Arroyo wins marathon vote count

Long-awaited results of a marathon vote count gave Gloria Macapagal Arroyo a fresh term as Philippine president yesterday, but opposition allegations of cheating and planned protests threatened to undermine her rule. The close but widely expected victory paves the way for the US-trained economist to be declared president later this week, although the win still has to be approved by Congress and is facing a legal challenge in the Supreme Court by the opposition.

More than five weeks after Filipinos voted in May 10 elections, the final tally by a congressional panel showed Ms Arroyo with 12,905,808 votes, beating her closest rival, film star Fernando Poe Jr, by just over one million. Her running mate, former newsreader Noli de Castro, won the vice-presidency.

"It's enough to govern," said Franklin Drilon, Senate majority leader and an Arroyo supporter.

Ms Arroyo's lawmakers have a majority in Congress and should be able to vote down further opposition objections. Yesterday's newspapers quoted her as saying she was going ahead with plans to hold her inauguration ceremony before a June 30 deadline.

But opposition politicians said she would be a bogus president unless their doubts over the vote were addressed.

"This is a sad time in the history of our country," the main opposition party said in a statement.

"What the majority has done is to abort the truth in the womb of our sacred electoral process."

The peso fell near its all-time low of 56.45 to the dollar last week and Manila stocks have been subdued for weeks by the political uncertainty, fuelled by opposition plans to protest Ms Arroyo's victory and rumours of coup attempts. Police and military bomb disposal experts defused two bombs found in Manila yesterday, one in the canteen of the defence department and the other outside the interior department, officials said, adding they did not know who planted them.

The military, which has spawned nine coup attempts in the past 18 years, appears to be calm, and there are few signs of the popular fury that toppled Joseph Estrada in 2001 and dictator Ferdinand Marcos in 1986.

Opposition lawmakers had demanded that election returns be re-opened to examine what they say are discrepancies in the results. Administration members refused, saying the counting must be completed by June 30, when Ms Arroyo's current term ends, to avoid a constitutional crisis.

"In 2001, Gloria Macapagal Arroyo became president without the benefit of a popular mandate," political commentator Randy David wrote in the Philippine Daily Inquirer. "In 2004, her claim to the presidency is even more dubious; it totters on the edge of unopened electoral returns."

Ms Arroyo assumed the presidency on the back of huge anti-graft protests that toppled Estrada, another film star and a close friend of Poe. Hopes that her presidency would signal a new era of economic and political stability were quickly dampened.

She faced constant opposition sniping, an attempted coup by military officers last July, and only scored limited success in her efforts to stamp out entrenched corruption and poverty in the mostly Roman Catholic nation of 82 million.

Investors and business leaders had hoped the May election would give Ms Arroyo her first real mandate and a further six years in which she would push through reforms more forcefully.