Joma calls Leni win over FM Jr. poetic justice

LUCENA CITY—It was “poetic justice.”

That’s the assessment by Jose Maria Sison, exiled founding chair of the Communist Party of the Philippines (CPP), of what he called the imminent win of Leni Robredo over Ferdinand Marcos Jr. in the vice presidential race.

“She (Robredo) stops on its track the long-term drive of the Marcos family to go back to Malacañang, criminally using money stolen from the Filipino people through a bloody fascist dictatorship,” Sison said in an online interview from Utrecht, The Netherlands, on Monday.

Robredo claimed victory on Sunday, noting that it had become mathematically impossible for Marcos to catch up with her.

Sison congratulated Robredo. He said she had done better in the elections than her running mate, Mar Roxas, due to her “militant” fight against Marcos.

“Roxas simply carried the stigma of President Aquino’s kiss of death, merely wishing to continue the discredited daang matuwid (straight path governance),” he said.

Last year, Sison advised Davao City Mayor Rodrigo Duterte, now the presumptive President-elect, against choosing Marcos as running mate.

Sison told Duterte that the only son of the deposed dictator might bring grave repercussions on his political plans.

“Bongbong is the worst kind. So anyone else is better,” said Sison, Duterte’s teacher at Lyceum in Manila.

Duterte eventually chose Sen. Alan Peter Cayetano as his running mate. Cayetano placed third.

The CPP founder spent nine years in detention, most of it in solitary confinement, during the martial law regime.

Sison, a former professor at the University of the Philippines, was released from military detention on March 6, 1986. He went to The Netherlands and since then lived there in exile.