Leader Brother Eddie Villanueva

Who’s Afraid of Bro. Eddie?

By Antonio C. Abaya

Written June 21, 2005

For the Manila Standard Today,

June 23 issue

Never before in living memory has this country been pushed to the edge of self-destruction as it has been in the past three weeks.

Whoever is manipulating all this has succeeded enormously in stripping President Arroyo and her government of the last semblance of credibility and moral ascendancy. She has become a hate object, the butt of text and email jokes, the target of derisive contempt and scathing insults. No national leader, male or female, can long stay in power carrying the baggage that she carries now.

President Arroyo is teetering on the brink of the precipice. And the only force that seems to be keeping her from being pushed into the void is the restraint and reluctance, especially among the middle class, dictated by self-interest: if she falls into the void, so will the rest of the country. Unless……….

Unless there is a credible and acceptable alternative leader or group of leaders who will provide the stability and the even keel to the ship-of-state in the coming storms, and the creative imagination to chart our way to a destination that we can all be convinced is our shared destiny.

Do we have such a leader or group of leaders in our immediate future, such as next week or next month or next year?

We probably do, but will he and they (never mind the ‘she’ for the time being) emerge triumphant in the inevitable squabbles that will ensue from an extra-constitutional demise of the Arroyo Government? Different groups will have differing agendas as they jockey for pre-eminence in the inevitable power vacuum.

And who will be the frontrunners in this jockeying for pre-eminence? In my column of June 01, I had mentioned that a five-person revolutionary council is being bruited about as the most likely core of a revolutionary government that will take-over if President Arroyo is forced out of power. But I did not name names.

In her June 14 column, Inquirer columnist Belinda Olivares-Cunanan, an unabashed defender of and apologist for President Arroyo, named four of those five: supposedly Susan Roces, Sen. Loi Ejercito, Fortunato Abat and Renato de Villa.

Cunanan pointedly excluded the rumored fifth, Evangelist Eddie Villanueva. Why she did not want to mention Villanueva at all is significant. Villanueva is the only one among the five who can excite and motivate a million people or more to attend a political rally at the Luneta, as he in fact did in the last days before the May 10 presidential elections in 2004. In other words, Villanueva is an actual potential threat, in fact THE only actual potential threat, to the Arroyo presidency, in terms of People Power mobilization. No wonder Arroyo-apologist Cunanan dared not mention his name.

Susan Roces can also draw a million people, but for an entirely different reason: out of sympathy for the death of her husband, FPJ, beloved of the star-struck masa and victim of massive fraud in the 2004 elections.

A combination of Villanueva and Roces – not necessarily as presidential and vice-presidential candidates – would be a potent political force.

Ms. Roces has repeatedly said she is not interested in entering politics and that a woman should not lead this country again. My information is that she and Villanueva have actually met and that she has explicitly deferred to Villanueva as the next leader of this country.

And this is not a sudden comradeship born out of the exigencies of the moment. In the funeral services for FPJ last December, at which politicians were pointedly barred from speaking, Villanueva and his religious group were the only ‘outsiders’ allowed to participate.

Villanueva, for his part, showed considerable political and mobilization skills in the 2004 elections, more than what the end results would indicate: he came out last in a field of five, after GMA, FPJ, Lacson and Roco, in that order.

A Villanueva-Roces combination would draw support from both the under-class and the middle and upper classes, which neither Erap nor Abat nor FVR nor the communists nor any of the trapos and family dynasts can match.

In presidential surveys in December 2003, Villanueva was getting only one percent. But this percentage kept on growing every month, until it reached five percent in the Pulse Asia survey of April 26-29 (with 9% undecided) and four percent in the SWS survey of May 1-4 (with 12% undecided).

His Luneta rally of May 6, a few days before Election Day, drew an estimated one million supporters, filling the park from the Quirino Grandstand to the Rizal Monument, by far the biggest rally for ANY candidate in the ENTIRE 2004 campaign.

In the SWS exit poll of May 10, Villanueva drew five percent (with 8% giving ‘no answer’). In the last publicly released Namfrel count of June 5, based on election returns from 79.21% of the precincts, Villanueva got 6.16% of the votes (versus 6.97 for Roco, 10.85 for Lacson, 36.97 for FPJ, and 39.05 for GMA).

So, from one percent in December to more than six percent in May, Villanueva’s share of supporters grew by more than 500% in only five months. Even granting that he was starting from a lower base, the growth of his support base was still phenomenal if you consider that support for Lacson actually decreased minimally during that period, from 13 to 11%, and so did support for Roco, from 16 to 6%, because of his illness.

Villanueva benefited from crossovers from Roco, as well as from many disaffected middle and upper class voters who could not stomach the idea of supporting either GMA or FPJ. And, of course, his biggest support base were the members of his charismatic religious group. What held them together was Villanueva’s rallying cry for a righteous leadership to extirpate the culture of corruption.

And if the elections had been scheduled for, say, September, instead of May, the growth momentum of his support base would have catapulted him above Roco and Lacson and would probably have placed him within striking distance of the presidency. He just plain ran out of time in 2004.

Is he now, in 2005, a political has-been, as another Arroyo defender in media describes him? That remains to be seen, if he were now to decide to flex his political muscles. Unless proven otherwise, Villanueva, supported by Ms.Roces, remains the only real potential threat to GMA, on the basis of mobilization capability and the broad spectrum of his support groups..

By contrast, the others in Cunanan’s four – Loi Ejercito, Fortunato Abat and Renato de Villa – are no threat to anyone except to themselves, assuming they are indeed members of the putative revolutionary council, which is by no means certain. Collectively, they could not draw 5,000 people to the Luneta even if they were to announce that they would sing and dance stark naked at the Quirino Grandstand.

Whoever is/are manipulating this train of events, he/they should realize that he/they need Villanueva-Roces on his/their side more than Villanueva-Roces need him/them on theirs, to attract the strongest support from the broadest sectors for a revolutionary council.

Who’s afraid of Brother Eddie? Everyone with a moist eye on Malacanang including its present occupant.

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