Why Grace Poe is with LP, not UNA

Grace Poe-Llamanzares. INQUIRER FILE PHOTO

Why is Grace Poe, daughter of the late actor and presidential candidate Fernando Poe Jr., running with the administration’s Team PNoy and not with the opposition United Nationalist Alliance (UNA), which is led by one of her father’s best friends?

The best friend, former President Joseph Estrada, on Tuesday said he learned about a possible reason last week and that was that Poe and her mother, Susan Roces, harbored ill feelings against him because he supposedly didn’t help his friend in the final stretch of his failed run for the presidency in 2004.

“That information reached me last week and it’s not true,” Estrada told the Inquirer, adding that he continued to support FPJ (Poe’s initials) even though he was in detention in Tanay, Rizal, at the time.

Estrada underwent a trial for plunder after his ouster from the presidency in 2001. He was placed under house arrest in his Tanay estate for most of the six-year duration of his trial.

Estrada said he was not happy that Grace Poe had opted to campaign with the administration coalition and not with UNA, the coalition he had formed with Vice President Jejomar Binay and Senate President Juan Ponce Enrile, despite her also being in the UNA slate.

“Of course, I was hurt,” he said in Filipino, “but I cannot not support her.” He stressed that he was supporting Poe “not because of herself but because of her father.”

For her part, Grace Poe flatly denied having any ill feelings toward Estrada. “It’s not true at all, I will discount that,” she said in a phone interview.

Poe said she ended up with Team PNoy because the administration coalition had asked her first to join its senatorial ticket. “And when I told Erap about it, he said that whatever my decision, he would support me unconditionally,” she said.