Marcos Foes Striving for United Front

In high-rise office suites, political strategists of the Philippine opposition scrambled this week to meet the call of President Ferdinand E. Marcos for an early presidential election.

Phones rang, lists were checked and favors called in. Movers and shakers from out-country provinces trooped through the various party headquarters. Offices buzzed with consultations and interparty bargaining.

The contest for the nomination was on, and platforms were pushed aside. In this campaign, if it is not aborted, the issue will be Marcos, as the president himself has said.

With the stakes so high, attention has focused on what is often described as the Philippines’ weak and fragmented opposition. Marcos wants the election held Jan. 17, and this gives his opponents little more than two months to organize.

The election, Marcos said, “will once and for all erase all doubts regarding the instability and popularity of my administration.”

Former Sen. Salvador Laurel, a front-runner for the opposition nomination, called the election “our one last hope, our one last chance (for a nonviolent change of government).”

If the call for the snap vote clears constitutional hurdles--some members of the opposition want to challenge Marcos’ decision to submit a formal resignation but remain in Malacanang Palace--the man who has ruled here for 20 years will be facing a candidate of the moderate mainstream.

The Communist-led protesters and street demonstrators who have plagued the Marcos presidency in recent years will not be a factor this time. Instead, his potential opponents include the widow of a martyred foe, a polished lawyer from an aristocratic family, a tough Manila businesswoman who is a political operator, and a former senator who sought exile from martial law in the United States.

“In a fairly clean election, united we cannot lose,” Laurel said. “Divided we cannot win.”

Since Marcos, 68, called last Sunday for the election, the opposition leaders have reiterated pledges to unite behind a single candidate. But whether party and personal divisions actually can be healed will become clear in the next month.

Since 1978, when the six-year martial-law ban on partisan politics was lifted, Philippine political parties have blossomed, combined and collapsed with regularity. Marcos’ own ruling party, the Kilusan Bagong Lipunan (KBL), or New Society Movement, was formed that year.

Opposition Listed

The major opposition parties include:

--The United Nationalist Democratic Organization (UNIDO), a party of nationwide strength that won more races than any other opposition group in the 1984 parliamentary elections, when Marcos foes won a third of the seats in Parliament.

The UNIDO leader is 57-year-old Salvador (Doy) Laurel, a senator before martial law and a member of a Batangas province family that has produced a long succession of provincial and national office holders.

A lawyer, Laurel is urbane and astute, having outgrown an early reputation as a playboy. His critics call him slick.

--The Liberal Party, one of the country’s oldest and now split into two wings, followers of former Sens. Eva Estrada Kalaw and Jovito Salonga. The Liberals also have a nationwide organization and are strong in Manila.

Kalaw, 64, has business interests in the capital and is a no-nonsense political leader. Salonga, also 64, jailed under martial law and an exile in the United States until his return last spring, has a reputation as a brilliant lawyer but his years abroad may have diminished his influence here.

--PDP-Laban, strong in Manila and some other cities. Ramon Mitra, an outspoken Marcos critic from the southern island of Palawan, is the party’s leading personality.

Aquino Widow Popular

Corazon Aquino, 52, the widow of assassinated former Sen. Benigno S. Aquino Jr., Marcos’ most formidable foe, is a woman without a party, with no practical background in politics, but she remains the popular choice for the presidential nominee of a unified opposition.

Acquaintances say she was toughened by her husband’s years in jail under Marcos’ rule, and by his 1983 assassination, a tragedy that catalyzed the opposition, waking many up from the long torpor of martial law.

There are several other opposition parties, including influential regional groupings like the Mindanao Alliance, but the favorites for the presidential nomination are Laurel, Aquino, Salonga and Kalaw. All except Aquino openly covet the nomination.

Laurel is a declared candidate, the nominee of UNIDO. He was in Los Angeles when Marcos said in an interview on American television Sunday that he was ready to hold early elections before his term was due to end in 1987. He has been on the East Coast on a speaking tour, but his aides said Thursday that he will cut short his U.S. trip and return for the campaign.

Kalaw, in an interview here Thursday, made her ambitions apparent. “Personally, I think I’m the most credible candidate. Marcos can be beaten,” she said.

Salonga is identified with the strongly anti-Marcos elements among expatriates in California and elsewhere in the United States. He has not lessened his criticism of the president since his return.

She Set 2 Conditions

Aquino seems reluctant. She has said she does not want the nomination and is not interested in politics. But she recently said that, under two conditions, she might change her mind: one, if snap elections were called, and two, if her supporters could gather a million signatures on petitions for her candidacy.

Marcos took care of the first and the Aquino camp, led by Joaquin (Chino) Roces, whose newspaper was shut down under martial law, is pushing the petitions.

Her competence and intelligence are acknowledged, and as Aquino’s widow, she has emotional appeal. But she is regarded here as far more than a sympathy candidate. Even in the distant southern provinces, politicians tell reporters, “Only Cory can pull us together.”

A knowledgeable politician in Manila said the Aquino family opposes her nomination as a threat to her husband’s “legend.” In an election some dirt will fly, and Benigno Aquino was known to play hardball in rough-and-tumble Philippine politics before martial law.

The major opposition parties have agreed to field a single candidate, and so far the agreement has held under the pressure of personal ambition. Next Friday, the opposition National Unification Committee, an umbrella group, will meet to hammer out the mechanics of the selection. The choice will be made behind closed doors, by discussion, negotiation and consensus, probably before the end of the month, if the election is not sidetracked for constitutional reasons.

The opposition leaders think it’s on.

“Marcos is in a bind,” said former Sen. Rene Espina, the UNIDO secretary general. “If he pulls out, he’ll lose further credibility abroad.”

Infighting Goes On

While agreeing to support a single nominee, the opposition parties are not meek about their candidates or guarded in their statements about others.

Espina, for instance, said the high assessment of Corazon Aquino’s popularity is “a lot of propaganda.”

“The Cory thing is a last-ditch effort to stop Doy Laurel,” he said Thursday in Laurel’s eighth-floor law offices in Makati, the Manila business district.

Kalaw, in turn, suggested that Laurel might run even if the National Unification Committee chooses another candidate.

Several opposition politicians suggested that Marcos might engineer and secretly fund lesser-known candidates in the hope that their presence on the ballot will drain votes from the unification committee’s choice.

The opposition acknowledges that it will not be able to match the Marcos war chest. Espina, the UNIDO leader, said the ruling KBL might spend close to $800 million on the election.

“In Cebu,” a UNIDO official confided, “we hear they’re budgeting 100 pesos a voter.” That is almost $6, more than a day’s pay for most Filipinos.

Jose Concepcion Jr., a Makati businessman, said a presidential election followed by scheduled local elections in May could drive up the inflation rate from the present 10% to 30%, with the inflow of campaign funds and government expenses.

Poll-Watchers Wait

Concepcion is head of the National Citizens’ Movement for Free Elections, a poll-watching group that has been credited with sharply curtailing fraud in the 1984 legislative elections; so far, it has not been accredited by the government to do the same job in the coming elections. He said the Manila business community will strongly support the opposition candidate.

“The businessmen have been demanding reforms,” he said, “but Marcos is not moving.”

Along with Marcos, the main issues of the campaign are expected to be the economy and what Filipinos call “the peace and order situation.”

Spokesmen for several parties mentioned military reforms to curb abuses and defuse the Communist-led insurgency as a top priority for any opposition candidate who makes it to Malacanang.

Generally, the parties are divided on personalities, not issues. Authorities say this is a tradition of Philippine politics. The voter backs the man and not the platform, a legacy of the patron-client society of earlier years.

Help from one’s equals or betters incurs a debt of gratitude, what Filipinos call utang ng ma loob . It is a debt that is stronger than political differences.

For example, Kalaw said the main difference between her wing of the Liberal Party and Salonga’s is their respective positions on the U.S. military bases here. Salonga favors abrogating the base treaty and she does not, she said.

Does that mean the two party leaders don’t get along?

“Of course not,” she said. “We’re the best of friends. He’s our family lawyer.”