Pacquiao Asks Lacson To Be His VP In 2022; Legarda Confirms Senate Run

Sen. Manny Pacquiao is determined to run for president in the May 2022 elections and he wants Sen. Panfilo Lacson to be his running mate.

“We had a hearing in the committee of the whole. We were at the Senate lounge, he approached me and asked, ‘Are you going to run, boss?’ I replied: ‘I am still thinking, it’s very tentative. How about you?’ I asked him and he answered: ‘I’m determined,’” Lacson recalled his conversation with Pacquiao.

While he has yet to decide whether to run for president or not, Lacson said he told Pacquiao to consider Senate President Vicente Sotto III as his running mate.

“I told him: ‘If I won’t run, maybe you can get SP as your VP?’ He said: ‘We’ll talk about it.’ So we’re in that situation,” Lacson told “The Chiefs” on One News / TV5  on Wednesday night, June 30,

He said Pacquiao was one of two personalities who asked him to be their running mate. He refused to name the second personality.

After Pacquiao won a Senate seat in 2016, Lacson said the boxing icon was adopted in the “macho bloc” originally composed of himself, Sotto and former senator now Information and Communications Technology Secretary Gregorio Honasan II.

Lacson said he has yet to make any political decision as he wants to have concrete plans considering the magnitude of the country’s problems due to the pandemic and issues related to the West Philippine Sea.

He said the country’s major problem is the national debt, which is now at P11 trillion as of April, from P9 trillion in December 2020.

He added the Mandanas law is set to increase the Internal Revenue Allotment (IRA) by 55 percent in the 2022 budget or about P848 billion, and the military and uniformed personnel pension – which needs seed money of P9.6 billion – is a huge dent in the national budget, not to mention the West Philippine Sea problem.

“China is already there, headway, leaving but more ships will return,” Lacson said, adding there are so many things that need to be considered.

 Legarda to seek Senate return

Meanwhile, House Deputy Speaker and Antique Rep. Loren Legarda confirmed on Thursday that she is set run for the Senate next year.

Asked about the matter during an interview with “Sa Totoo Lang” on One PH on Thursday night, Legarda said: “To make the long story short…‘yun ang aking gagawin (that is what I will do). Balik Senado po, sa awa ng Diyos at sa kagustuhan ng taumbayan (I intend to make a Senate comeback if it’s God’s will as well as of the people).  It's not for me to say. It's just for me to say that I have much, much more to do and to give to the Filipino people.”

It was Sotto who bared that Legarda, along with her former Senate colleague and now Sorsogon Gov. Francis “Chiz” Escudero, are hoping to make a Senate comeback under the National People’s Coalition (NPC) banner, which the Senate President chairs.

Escudero, in a separate interview with ABS-CBN News Channel, already confirmed that he is also planning to run in the 2022 elections.

Apart from Legarda and Escudero, Sotto said Honasan and former senator JV Ejercito are also eyeing a Senate return.

Should she win a seat in the Senate next, Legarda will be marking her third term. She first served as senator from 1998 to 2004, and then from 2007 to 2019.

When it comes to the improvements that could be done on the Philippines’ COVID-19 vaccination drive, Legarda suggested that the government put up a real-time online platform on the arrival of the vaccines as well as the rollout in all areas nationwide.

This way, Legarda said, people would know how many people from a particular area, as well as how many members of the government’s priority sector, had been inoculated.

The Antique representative said she made this suggestion when she was invited to a Cabinet meeting.