Bayani seeks Panagbenga ‘exposure’

BAGUIO CITY – Politics just might mix again with the Panagbenga, the popular flower festival here, after likely presidential hopeful Bayani Fernando offered to address the crowd and have his own float during the festivities.

Baguio City Mayor Reinaldo Bautista Jr. told The STAR on Friday’s opening of the Panagbenga that Fernando has
expressed interest in speaking during the Grand Street Dancing Parade on Feb. 23, and to have a flower float in the Grand Float Parade slated the next day.

Some 500,000 people are expected to crowd the city’s main thoroughfares during the two-day festival parades.

Fernando reportedly told Bautista he wanted to promote the shoes produced by the country’s shoe capital, Marikina City.

Fernando, chairman of the Metropolitan Manila Development Authority and former mayor of Marikina, is believed to be running for president in the 2010 elections.

“It is a fiesta, Baguio-style. No speeches,” Bautista said.

He added that while “everybody is welcome to come and join the revelry even with their floats,” he pointed out, “politicians are barred from riding on it.”

In the 2007 Flower Festival Float Parade, almost all senatorial bets of the administration’s Team Unity joined the parade with their own float. Candidate Prospero Pichay even had his own flower-enamored “Surfboard Float of Siargao.”

Now on its 13th year, this year’s Panagbenga  (literally, “a time to bloom”) has become a private-run but government supported endeavor. “Our thrust to lessen politicians’ dipping fingers into the community activity is gaining good results because the less politicians there are, the less problems,” Bautista stressed. – Artemio Dumlao