MANILA, 21 June 2004 — President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo has won a fresh six-year term in office, a congressional committee that finished the contentious vote count said yesterday.
The opposition, which has claimed Arroyo’s camp manipulated the May 10 vote and cheated action film star Fernando Poe Jr. of some 2 million ballots, fought the proceedings all the way and did not appear to be ready to give up. Arroyo’s victory margin was a little over a million votes.
The military and police have been put on full alert for possible trouble.
The end of the count, six weeks after the election, paved the way for Arroyo’s proclamation as winner by the full Congress. But the opposition can still question the committee’s report on the count later this week or file a protest, after the proclamation, to the Supreme Court election tribunal that likely would take years to resolve.
The congressional committee worked through the weekend and finally finished counting the last of 176 provincial summaries of votes, called certificates of canvass, late yesterday. “The canvass is over. Arroyo has won,” Senate President Franklin Drilon said. “It was very difficult but this is democracy,” he said, describing the infighting over the vote count as “harrowing.”
The final tally had Arroyo with 12,905,808 votes and Poe with 11,782,232, a difference of 1,123,576 votes. Three other candidates were well behind.
Arroyo’s vice presidential running mate, popular news anchor Noli de Castro, also won, according to the House-Senate committee tasked with counting the races for the country’s top two offices.
Newspapers yesterday quoted Arroyo, a US-trained economist, as saying she was going ahead with plans to hold her inauguration ceremony before a June 30 deadline.
But opposition politicians said she would be a bogus president unless their doubts over the vote were addressed.
“President Arroyo’s allies can now run their express train faster to railroad the canvass and proclamation, but it will be a bogus proclamation,” opposition Sen. Edgardo Angara told the Philippine Star newspaper.
Opposition lawmakers had demanded that election returns be reopened to examine what they say are discrepancies in the results. Administration members refused, saying the counting must be completed by June 30, when Arroyo’s current term ends, to avoid a constitutional crisis.
“In 2001, Gloria Macapagal Arroyo became president without the benefit of a popular mandate,” political commentator Randy David wrote in the Philippine Daily Inquirer. “In 2004, her claim to the presidency is even more dubious; it totters on the edge of unopened electoral returns.”
Arroyo assumed the presidency on the back of huge anti-graft protests that toppled Joseph Estrada, another film star and a close friend of Poe.
— Additional input from agencies
