The Communist Party of the Philippines, which marks its 41st anniversary on Saturday, appears to prefer Nacionalista Party standard-bearer Senator Manny Villar over other candidates in next year’s presidential elections.

“Former Senate president Villar seems to be the most patriotic and progressive insofar as he advocates the interests of Filipino businessmen, expresses sympathy for the workers and peasants and condemns human rights violations,” said the CPP central committee’s traditional anniversary message to cadres and sympathizers, an advanced copy of which was emailed to media on Thursday morning.

But the CPP, a known critic of all administrations since it was founded on December 26, 1968, said that “it remains to be seen whether [Villar] can win and prove himself any better than his major political rivals”.

The CPP meanwhile assailed Villar’s rivals for having “bloodstained records of opposing the demands of the workers and peasants, like [Noynoy] Aquino of Hacienda Luisita notoriety”.

Aquino currently leads all public-opinion polls and is considered as the frontrunner in the eight-way race for the presidency.

The CPP called administration candidate Gilbert Teodoro “the mad dog defense secretary of [President Gloria Macapagal] Arroyo” and cited former President Joseph Estrada for “having a bellicose record during his failed presidency”.

Villar’s Nacionalista Party has “adopted” senatorial candidates Satur Ocampo and Liza Maza who belong to the left-wing Makabayan coalition. Ocampo served as chief negotiator of the National Democratic Front of the Philippines in peace talks with the government of President Corazon Aquino, the mother of Liberal Party candidate Noynoy Aquino.

The Makabayan is composed of eight partylist groups which the Manila government claims to be sympathizers or fronts of the CPP, a charge Ocampo and Maza assails as nothing but a flimsy pretext for violently attacking left-wing activists who dare participate and win in national elections.

According to the CPP, all Philippine presidents “kowtowed to the power of US imperialism and has sought to amass wealth and power for self-aggrandizement against the rights and interests of the people. No president ever has had the political will to undertake significant reforms that respond to the people’s demand for national independence and genuine democracy nor has used peace negotiations in order to forge agreements with the revolutionary movement on social, economic and political reforms as basis for a just peace”.

The CPP-led NPA appear to have endured Arroyo’s nearly-eight years of counterinsurgency operations marked by political assassinations of left-wing activists mostly belonging to Makabayan.

Set to celebrate its 41st year of fighting for a Marxist state, the CPP today claims effective control and influence over 120 guerilla fronts across the Philippines, supervises the NPA, and has forged eleven (11) bilateral agreements with Manila since the administration of President Fidel Ramos.

Peace negotiations have disintegrated after Manila backed moves by the European Union and the United States to tag Prof. Jose Maria Sison, founder of the CPP and chief political consultant of the NDFP peace panel, as a terrorist.

A court in the EU recently struck down the terrorist tag on Sison, who has lived in The Netherlands in 1987 soon after the cancellation of the peace talks at the time with the then-Aquino government in the aftermath of a massacre of farmers during a protest action near the presidential palace in Manila.