The candidate list started out with a dozen serious contenders vying with 100 not-so-serious contenders, including a transvestite diva, a candidate who painted his name on local dogs, and a movie star with a history of womanizing, gambling, and heavy drinking. Thankfully, the Commission on Elections (Comelec) exercised its legal right to declare some candidates "nuisance candidates" and strike them from the ballot, and fortunately, they did so with great vigor. The diva didn't make it. The movie star won.
He is Vice President Jose Estrada, head of the Struggle of the Nationalist Filipino Masses, and he has claimed victory, with a government-sanctioned poll-watching group giving him 37 percent of the vote. Although the results aren't yet official as of this writing, several other candidates have already conceded the race. Estrada (known popularly as "Erap") has already lodged a formal complaint about the long delay in announcing an official winner, and warned of voter fraud, making him possibly the first electoral winner ever to contest the election.
He wants to ensure that the results are perfectly accurate, and has good reason for doing so. The current administration, headed by President Fidel Ramos, was backing House Speaker Jose de Venecia, who looks to have lost fairly badly, coming in third with only about 18 percent of the vote. But Ramos, who was constitutionally barred from seeking a second six-year term, still holds out hope that his candidate may have won, and claims that it is too early to know the final result, despite the capitulation of most of the rest of the field. Given a deep historical memory in the Philippines of governments nullifying elections, that alone is enough to make Estrada nervous. There are no indications that Ramos would take such action, but the unfortunate historical precedent is hard to erase from memory.
Most others have conceded defeat. Fellow candidate Juan Ponce Enrile, a former defense secretary, announced that he was "personally convinced of the irreversible and overwhelming victory" for Estrada. Influential Roman Catholic leader Jaime de Sin, who called Estrada "morally unfit to govern" due to his admitted history of womanizing, drinking, and gambling, also announced his support for the new government.
Estrada is a former movie star, principally of cheap action movies, where he typically played a Robin Hood-like character who stood up for the poor and oppressed in society. A bizarre coalition has opposed him, from moralists like Cardinal Sin to big business leaders who fear that Estrada's lack of economic policy experience is the last thing the embattled Philippine economy needs. Even former president Corazon Aquino joined the fray, saying that Estrada's popularity was "really amazing," a quotation dripping with some sort of undefined normative judgment.
