Abolishing the country’s party-list system will require amending the 1987 Constitution, Commission on Elections (Comelec) Commissioner George Garcia said.
Garcia made the comment, after President Rodrigo Duterte earlier urged the next administration to initiate a charter change and to abolish the party-list system.
In a radio interview, Garcia said “in my opinion, abolishing the party-list system would need an
amendment to the Constitution because it is written in our charter.”
Under the 1987 Constitution, party-list representatives shall constitute 20 percent of the total number of representatives including those under the party-list. A party-list group that gets at least two percent of the total number of votes cast in the party-list race will be entitled to at least one seat in the House of Representatives.
The Constitution said the sectors qualified for a party-list group are “labor, peasant, urban poor, indigenous cultural communities, women, youth, and such other sectors as may be provided by law, except the religious sector.”
Garcia said the next administration should define and identify the sectors or groups that need to be represented in Congress.
“We should define it and enlist what are the sectors that we will allow to be represented in Congress. For example, we define 10 sectors. How many seats are we going to allocate to the women’s groups, to the farmers’ group, among others,” Garcia, in a radio interview, said.
He added that “this means, all sectors will have a representation. For example, the three of us are representing different farmers’ groups. During the elections, the three of us will be competing against each other to win the seats which were allocated to the farmers’ sector. So that at any given time, there is a representation for that specific sector.”
Duterte earlier encouraged the country’s next leader—presumptive President Ferdinand “Bongbong” Marcos Jr., 13 years his junior—to make an initiative to amend the 1987 Constitution as soon as he assumes the presidency on June 30.
Duterte said there was “really a demand of the moment” to introduce amendments to the Constitution.
He made the call as he reiterated the need to make changes in the country’s charter, be it a shift from the presidential to a federal form of government or whatever.
Addressing his successor, Duterte said “It should be done now. Because if you do that before your term ends, they would say you want to change some provisions in the Constitution to allow you to run (again).”
Duterte told his successor to propose the change in the Constitution as early as possible to avoid speculations that the move was meant to extend the Charter-mandated six-year term with no re-election.
Duterte also earlier said the party-list system is being used by leftists to “destroy” the government.
