Suarez to challenge Belmonte for ‘crumbs’

Quezon Rep. Danilo Suarez (left) and outgoing Speaker Sonny Belmonte are expected to scramble for leftovers when Congress opens. INQUIRER FILES

The race for minority leader in the 17th Congress just got interesting after Quezon Rep. Danilo Suarez  of the United Nationalist Alliance (UNA) decided to challenge former Speaker Feliciano Belmonte Jr.  for the post.

In a phone interview, Suarez said he had received backing from his party and other allies to get the post and insisted he was not making a token challenge. “I intend to win,” he said.

Under the House of Representatives rules, the second highest vote-getter in the race for speakership would automatically get elected as minority leader. With Davao del Norte Pantaleon Alvarez expected to win as Speaker via landslide, the only thing to be settled was who between Belmonte and Suarez would get the second-highest votes.

After weeks of hemming and hawing, Belmonte and the Liberal Party finally made up their mind to stay in the minority bloc in the 17th Congress and scuttled plans to join the majority coalition led by Partido Demokratikong Pilipino-Lakas ng Bayan (PDP-Laban).

Belmonte said LP has 35 members which he believed was enough for him to win the post.

UNA president and Navotas Rep. Tobias Tiangco said his party had also decided not to join the majority because their members were split on supporting President Duterte’s antidrug bills and the shift to federalism.

“Now that Sonny Belmonte will lead the LP in the minority, I don’t think I can beat him, but Danny Suarez might have the numbers,” said Tiangco.

Both Tiangco and Suarez declined to say who have committed to support the latter’s run.

Surprise

Ilocos Norte Rep. Rodolfo Fariñas, the presumptive majority leader, said he expected some surprises in the voting.

“As it happened in the last Congress, some of those in the majority might be tempted to join the fray for minority leader to make it more interesting,” said Fariñas in a text message.

Former Leyte Rep. Martin Romualdez lost the minority leader post in the 16th Congress to San Juan Rep. Ronaldo Zamora whose political party, Nacionalista, was a member of the majority coalition.

Albay Rep. Edcel Lagman of the LP said that after PDP-Laban forged a  “supermajority”  with the Nacionalista Party, Nationalist People’s Coalition, National Unity Party, Lakas-NUCD and the Party-list Coalition, “the only principled option for the Liberal Party is to constitute the political opposition to preserve the democratic process.”

Lagman said that as the minority bloc, the LP would ensure that legislation would be the creation of  “productive deliberation, not of an orchestrated soliloquy.  ”

“The task of LP is to stand as the potent, vigilant, credible, reasonable and responsible minority. It will not be an obstructionist opposition but a tempered yet determined fiscalizer. It will neither be co-opted by nor servile to the majority,” Lagman said.