Both Left and Right Attack Aquino’s Policies, Threaten to Fight Her New Constitution

The Philippine political left accused President Corazon Aquino on Monday of moving her government radically to the right, and its leaders threatened to fight her proposed constitution in a referendum scheduled for Feb. 2.

The political right, meanwhile, charged that Aquino has allowed her government to be infiltrated by leftists and Communists, and it, too, vowed to fight the constitution.

The government itself said nothing.

The criticism of Aquino’s policies was made at a breakfast forum taped and scheduled to have been shown on government television Monday night. The government had turned down an invitation to send its representatives to the forum. The show, however, was canceled at the last minute “because of technical difficulties,” the government said.

“Actually, I don’t know where this government is going,” said Rene Cayetano, a prominent politician who heads the right-wing opposition Nationalista Party. “From the beginning, this government was in chaos, and it is still in chaos.”

Aquino, he said, “has failed to exercise political leadership, even among her friends in government.”

Moderate columnist Francisco Tatad, also a prominent politician and once an Aquino supporter, concluded that the charges and countercharges against the president “simply mean that (the government) lacks ideological clarity.”

The blistering--and unanswered--charges against Aquino were made at the respected forum known as Kapihan sa Manila against the backdrop of Time magazine’s selection of the president as its “woman of the year.”

On Sunday, in the course of a demonstration by a handful of die-hard supporters of deposed President Ferdinand E. Marcos, some back copies of the magazine were burned. Accounts of this demonstration appeared on page one of every Manila newspaper, and at the forum Monday, virtually every panelist found a way to turn Time’s recognition against Aquino.

Arturo Tolentino, who ran for vice president on a ticket with Marcos and tried last summer to take over the government, predicted that Aquino’s constitution will be rejected in the referendum.

“Those people who voted for her as the ‘man of the year’ might have to think twice about this next year,” he said. He compared Aquino with “a woman trying to flirt with two men” in her effort to balance the forces of the political left and right.

Columnist Tatad cautioned sardonically that “we have to be very prudent, because after all we are dealing with the man of the year here.”

Although most of the ribbing was good-natured and characteristic of Philippine politics, the criticism was a strong indication that powerful forces are still at work here to bring down the Aquino government.

Ten months after she rose to power after the coup that drove Marcos into exile, Aquino continues to be praised in Washington and other foreign capitals. But at home she is increasingly the target of criticism.

Even the moderator of the Monday show, Art Borjal, an independent journalist, noted wryly that Aquino was not defended because two Cabinet ministers declined at the last moment to attend.

Alan Jazmines, general secretary of the leftist People’s Party, said that Aquino’s policies are largely the same as those of the “oppressive Marcos dictatorship.”

“There is hardly any difference between the policies of the Aquino government and the Marcos government,” Jazmines said. “There has been a continuation of the repression of human rights . . . and most of the dictatorial Marcos decrees remain in place.”

Echoing this charge was an editorial in the daily Manila Chronicle condemning Aquino’s economic policies. Aquino, it said, “prefers to repeat the routine of the Marcos program. . . . For the next year, therefore, the government would hardly have anything to distinguish it from the Marcos priorities, except the significant fact of establishing civil liberties.”

On that issue, too, Jazmines was critical, noting that more than 200 people have been arrested for their political beliefs since Aquino took power and that political assassinations continue in the countryside.

Jazmines, whose party had announced a “critical yes” to Aquino’s proposed constitution last month, said the party’s 2 million members are strongly considering changing their stand because “the Aquino government has shown a rightward drift.”