Aquino’s Vice President Will Head Opposition Party

President Corazon Aquino’s adversarial vice president, Salvador Laurel, on Sunday was elected head of the Philippines’ main opposition party.

In a national convention, the Nacionalista party also elected two former top aides of deposed President Ferdinand E. Marcos to the party’s next two most powerful positions.

Juan Ponce Enrile, a former defense minister, was chosen secretary general, while former Labor Minister Blas Ople was elected executive vice president.

The platform of the party, which is holding its first convention since it became inactive during the martial-law years in the 1970s, proposed the gradual dismantling of key U.S. military bases in the Philippines when their lease expires in 1991.

Laurel, who broke with Aquino in September, 1987, over the president’s handling of a 20-year-old Communist insurgency, was unanimously elected party president.

In a speech to 1,000 cheering delegates, Laurel called the Aquino administration “the most incompetent this nation has ever had.”

“We cannot remain a nation divided, a nation wracked by insurgency and lawlessness. . . ,” he said. “The government goes not govern. The leader does not lead.”

Both Laurel and Enrile are considered leading candidates for the 1992 presidential election. Aquino has said she has no plans to seek reelection when her six-year term expires.

The 81-year-old Nacionalista party, the country’s oldest political grouping, was the party that brought Marcos to power in the 1965 presidential elections.

It disintegrated in 1972 when Marcos declared martial law and formed his own New Society Movement.

At a press conference Sunday, Enrile said the ailing Marcos should be allowed to return to his homeland.

Aquino has banned Marcos from returning--dead or alive--because she fears he would destabilize the nation.

Marcos, 71, is in critical condition in a Honolulu hospital.

“There is no reason why he should be deprived of his right to come home at this time of his life,” Enrile said. “He is so ill. How can he destabilize the country?” Laurel echoed Enrile’s sentiments.