PHILIPPINE President Rodrigo R. Duterte will consider the advice of his allies regarding his future political career, according to the presidential palace.
This after two major allies, Senator Emmanuel D. Pacquiao and Taguig Representative Alan Peter S. Cayetano, discouraged him to run for vice president in next year’s polls.
The President is yet to decide on whether or not he would run for the country’s second highest post, “but he welcomes suggestions from everyone, lalo na galing sa malalapit sa kanya (especially those coming from people close to him),” his spokesman Herminio L. Roque, Jr. told a televised news briefing.
In an interview with ABS-CBN News Channel, Mr. Pacquiao asked supporters of Mr. Duterte and her daughter, Davao City Mayor Sara Duterte-Carpio, who is supposedly being urged to run for president, to “give others a chance.”
Mr. Cayetano, Mr. Duterte’s running mate in 2016, said it’s better for the President to become an “elder statesman” than run for vice president in the upcoming polls.
“Look at President Ramos, not everyone agrees with him and to be frank, he was not the most exciting politician. But naging (he has become an) elder statesman,” he said.
“I’m sure the President will listen to all these well-meaning remarks,” Mr. Roque said.
The ruling Partido Demokratiko Pilipino–Lakas ng Bayan (PDP-Laban) earlier passed a resolution urging its chairperson, Mr. Duterte, to run for vice president. The President was also allowed to choose his own running mate.
The President, 76, is barred by law from running for reelection.
Ms. Carpio, who is not a party member, was among those being considered by Mr. Duterte to become the ruling party’s standard bearer in the 2022 elections, Mr. Roque said last week.
Michael Henry Ll. Yusingco, a senior research fellow at the Ateneo de Manila University Policy Center, said the “Duterte for VP proposal is more of a PDP-Laban issue than a Duterte issue.”
“I see certain elements in the party probably feeling anxious of a possible Sara Duterte presidency given that she is not actually a member of the party,” he said in a Facebook Messenger chat.
Howard Calleja, a convenor of the opposition coalition 1Sambayan, said Ms. Carpio would not become a “unifying” leader, adding that she would only continue the controversial legacies of her father.
Mr. Calleja made the statement after former Defense Secretary Gilbert Teodoro, Jr., said the presidential daughter “would have the ability to unite a lot of people.”
Mr. Teodoro, who lost to Benigno C. Aquino III in the 2010 presidential elections, made the remark after meeting with Ms. Carpio at her office last week. — Kyle Aristophere T. Atienza