Aquino Victory at Polls Called Overwhelming

President Corazon Aquino’s campaign manager assured her Tuesday that her slate of candidates were headed toward an overwhelming victory as returns trickled in from Monday’s legislative elections.

Paul Aquino, the president’s brother-in-law as well as her campaign manager, told her “the thing is already won,” that candidates she had supported appeared to be winning as many as 145 of the 200 seats in the House of Representatives and 22 of the 24 Senate seats.

Final, official results are not expected to be known for several days. Ballots are being tabulated manually in thousands of centers scattered across the 7,100 islands that make up the Philippines.

But the Aquino candidates were clearly piling up victory after victory. Independent tabulations based on unofficial, incomplete returns showed that at least 20 of her Senate candidates were virtually certain to win and that 48 of her House candidates had been all but elected.

The right-wing opposition charged fraud and accused the government of conspiring to steal the election.

President Aquino, in a telephone call to her campaign manager, asked specifically about his sister, Tessie Aquino Oreta, who was running for Congress in a slum suburb of Manila.

“Tessie is leading by a mile,” she was told.

She then asked about her brother, Jose Cojuangco Jr., a candidate for the House in the family’s home province of Tarlac.

“Peping is OK,” Paul Aquino said, referring to Cojuangco by a nickname.

For the next 10 minutes, the president threw out one name after another and heard similarly encouraging reports.

“It’s better than we ever imagined,” Paul Aquino said.

“Oh, gee,” the president said, “that’s nice.”

Paul Aquino later tried to explain for a group of reporters how the government could achieve so impressive a margin of victory.

The president, he said, told the voters, “I want these people,” and the voters said, “Yes, you can have them.”

He issued a statement to the press on behalf of “people power,” the Aquino coalition, saying, “We ask the opposition to be gracious in recognizing the will of the people and to keep in mind previous electoral exercises that we all know--and which they cannot deny--were characterized by massive fraud and terrorism.”

Vote Tampering Charged

But Juan Ponce Enrile, leader of the opposition Grand Alliance for Democracy, replied with a charge that the vote count was being tampered with, as it often was under former President Ferdinand E. Marcos, who was driven from office in February of last year.

Enrile, the former defense minister who was dismissed by Aquino last November amid rumors that his military supporters were planning a coup d’etat, said in a statement:

“The minds of the people are being systematically conditioned to accept a fraudulent claim of a total or near-total opposition shutout.”

Enrile, who still has considerable support in the military, warned that the election will be “the beginning of an instability of unimaginable proportions.”

He said his alliance will refuse to take any seats in the Senate even if the official returns show its candidates to have won.

Protest Rally Planned

The alliance has scheduled a protest rally at the offices of the National Election Commission this afternoon. Party leaders said they will present proof of electoral fraud.

Actually, few instances of fraud were seen by reporters, foreign or domestic, and few voters reported irregularities to the Election Commission or to a citizens’ poll-watching group, the National Movement for Free Elections.

Christian Monsod, chairman of the citizens’ group, told a reporter that complaints were “a tiny fraction” of the massive allegations reported in the presidential election of February, 1986.

Only one race, that involving President Aquino’s sister-in-law Tessie in the suburbs of Novotas and Malabon, appeared to have been severely tainted.

“Our people say that the elections in Novotas and Malabon are as dirty as they were in 1984,” Monsod said, referring to a legislative election that Marcos is widely believed to have stolen.

Bias Charges Rejected

Some of the founders of the citizens’ group are serving in the Aquino government, and others are running for the Senate with her support, but Monsod denied opposition charges that the group is biased in reporting election returns. He said the group will disband if the opposition can prove its charges.

“There’s no way this can be manipulated in a conspiracy,” Monsod said. “I think they just jumped the gun.”

Ramon Felipe of the National Election Commission also denied the fraud charge.

“There was no failure,” Felipe told reporters. “I think that some losers will not want to accept defeat.”

The defeats, however, were not confined to the opposition. One of the House races pitted Nenita Daluz, one of Aquino’s close friends and a former undersecretary in her Cabinet, against Ramon Durano III, the son of a regional boss on the island of Cebu who is so powerful he is often referred to as a political warlord.

Daluz was one of those candidates about whom the president asked her brother-in-law during the phone call. He flatly told her the truth. “Inday Nita lost,” he said, using Daluz’s nickname.

It was the only time on Wednesday, he recalled later, that his sister-in-law expressed disappointment.