An incensed Mayor Duterte had emerged from his voting precinct in Matina Aplaya on the day of the elections to speak against the alleged junking of Hugpong candidates by the Nograles camp. Mayor Duterte said he felt bad that Nograles junked some of the Hugpong candidates just to campaign for his son, Karlo, who ran under the Kalahi partylist group. In retaliation, Mayor Duterte junked candidates affiliated with the Nograles’s Lakas-NUCD party, Avila among them.
“We’ve never been allies in the first place,” Mayor Duterte said in the afternoon of the elections, crumpling a campaign leaflet and telling reporters everything is over between him and Nograles.
In two elections in the past, in fact, Nograles tried to wrestle City Hall from Mayor Duterte. What they had, the mayor said, was “a unity ticket” but “only because of President Arroyo.”
Karlo had earlier expressed interest to run for vice mayor but backed out at the last minute when Mayor Duterte said he was fielding Sara. Karlo said he was doing it for the sake of the TU-Hugpong unity ticket and opted instead to run as the second nominee of Kalahi, a partylist group for overseas contract workers believed to have been created by the Arroyo.
Some partylist groups, however, viewed Mayor Dutertes wrath at the Nograles camp to have been directed towards Kalahi, rather than the last minute junking of Hugpong political bets.
Omar Bantayan, vice president for Mindanao of the partylist group Anakpawis, said Kalahi might be used as a political machinery for Nograles to develop a broader mass base in preparation for the 2010 elections.
Mayor Duterte is an astute politician, Bantayan said. He sees Kalahi for what it is. Kalahi enables them (the Nograleses) to legitimately campaign in the three districts of Davao and build up their machinery for the next local elections, said Bantayan, who was among the first ones to expose the distribution by Kalahi of rice, insurance, and others on the eve of the elections, which are a form of vote-buying under election rules.
Bantayan said that Kalahi distributed goods and actively recruited leaders in the three districts of Davao. You would wonder why Kalahi, which is supposed to be a partylist group with coverage nationwide, would limit its campaign only within the bounds of Davao City. Kalahi was hardly even heard outside of the region. Why? Because Kalahi can be used as a political machinery for Nograless bid for mayor, he said.
Bantayan warned that just because Kalahi hardly made it to the winning partylist groups nationwide, its not really as dead as it looks.
In any case, Mayor Duterte himself acknowledges that 2010 would be crucial for both the Dutertes and Nograleses. Although he still could run for mayor in 2013, Duterte had acknowledged that he was not getting any younger, or healthier.
He said he would be phasing himself out and allow a new generation of Davao politicians — like his daughter Sara and Nograles’s son Karlo — to take over. And so the showdown continues. (Germelina A. Lacorte/davaotoday.com)
