Politics makes strange bedfellows, and none would be stranger than the self-exiled leader of the Communist Party of the Philippines and his avowed enemy, the United States.
Yet over the weekend, CPP founding chairman Jose Ma. Sison said Washington could influence the Philippine military and police to arrest President Rodrigo Duterte as a traitor and instigate a coup.
Sison issued the statement after the President, accusing Washington of egging him into provoking Beijing over the territorial dispute in the West Philippine Sea, dared the United States to fire the “first shot” against China.
The communist leader, however, said even that shot was unnecessary.
"Without firing a single shot, the US can easily instruct its following within the military and police forces under Duterte to take him into custody as a traitor and to install Vice President [Leni] Robredo as the constitutional successor," Sison said in a statement.
Sison claimed the US refrains from ousting Duterte because it is still trying to use him against communist rebels and to pave the way for Charter change, which he said would "allow 100-percent foreign ownership" of businesses engaged in the "exploitation of land and natural resources."
Sison, meantime, also alleged that Duterte has been "heavily bribed" by China.
The Palace promptly dismissed the Sison’s warning that the United States could stage a coup against Duterte, calling it “wishful thinking coming from a tired, old, failed, revolutionary.”
Presidential Spokesman Salvador Panelo said Sison should wake up from his slumber.
“He has to wake up from a half-century of sleep because 50 years, 50 years, they have been fighting,” he said.
He added that it was both ironic and pitiful that Sison had to rely on a foreign country to effect a change in the leadership in the Philippines.
“It is an admission in fact that their revolution has failed,” Panelo said.
The narrative of an aging revolutionary leader out of touch with his own people is not difficult to sell. After all, Sison has been in self-exile in The Netherlands since 1988 while his comrades risked life and limb battling successive governments back home.
But it probably isn’t all that wise for the Palace to play the “tired and old” card so quickly. The President, after all, has himself invited talk of coups by telling the military that he would step down if they asked, and for seeing enemies behind diagrams whose provenance and credibility are suspect.
There was a short moment when Sison and the President, given their shared history in the political left, seemed ready to pursue peace. That moment has long gone, however, and the two old men—strange bedfellows indeed—need to stop muddying the waters and step aside and give a new generation of leaders with fresh ideas work for peace and progress.