Benigno Aquino looked set yesterday to emerge from a tumultuous election campaign as the next president of the Philippines with the release of a survey showing he had widened an already big lead over his rivals.
Should the opinion polls be reflected in Monday’s election, the son of national democracy heroine Corazon Aquino would record the biggest win in Philippine presidential electoral history.
Aquino, a balding bachelor whom rivals have unsuccessfully sought to portray as a political lightweight, enjoyed 42 percent support from respondents to this week’s survey by polling body Social Weather Stations.
PHOTO: REUTERS
Former president Joseph Estrada, deposed in 2001 amid graft allegations for which he was later convicted, climbed past business titan Manny Villar with 20 percent support, according to the survey.
Villar, who had long been seen as Aquino’s main rival, slumped to 19 percent from 26 percent recorded in the previous survey carried out last month. Aquino’s numbers were up from 38 percent.
The survey was the last major opinion poll to be released ahead of Monday’s election to choose a new president, members of parliament and thousands of other government posts for the Southeast Asian nation of 90 million people.
Philippine President Gloria Arroyo is required by constitutional term limits to step down on June 30, ending nine years in power that were marred by allegations of massive corruption and vote rigging.
Philippine presidential elections are decided simply by whomever receives the largest amount of votes.
Estrada secured the most emphatic win in Philippine electoral history in 1998 when he received 39 percent of the vote.
Aquino, 50, who has spent the past decade as a low-key member of parliament, tapped into a massive outpouring of sympathy over his mother’s death late last year as a springboard for his campaign.
Corazon Aquino led the “people power” revolution that overthrew dictator Ferdinand Marcos in 1986, then served as the nation’s president for six years.
She earned a reputation for being above much of the corruption that plagues the Philippines, and her son has similarly campaigned on a platform of clean governance.
The Philippines has one of Asia’s most free-wheeling democracies and the buildup to next week’s vote has been full of the drama, violence and conspiracy theories that have been a trademark of previous election campaigns.
Nearly 100 people have been killed in election-related violence, according to police statistics, as politicians in mostly lower-level posts have used the most brutal of means to extinguish rivals’ challenges.
Adding to the tension have been concerns that the Philippines’ first attempt at using computers to count the votes will be a disaster and potentially lead to a failure of elections.
A humiliating technical blunder by the election commission this week fueled those fears, and led all the presidential candidates to call for a parallel manual count.
The election commission and its private partners were forced to recall memory cards for the nearly 80,000 vote counting machines after they were found to be configured incorrectly.
The commission has insisted the election will still be able to go ahead on Monday and that there is no need for a manual count.
It also admitted that not all the machines will have their memory cards replaced in time, further stoking concerns about the credibility of the vote.
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