Former Akbayan Rep. Walden Bello INQUIRER.net FILE PHOTO
MANILA, Philippines — Former party-list lawmaker and activist Walden Bello on Wednesday officially filed his paper through a representative to run as vice president in the upcoming elections in a bid to stop “the Marcos-Duterte axis of evil.”
The Laban ng Masa chairperson is also substituting for the party’s vice-presidential candidate Raquel Castillo.
Bello is running with Ka Leody de Guzman.
“I have no other choice but to enter this fight against the greatest peril the country faces today, the Marcos-Duterte Axis of Evil,” Bello said upon filing his candidacy.
In previous statements, Bello also warned of a “civil war” once presidential aspirant Bongbong Marcos won the presidency.
“Millions of us would rather die fighting this bastard upstart than have this country go back to the dark past,” Bello said of the defeated vice presidential candidate and son of late dictator Ferdinand Marcos in a Facebook post dated October 5.
“There is no way we can allow such a malignant cancer to come to power through elections, like Hitler did in Germany. Democracy must protect itself from forces that seek to destroy it,” he added.
Bello also questioned presidential aspirant Vice President Leni Robredo’s senatorial slate.
“This is the reason people like me who hate traditional politics are forced to go into politics despite the fact that it makes us vomit, so we can rid the arena of these f*cking, stinking trapos that have made life miserable for 99 percent of Filipinos,” he said in a Facebook post last October 16.
Bello served as a two-term representative of Akbayan party-list to the House of Representatives, but later resigned in 2015 in protest of the administration of late President Noynoy Aquino.
He also ran for senate but lost after ranking 36th in the polls with only 1,091,194 votes.
He is currently an adjunct Professor of Sociology at the State University of New York at Binghamton.