Filipinos rejected leftist group in May 9 polls: NTF-ELCAC

From the Philippine News Agency (May 25, 2022): Filipinos rejected leftist group in May 9 polls: NTF-ELCAC (By Lade Jean Kabagani)

NTF-ELCAC spokesperson and Communications Undersecretary Lorraine Badoy (File photo)

The defeat of the Bayan Muna Party-list in the May 9 elections was due to “massive rejection by Filipino people” and not by massive vote shaving, an official of the National Task Force to End Local Communist Armed Conflict (NTF-ELCAC) said Wednesday.

In a statement, NTF-ELCAC spokesperson for sectoral affairs and sectoral concerns, Communications Undersecretary Lorraine Badoy, insisted that the Bayan Muna Party-list is a front organization of the Communist Party of the Philippines-New People’s Army-National Democratic Front (CPP-NPA-NDF).

In a statement, the Bayan Muna said its loss during the May 9 elections “might have been caused by massive vote shaving” relating to “electronic cheating in the 2022 flawed automated elections.”

“The last time Bayan Muna votes registered such a significant decrease was in the 2016 elections. From 946,000 plus in 2013, its counted votes was 606,000 in 2016, but, still far more than enough to get a seat in Congress,” it stated.

It claimed that its party list seemed to be targeted by the NTF-ELCAC and the Duterte administration “to unjustly stifle the effective and progressive voice of the marginalized sectors in Congress” during the last elections.

Badoy debunked the statement of the party-list saying their defeat is due to a loss of support from the people in the countryside—who finally felt the services of government.

“CPP NPA NDF party-list Bayan Muna says their monumental loss in the 2022 elections—a first since it first perverted our electoral process 21 years ago- may have been caused by what it fancifully calls massive vote shaving instead of what it truly is—Massive rejection by the Filipino people, who now know who it is they truly are: urban operatives of a terrorist organization who sit in Congress not to serve the Filipino people but to serve hand and foot the Central Committee of the CPP-NPA-NDF whose every bidding they obey in order to weaken the government and destroy our democracy,” Badoy further stated.

“Their loss of about a million votes—from over a million in the 2019 elections to a pitiful 200,000 in the recently concluded polls—can be attributed to their loss of support from the people in the countryside where scores of our countrymen have turned their backs on them after finally feeling the services of government,” she added.

Badoy emphasized that the very core of the NTF-ELCAC is good governance as the main marching order of President Rodrigo Roa Duterte to his administration.

“And so this has been NTF ELCAC’s guiding light. Who shamelessly use government resources to destroy government and who use our democratic institutions to destroy our democracy,” she said.

Badoy sees the recently concluded elections as the “cleanest and most credible elections” under the Duterte administration.

Badoy said it will also be known as part of the county’s history “where an empowered people successfully booted out a massive half of the CPP-NPA-NDF in Congress signaling the start of the end of their 53-year reign of terror.”

“The Filipino people and the government that serves them have made good the social contract that exists between them and has become formidable in the face of this terrorist scourge that has brought Death and Destruction to the Motherland,” she said.

“It is you, the Filipino people, that is delivering the death blow to our most ruthless, most inhumane oppressors: the CPP-NPA-NDF wearing the mask of Bayan Muna,” she added.

The CPP-NPA is listed as a terrorist organization by the United States, the European Union, the United Kingdom, Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and the Philippines.

The Anti-Terrorism Council also formally designated the NDF as a terrorist organization on June 23, 2021, citing it as “an integral and inseparable part” of the CPP-NPA that was created in April 1973.

https://www.pna.gov.ph/articles/1175196