The Supreme Court’s decision to allow Sen. Grace Poe to run for the presidency was not just the boost she needed for her candidacy, it also laid to rest for now any uncertainty that her disqualification from the race brings to the elections.
Right before Davao City Mayor Rodrigo Duterte threw his hat into the presidential ring—his decision supposedly stemmed from his belief that Poe cannot run because she once renounced her Filipino citizenship and had become an American citizen—there were fears that there wasn’t a viable challenger to Vice President
Jejomar Binay since Liberal Party (LP) standard- bearer Mar Roxas had been falling behind in the surveys.
Despite being stained by charges of corruption, Binay was the front-runner and due to the legally troubled candidacies of both Poe and Duterte—the Davao City mayor also in the same boat as the senator owing to his substitute filing candidacy for the wrong post—the vice president became the preferred choice of those who want their candidates unencumbered by legal challenges in their presidential run.
Duterte got the jump over Poe after the Comelec decided he can run for the presidency while Poe had to agonize for months wondering whether she would not only be disqualified from the race but also from her post as senator with one of her accusers waiting in the wings with perhaps a shot at replacing her.
The SC ruling on Poe’s disqualification case also came on the heels of a court ruling disqualifying a local candidate for holding an American passport. In Poe’s case much of the uncertainty lay on where in the country she was born—the widely-held belief that it was in Jaro, Iloilo is backed by accounts of those who supposedly knew her and how she was eventually adopted by acting legend Fernando Poe Jr. and his wife Susan Roces.
The SC’s ruling came a month earlier than a similar favorable ruling handed down by the High Tribunal on Poe’s late father, whose 2004 run to the presidency tragically ended in his death later in that same year.
Again we can only hope that a presidential run by the younger Poe will not be marred by allegations of mass cheating similar to what was uncovered a year after his death when the so-called Garci scandal erupted.
That the principal player in that scandal, former Comelec commissioner Virgilio Garcillano, was spotted in one of Cagayan de Oro City’s hotels after the presidential debate held in that city last month, stoked the fires of speculation that something irregular is about to happen.
That and the SC ruling that orders the Comelec to print out voters’ receipts which the poll agency warned would significantly set back their preparations for the elections may only fuel those fires. But that’s another issue for another day.
For now, Poe and her followers can take consolation in the fact that she lives to fight for the presidency, a five-cornered fight that will offer voters more than enough options to decide on and more than enough choices on who and what kind of leader they want to turn over the reins of government to.
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