CABANATUAN CITY—The Nationalist People’s Coalition, the country’s second biggest political party, will likely throw its support behind presidential candidate Grace Poe when it announces its stand in the first week of March, reelectionist Senator Vicente Sotto III said here Friday.
Sotto said he was informed by Isabela Gov. Faustino Dy II, the NPC chairman, that the majority of their members were inclined to support Senator Poe and her running mate Senator Francis Escudero.
Poe and Escudero are running as independent candidates in this year’s elections.
“Majority of the members of the NPC will go for Grace. We are just waiting for the final or official statement that will come from either Gov. June Dy or [NPC] president Gigi Agabao,” Sotto said.
“I’m just speaking on behalf of some of the members that I have talked to. What I know, what I have sensed, what I heard is that they will stay with Grace.”
Poe on Friday said former Interior Undersecretary Rico Puno, a close friend of President Benigno Aquino III, was not an official part of her campaign, but she welcomed his support.
“[But] as long as [the support from him] is being done in a legal and proper manner, we are very much thankful,” Poe told reporters at the Harvest Hotel here.
She welcomed the reported recruitment by Puno of his fellow Masons in the bailiwicks of the ruling Liberal Party to support her presidential bid.
Sotto said it was not the disqualification cases against Poe that was preventing the NPC from making an early decision on whom to support.
“To be very candid about it, what Jun Dy told me is that they’re just collating the reports that they gathered from the nationwide members of NPC but generally, the sense of the majority is that they want Grace,” Sotto said.
The frontrunner in the senatorial race conceded this was the first time that the NPC failed to make an early stand on whom to support for the country’s top position.
“They have so many friends. As for me, all the presidentiables are my friends,” Sotto said.