Angeles City Mayor Edgardo Pamintuan (back row, middle in polo barong) is joined by supporters who launched the local party Partido Abe Kapampangan (PAK). Photo by Ding Cervantes
ANGELES CITY – In a move in the mold of self-preservation, close allies of former president Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo launched here Thursday a new local political party called Partido Abe Kapampanga (PAK) headed by this city’s Mayor Edgardo Pamintuan.
Pamintuan used to be Arroyo’s secretary for external affairs and had also acted as chairman of the National Housing Authority (NHA) and later president of the North Railways Corp. (Northrail) during her term.
He won as mayor of this city as candidate of Lakas-NUCD. The office of Pampanga 1st district Rep. Carmelo Lazatin, also a known political adviser of Arroyo during her nine-year presidency, also confirmed Lazatin was joining PAK.
But far from currying favor with the Aquino administration, PAK, in a statement issued during its launching on Wednesday, noted that the move to form a local party was borne of Pres. Aquino’s vindictiveness.
“Pampanga may be cut off from national development priorities. And even if former President Arroyo survives and wins all her cases, she would have been irreparably scarred and damaged. It will take long before she can rehabilitate her political image,” the PAK statement said.
It noted that “if a local government is excluded from national priorities owing to political affiliation, alignment or bias, it would be unable to appropriately deliver on its services to its constituents – unless it is able to muster enough voter numbers and support which the national government cannot ignore.”
In August last year, Pampanga’s 3rd district Rep. Aurelio Gonzalez, who had received much funding for his district during the Arroyo administration and had been a frequent companion of the former President in her official trips abroad, bolted Lakas-NUCD to join Pres. Aquino’s Liberal Party.
Some 300 other local officials and leaders in this city met at a restaurant in Barangay Balibago here yesterday to launch PAK.
In paper distributed by the new local party during the launching, PAK noted that “Lakas-NUCD (now Lakas Centrist Democrats), the former president’s political party where most of the Pampanga political leaders still belong, is a shadow of its former self and has become largely marginalized.”
It said that Kapampangan political leaders and supporters are left with three options that included “sticking with the status quo, and with the beleaguered former President- who has been successfully demonized by the current administration- and risk being isolated from development priorities.”
Another option, it said, was to “jump to Pres. Aquino’s ship and join the Liberal Party, as most politicians have done, including those who benefitted much from the former president.”
But PAK said in its statement that it preferred the third option of “declaring independence from national politics and form a Kapampangan local political party.”
“The third option is the boldest and most challenging. The Kapampangans are everywhere, and they are known to be fiercely, and virtuously parochial insofar as this issue is concerned,” the statement said.
It said that PAK is “a local political party whose base shall be the Kapampangans, not only in Pampanga but those spread all over the country and the world.”
“Pampanga has about 1.2 million voters, the 12th largest province in terms of voting population. These do not include possibly hundreds of thousands of Kapampangans spread all over the country.
Angeles City has the most number of voters in Pampanga, with about 148,000 voters, followed by San Fernando City at 120,000 voters,” the statement said.
PAK also noted the success of other provincial political parties such as Pusyon Bisaya, which challenged the powerful Kilusang Bagong Lipunan (KBL) during the Marcos era.
