Gloria Macapagal Arroyo appealed for calm yesterday amid allegations of cheating and as officials braved violence to count votes from Philippine elections that look set to give her six more years as president.
Arroyo, careful not to celebrate prematurely after doing well in exit polls, asked Filipinos for patience during an official counting process that will take at least three weeks and which has proved vulnerable to cheating and violence in the past.
PHOTO: AP
"The president is reaching out to all Filipinos to leave any residual rancor or animosity behind and buckle down to work and normalcy," her spokesman Ignacio Bunye said in a statement.
Underlining the problems facing those counting the votes, police said unidentified gunman staged three separate attacks in the northern Philippines on Monday and Tuesday, stealing ballot boxes, trying to burn an election office and killing one policeman.
A bomb exploded yesterday count officials in the southern island of Jolo, killing one person and wounding 11, police said.
Voters and investors face a nail-biting wait for results to confirm that economist Arroyo has won her first electoral mandate by defeating movie star and political novice Fernando Poe Jr.
Arroyo has a commanding lead of 41 percent of the vote to 32 percent for Poe, according to an exit poll that has proved accurate in the past.
Three other challengers were splitting the rest, pollster Social Weather Stations (SWS) said.
The survey showed senators loyal to Arroyo on track to win eight of 12 Senate posts up for grabs, assuring her administration of a majority in the 24-seat upper chamber and smoothing passage of an investor-friendly reform agenda.
Arroyo's margin over Poe raised hopes that she would have more clout after three years of questions over her legitimacy after she was thrust into the presidency by "people power" protests in 2001 that toppled incumbent Joseph Estrada.
She had to face down a one-day military mutiny last July -- the ninth revolt in 18 years -- and has a mixed record on corruption, debt control, poverty and insurgencies.
"That is a much stronger mandate than I think the administration anticipated early in April," Felipe Miranda, head of polling firm Pulse Asia, said. "That will help to a very great extent to stabilize the country."
Arroyo, 57, may struggle to rule effectively unless she can calm anger about glitches that left two million people unable to vote.
"If that SWS survey is accurate and she has won, less than credible elections will make her next six years as fractious and unstable as her first three," columnist Ane Marie Pamintuan wrote in the Philippine Star newspaper yesterday.
Manila stocks and the peso climbed after falling sharply on Tuesday after a global tumble and on concerns about the political risks of a narrow Arroyo win.
"This is just a dead-cat bounce," said Allan Araullo, vice president of Regina Capital Development. "There is concern on what the losers will do. There are also worries about the oil prices and the imminent [US] rate hike."
Arroyo was backed by big business, charismatic Christian sects and much of the political elite in the Roman Catholic nation of 82 million as she played up her record.
Poe, a gun-toting hero of 282 movies, expressed surprise he was trailing in surveys. Several thousand Poe supporters held a "victory march" on Tuesday night in Manila's business district.
The opposition said they expected a "people power" demonstration against the government if the election results were tainted by fraud and cheating.
The latest results from independent poll watchdog NAMFREL, which traditionally gives an accurate picture of the official tally, showed Poe leading Arroyo by 9 percentage points. It had counted less than 2 percent of total ballots.
For the official count, teachers tally votes by hand before ballot boxes make a long journey to regional and national centers, leaving ample scope for bribery and box switching.
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