History Crash Course on current RP Politics

From Lito Banayo:

Kampi is Gloria’s gang of sip-sips and opportunists. She established it to launch a presidential run in 1998, but was forced to sleep-in with Lakas when she agreed to be the vice-presidential candidate of Jose de Venecia. She resurrected it through Ronaldo Puno and Luis Villafuerte, the acolytes of her husband Mike, in 2004. Some of the Kampi members used to line up for Erap’s short-lived Lammp, which incorporated his own personal party called Partido ng Masang Pilipino. Other Kampi’s used to worship FVR when his Lakas was malakas.

Lakas began as a motley group of LDP separatists in the wake of FVR’s defeat in the convention of that once humongous party of trapos in 1991. But FVR with his rag-tag group of a dozen Lakas-NUCD leaders won the closely-contested 1992 elections, and became the party in power for six uninterrupted years. LDP gradually declined and was forced to coalesce with Erap’s PMP and Danding’s NPC to form a Lammp coalition for the 1998 elections that a newly-elected President Erap hardly took serious interest in fortifying. In the wake of his trouncing Lakas’ champion, Speaker Joe de Venecia in 1998, fifty Lakas members in Congress suddenly swore in to Lammp, and managed to elect Manny Villar, a Lakas stalwart turned Lammp member, as Speaker. Two years and five months later, Villar and his Lakas-turned-Lammp congressmen impeached the Erap who had taken them into his fold. At that moment, Lammp died, and Erap’s presidency was gasping for survival, eventually to be given the coup de grace in Edsa Dos, when his handpicked CSAFP, Angelo Reyes, gave salute to a "new" commander-in-chief.

With Erap’s ouster, Doña Gloria consolidated political power first through coalition-building, with her, as suprema, and her husband Jose Miguel as caja de hierro. The coalition included Lakas, the Liberal Party, then still united and singing hosannas to Doña Gloria, the Nationalist People’s Coalition of Danding Cojuangco, with a few "recalcitrants" still holding "Erap pa rin" flaglets, a fringe party called PDSP, and independents in the Senate who grouped themselves into a Wednesday dinner gang, namely Noli de Castro, Joker Arroyo, Ralph Recto, Kiko Pangilinan, and Manny Villar.

Setting his sights on the 2010 plum when the Gloria he supported for six long years would be gone (that’s an assumption), Villar acquired a "shell" party with a grand old history, the Nacionalista Party, from the then dying Salvador Laurel in 2003. After his Gloria won in 2004, he worked his way through nimble brinkmanship and purveyed his Nacionalista Party of a dozen members into an ally of the opposition under Erap. Through such nimble footwork, Villar, now identified with the opposition, was able to salvage his re-election, while his friend Ralph Recto floundered in defeat, identified as he chose to be with Doña Gloria.

Erap in prison has had to cobble along through momentary coalitions, just to provide a flag of convenience for anyone who needed a standard to run against whoever ran under GMA’s banners. First there was the hastily-formed Pwersa ng Masa coalition in 2001, then the United Opposition (Nagkaisang Oposisyon) that Angara, Sotto and Oreta marshaled for FPJ in 2004, which later metamorphosed into the so-called Genuine Opposition, minus the three, and this time with Jojo Binay as captain. The Angara-Sotto-Oreta trio defected to the Doña’s side, and the once humongous Laban ng Demokratikong Pilipino has transmogrified into a family affair headquartered in Baler.