MANILA - Former President Joseph Estrada should brace himself for a “deluge of petitions” questioning his eligibility to join next year’s presidential election, Malacañang said Thursday.
With this likelihood, Cabinet Secretary Silvestre Bello III said there would no longer be any need for the Palace to initiate its own petition even if Estrada’s political comeback was made possible by the pardon granted to him by President Macapagal-Arroyo in 2007.
“I am sure that the moment President Estrada files his certificate of candidacy… there will be a deluge of petitions to have it disqualified,” he said in a press briefing.
Bello said he expected such petitions to come from Estrada’s own backyard, the political opposition, which, at this point, remained divided among at least three known presidential aspirants.
“I’m sure many of the people belonging to the other parties who will be affected by his entry will just be too happy and too eager to see to it that he will be disqualified,” he said.
Sixto Brillantes, an expert on election law and former legal consultant of the United Opposition, argued that Estrada was eligible to run. He argued that the Constitution barred only a sitting president from seeking “any reelection.”
“If the term is ‘any election,’ then he would be disqualified. But ‘any reelection’ would refer only to an incumbent president. That term should be interpreted that you have to be an incumbent,” he told the Inquirer.
But Brillantes warned that an Estrada disqualification would lead to “complications” because of the absence of an existing rule on candidacy by “substitution.”
He urged the Commission on Elections to bar substitution in the event of a candidate’s death or disqualification. “That’s the best solution,” he said.
Bello said the Palace was sticking to its position that the courts should ultimately decide whether Estrada could run again given the constitutional prohibition and the supposed condition in Ms Arroyo’s pardon declaration.
But he hinted at the idea that the Palace would have no problem even if Estrada, the Philippine president who received the biggest number of votes at around 11 million, was to join the 2010 race.
“Let the courts decide and in the final analysis, let the people decide,” he said. “I hope I don’t sound like bragging but in our case, we rely on the strength of a candidate, not on the weakness of the opponent.”
The administration's standard-bearer, Defense Secretary Gilbert Teodoro, remains in the bottom of surveys on presidential aspirants.
A clause in the pardon declaration read: “Whereas Joseph Ejercito Estrada has publicly committed to no longer seek any elective position or office.”
But the same document signed by Ms Arroyo two years ago acknowledged that “he is hereby restored to his civil and political rights.”
Brillantes said the clause showing Estrada’s promise not to seek any public office anymore was not necessarily a “condition.”
“It’s just a ‘whereas’ clause which is not really part of the pardon,” he said.
Anthony Golez, deputy presidential spokesperson, said Ms Arroyo had no regrets over freeing her predecessor. Estrada was pardoned shortly after he was found guilty of plunder by the Sandiganbayan.
“It was done out of reconciliation, a goodwill and good gesture coming from the President,” he told reporters.
“It was not a spur of the moment. The sincerity of the President was there and it’s up to him how he would accept that sincerity.”
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