Chief Presidential Legal Counsel Salvador Panelo criticized on Sunday that the call for a revolutionary government, saying it cannot come from a single organization or an individual but “from the people.”
“It must be an overwhelming call, and there is no present perceptible people’s clamor for such,” he said in a statement.
Panelo clarified that even if President Rodrigo Duterte mentioned a “need” for a revolutionary government, “he was quick to qualify it as only if all others means constitutionally allowed to effect a radical change in the social, political and economic structure fail.”
“Presently PRRD is effecting the necessary changes in our country and succeeding despite [the] opposite view of a boisterous minority. For academic discussion, it is a titillating idea for discourse,” he explained.
Palace spokesman Harry Roque acknowledged on Sunday that the call came from a private group and they were “free to publicly express their opinion.”
He said the Duterte administration was primarily concerned with addressing the people’s needs amid the coronavirus disease 2019 (Covid-19) pandemic.
“The most pressing and most urgent concern, which requires the Executive’s full attention, is the gradual opening of the economy while safeguarding the people who are working/going back to work amid the pandemic,” Roque said in a statement. Francis David T. Perez