Grace Poe content to cultivate underdog status in Philippine presidential race as she attempts to resolve citizenship questions
Last month, the Commission on Elections disqualified Poe on the grounds that she could not prove she has Filipino blood and failed to meet a 10-year residency requirement.
Philippines Senator Grace Poe returned this week to the rustic island where she was abandoned as an infant, forging ahead with her presidential campaign under a cloud of controversy as she struggles to prove she has Filipino blood.
Poe flew into Kalibo, one of the main towns on the island of Panay, for a whirlwind tour on Tuesday, posing for selfies with excited fans, meeting the local bishop and doing radio interviews to reach a wider rural audience.
“Part of the reason why I am really going around is to tell the people that I am still very much in the race and I am not giving up,” Poe said before she embarked on her journey to Panay island.
Poe’s Dickensian life story has become one of the main narratives in the Philippines presidential election scheduled for May 9. Found in the Jaro Cathedral on Panay in 1968, she was eventually given to a Philippine couple who became prominent in cinema and politics in a country with a long history of political melodrama.
Loyalty to the country does not end with territory. Sometimes you are elsewhere but your heart is really for the country
Her adoptive father, the late action movie hero Fernando Poe, would himself make an unsuccessful run for president in 2004, fending off charges that he, too, did not have proper citizenship credentials for the presidency.