"No voices—just plain good sense"
The President is reportedly waiting for a message from God on whether he should heed his party’s exhortation to run for the second-highest post in the land during next year’s election.
It is not clear which god Mr. Duterte wishes to hear from, but we hope he is awakened to the fact—on his own and without otherworldly intervention—that doing so would be a really bad idea.
For some members of the PDP-Laban, however, this is the only way to go: Mr. Duterte agrees to run for vice president, and will have the choice of either his daughter, Davao City Mayor Sara Duterte-Carpio, or his faithful aide, Senator Christopher Lawrence Go, gunning for the top post.
A February 22-March 3 survey by polling firm Pulse Asia revealed Duterte-Carpio leads a list of 13 potential presidential candidates with 27 percent of respondents preferring her. Go ranks 7th with 5 percent of respondents likely to vote for him.
And then, of course, President Duterte remains wildly popular; a September 2020 survey by the same firm found that 91 percent of Filipinos approved of his performance. All these make for a winning combination in next year’s make-or-break elections.
It may be good for the party and good for the running mate, but Mr. Duterte must know that the move would be ill-advised because it goes against everything he has said and has stood for.
Foremost, he has always expressed weariness at leading the country, especially during this COVID-19 crisis. More than once, he has threatened to step down if this or that condition were not met. In his weekly addresses to the nation, he has always appeared distracted, exhausted, even lost.
Why then would he wish to remain as a top executive, sliding to a post just a heartbeat away from his former office, when he could very well serve as an elder statesman best remembered for not clinging to power at all costs?
Second, our country remains in the cruel grip of the pandemic. Our health care and economic systems are in shambles. More than a million cases and more than 21,000 deaths into the crisis, we are still waiting for a road map telling us that while we may still be battling the virus now, we will soon be led out of the woods by people who know what they are doing. This is a tall order that Mr. Duterte’s team still has yet to measure up to.
Finally, Filipinos are not stupid. They will easily see through these maneuvers —when Mr. Duterte should be focusing on containing COVID and achieving herd immunity and restoring the economy—as a ploy to circumvent the prohibitions of the Constitution. We are sure he does not want to go down in history as somebody desperate to stay when he has had his turn.
We can only hope that the voice that speaks to the President is one of reason and one of genuine love of country, and that soon he realizes that this voice does not come from God or anybody—just his plain good sense.