P-Noy, Roxas Pledge Funding for Leni Robredo’s Campaign

Naga City (PNA) — The fear of vice presidential candidate Rep. Leni Robredo of having no resources to finance her campaign besides family approval and popularity rating before she accepted being Liberal Party standard bearer Mar Roxas’ running mate in the 2016 presidential elections has been solved.

Robredo, Camarines Sur Third District representative, revealed early this week that the LP, through President Aquino and Roxas, has assured her of the campaign fund required for her run upon acceptance of the offer as standard bearer for vice president.

“What was promised to me by the LP was that it (having no resources for campaign) is something I will not think of as a problem. I told them that even a bit, I don’t have money to fund my campaign because what I have now is just enough or might not even be enough for my kids,” she frankly said.

“It is something that I don’t have to worry about, they (Aquino and Roxas) told me. They will take charge of everything,” Robredo added.

Robredo said her 2014 statement of assets and liabilities (SALN) was worth a little more than PhP8 million and it has decreased at the present time.

“I expect that until the end, they will answer for all I need throughout the campaign period. I will leave these all to them to carry on,” she said.

Robredo is virtually the second fiddle to Sen. Grace Poe to tandem with Roxas as vice president under the LP coalition that the ruling party unabashedly bend backward only to be rejected.

For the meantime, as the political courtship between Roxas and Poe became anticlimactic in August, the Kaya Natin Movement, a group united on the principles of good governance and transparency in which the late Jesse M. Robredo was among the convenors, launched a movement for Leni to run as vice president.

It gained traction and became a buzz in the social media and the mainstream media, obliging her to react on the Kaya Natin Movement of its launching of Leni Robredo for Vice President Movement on Aug. 13, in which she was a no-show.

In fact, Robredo preferred to run for a Senate seat or reelection in the third district of Camarines Sur where she dislodged the nine-year reign of Luis R. Villafuerte over the district by defeating Nely F. Villafuerte, Villafuerte’s wife, with an overwhelming victory in the 2013 midterm elections.

In a gathering of LP on Aug. 4, Robredo and Vilma Santos were seen together in one table with Roxas and President Aquino which fueled rumors that either of the two women were being eyed as Roxas’ running mate.

Both Robredo and Santos denied they were interested to be running mate of Roxas even as Robredo did not totally close her doors by saying she can run if there is no one else to run in the LP.

In the first week of September. talks were ripe that Robredo had been considered as Roxas’ running mate.

She was formally offered by Roxas on Sept. 17, a day before the oath-taking ceremonies of the new members of the LP Camarines Sur.

Robredo said she was told by Roxas to be open on the idea of being his running mate, for which she asked until Oct. 5 to give her decision.

She had made up her mind on Sept. 30 to accept Liberal Party’s offer to be Roxas’ running mate in the 2016 presidential elections.

Robredo revealed for the first time how she reached the decision and determined she was to get the blessings of her immediate family.

“I promised that ‘okay, I will think about it’,” she said.

When Robredo went back to Manila after the Peñafrancia fiesta she talked to her daughters about it and they were “violently reacting,” she narrated.

“Then for several days, we (she and her daughters) never talked about it again. And if only I could be intellectual, it would be ‘no’,” she said.

Robredo continued praying for her husband to appear in her dream or give sign to guide her in her life-changing decision but she said it was never heeded.

But slowly she felt she was being pushed that this was one thing she had to do even as she consciously was resisting to accept it, she said.

Robredo sought for more guidance from different spiritual leaders separately and asked them how she would discern that her decision will be the right one.

She was told essentially the same message that God would speak to her through her heart.

“If the message makes me at peace with myself, that’s what God wanted me to be, they told me,” she said.

Robredo said the pressure actually came from around her, from her constituents in the third district of Camarines Sur who were dissuading her to accept the offer, including her family who initially opposed her accepting higher position.

She said she did not consider the LP’s time frame for her to decide a pressure because she said it would be easier for them to accept her decision to decline the offer than her constituents.

“At the end of September, I finally told my daughters that I had decided and it was what I felt God wanted me to do, and all of them cried,” she said.

Robredo said she could not go on with her decision until all her daughters gave her the blessings to accept the offer as Roxas’ running mate in the 2016 presidential elections. (PNA) SCS/FGS/JME/CBD/PJN