of excellence,” Marcos said.
But he said he learned his leadership skills from his mother, Ilocos Norte Rep. Imelda Marcos and his late father, former President Ferdinand Marcos.
“In this coming elections no one will be left behind. Long live Ilocos Norte!” Marcos said. He asked the Ilocanos to “get rid” of their regionalistic mentality and to revive nationalism.
“Wherever we came from—whether we are Ilocano, Bicolano, Tagalog, Bisaya or Ilonggo, we are all Filipinos,” Marcos said.
“So we must vote for a leader who will remind us that nobody will love the Filipinos except we Filipinos.”
Marcos is running second in the latest survey on the preferences for vice president. The Marcos family is banking on the so-called Solid North to deliver the votes for him on election day.
Santiago said she had given a lot of thought on where she would launch my presidential campaign. “Some have advised that I begin in the South because I come from the Visayas,” she said.
“But here I am now in the North to show the strength of my alliance with Senator Bongbong Marcos.”
Santiago hails from vote-rich Iloilo. She enjoyed strong support from the Visayas in the past elections. Macon Ramos-Araneta
Marcos wields the so-called “solid north vote” with his family still holding top positions in the Ilocos Region.
Santiago said the May elections were an opportunity for the voters to “reform the culture of corruption” in the Philippine government.
She and Marcos have consistently won the campus surveys conducted after the filing of the Certificates of Candidacy in October. Santiago, in particular, has been dubbed the “president of campuses” after winning all the campus polls so far.
She was the president of choice in the University of the Philippines campuses in Los Baños and Manila, the University of Santo Tomas, the Polytechnic University of the Philippines, the Ateneo de Manila University and the University of Northern Philippines.
She has previously emphasized the importance of the youth vote, recalling that she almost won the 1992 presidential elections with the help of thousands of student volunteers and campus campaigners.
The Commission on Elections expects some 37 percent or 20 million of the total 54 million voters in the May elections to come from the voters aged 18 to 35, giving Santiago the youth vote comparable to the 15 million votes that won for Aquino the presidency in 2010.