Hope

WHATEVER was the number of people that attended the proclamation rally of the United Nationalist Alliance (UNA) last Tuesday is immaterial. What is material is the fact that the opening salvo of the opposition candidates for the Senate was held in Cebu.

There is a mixed assessment of the rally at the Plaza Independencia last Tuesday, in the sense that this province has become the critical center of a political maelstrom. The locking out from her office of suspended Gov. Gwendolyn Garcia somehow engendered a test of this nation’s global democratic standing.

The politics upon which the suspension does stand has become an international question seeking quick resolution.

However, the point here is that the ongoing May elections campaign carries with it just one grand goal or objective, not only for contending political parties and their allied factions, as well as some splinter groups, but also all individual candidates regardless of their allies in the campaign.

For the naked reality is that on the final stretch to the day when one has to cast his vote, it is each one to himself.

The UNA proclamation rally last Tuesday was only an initial one. Other visits may follow. And so the push and counter-push of issues would go on within the short period the Commission on Elections (Comelec) or as our election rules and regulations allow the participants to do their things. Thus, the democratic way of governance moves on.

What needs to be watched and attended to over the coming weeks is how the prevailing political turmoil that has enveloped our provincial politics will resolve itself.

Would the locked out suspended governor still be a beautiful, multi-colored political activist as she had proven to her supporters all through the recent weeks? Or would she be an emaciated political lady whose political gumption has all been drained out of her during the weeks she had struggled to remain floating on the surface of her politics?

But ye gods, what about her opponents on the other side of the political river? Agnes must be on tenterhooks, too, trying to figure out how to be able to remain on guard and withstand her once close friend’s political wiliness, and continue to retain her equanimity before all the “forces” of troubling politics whirling around her.

I dare not say more, except to express a personal wish that these political maelstrom would clear, and be replaced with hope.