De Venecia: Elections will push through next year

The presidential elections scheduled in May next year will push through, Speaker Jose de Venecia assured the nation yesterday.

De Venecia dismissed reports that he and other proponents of Charter change are eyeing the cancellation of next year’s elections so that the terms of elected officials could be extended beyond 2004.

"Those who claim they know of such (no elections and term extensions) plans are misrepresenting the Charter reform movement," he said at a meeting of the Philippine Chamber of Commerce and Industry, which is supporting moves to amend the Constitution.

"We reiterate that we are against term extension and the cancellation of elections next year. They are immoral and do not represent the best interest of the nation," De Venecia added.

He remains confident that the campaign to amend the Constitution will culminate in a constituent assembly, which could propose the lifting of certain restrictive economic provisions and the shift from a presidential system to a unicameral parliamentary government.

De Venecia said electing a president patterned after the French or Singapore model of governance would ensure that Filipinos can directly participate in electing a "president who will be a unifying figure and a symbol of sovereignty and power."

He said the president, under the French model, would be "powerful," while a president patterned after the Singapore model would have "reduced powers."

De Venecia said he will leave it up to the constituent assembly to work out these proposals.

He said he is happy that one of the staunchest opponents of Charter change, Manila Archbishop Jaime Cardinal Sin, now is in favor of it and that even former President Corazon Aquino has admitted that the Constitution, drafted and ratified during her administration, is not perfect.

"We are not discarding the Aquino Constitution. All we want is to amend it to make room for structural amendments," he said.

De Venecia opposes the holding of a constitutional convention not on grounds that it would be divisive, but would cost P8 billion to conduct.

A constitutional convention, he said, will "create 420 new politicians" elected from the country’s 210 congressional districts "who will demand a large working budget, staff and convene in a new building to write the Charter."

De Venecia added that the amendments wrought by a constitutional convention will take effect only in 2010, "too long for urgent reforms to be put in place."

"We are being left far behind (by other countries) in Southeast Asia in economic terms," he said.

The changes proposed by a constituent assembly, on the other hand, may be implemented as soon as they are ratified in a plebiscite.

The Senate committee on constitutional amendments has invited Western Samar Rep. Eduardo Nachura, chairman of its counterpart committee in the House, to today’s hearing on Charter change proposals.

Nachura said the invitation was extended to him by the Senate committee in his capacity as the principal sponsor of House Concurrent Resolution 16, which supports the convening of both chambers of Congress into a constituent assembly as the mode of Charter change.