Juan Ponce Enrile: Some people want regime change

MANILA, Philippines — Chief Presidential Legal Counsel Juan Ponce Enrile yesterday urged people who want a regime change to wait for the midterm elections next year.

“We are a democracy. We just recently elected a president and a vice president under our Constitution. Now, it seems, some people want a regime change. What do we really want? A Leninism? A Maoism? A fascism? A banana republic? What? If we want to test our popular strength, why don’t we wait for the coming mid-election next year? If we want a regime change, why don’t we wait for the national election…? Or, are we that impatient that we want to have the political power now?” Enrile said in his Facebook post.

Enrile made the statement after some supporters of Vice President Sara Duterte gathered at the Veterans Memorial Medical Center in Quezon City, where her chief of staff lawyer Zuleika Lopez is confined.

In Davao City, a prayer rally was held in Rizal Park on Saturday evening.

“Do we want a stable (and) peaceful society? Or do we want an anarchic social condition? WHAT? Let us be more clear about what we want. Let us bring it out into the open and debate it, and let the whole society decide,” Enrile said.

People, he added, should not allow themselves to be led and “herded like sheep to the precipice by alarmist adventurers, who are pretending to be patriots with dubious agenda.”

Duterte, during an expletive-laced press conference, alleged that she was the subject of an assassination plot and that she ordered a member of her security team to kill the President should it succeed.

The Duterte and Marcos families have seen their alliance unravel in spectacular fashion in recent months, trading accusations of drug addiction and increasingly extreme rhetoric ahead of next year’s midterm elections and presidential polls in 2028.

The two families are at odds over foreign policy and former president Rodrigo Duterte’s deadly war on drugs, among others.