Gloria: I didn't wish for EDSA Dos to happen, but it happened

If it had been up to Speaker Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo were to choose, she would not have wanted to assume the presidency in 2001 against the backdrop of the second EDSA People Power Revolution.

"I would rather become president under peaceful, uncontroversial, less dramatic conditions. But then EDSA 2 happened when I was vice president, so I became president," Arroyo admitted in an interview with GMA resident analyst Richard Heydarian on Monday.

"I didn't wish for it to happen but it happened, because I would rather have peaceful transitions rather tumultuous transitions," she added.

The incumbent Pampanga 2nd District Representative, who has held several government positions in the past, took a trip down memory lane as she ends her more than three decades of public service in June this year.

In the interview, Arroyo said it was not her intention to run for politics in the first place, but it "seemed natural" that she would end up taking that path given that she is a daughter of the late President Diosdado Macapagal.

"I was serving as Undersecretary of Trade and Industry, I was a professor of economics before that in several universities including the University of the Philippines. So it seemed natural that being an economist plus being the daughter of a former President, somewhere along the way, I would be drafted to run for politics," she said.

"And it happened. For the election of 1992, I was drafted to run for senator," she added.

After serving for three years as a senator, Arroyo ran for reelection in the 1995 midterm polls, where she topped the senatorial race.

At that time, she said she had come to realize that anyone who tops the senatorial race is touted to become a future presidency. She decided not run for the position in the succeeding elections right away as she lacked the resources to win.

"At that time, if you're going to have resources, you need to either have the support of the Ramos administration, or your own independent resources, or the support of the Catholic church. Those were the big power brokers at that time," Arroyo said.

Among the candidates for president in the 1998 elections, former Speaker Jose De Venecia had the backing of former President Fidel Ramos, while the Catholic church supported then-Manila Mayor Alfredo Lim, Arroyo noted. Meanwhile, then-Vice President Joseph Estrada, who would eventually win the presidential elections, "had his own independent means."

"Speaker Jose De Venecia, when he was chosen by the selection process to be the candidate for president of the administration then, he asked me to run for vice president with him. So that's how it happened," Arroyo said.

Arroyo said she accepted the challenge of becoming the country's president amid the political and economic stability after the Estrada administration, which had been wracked by allegations of corruption and a lengthy impeachment trial at the Senate.

She claimed that elements that "tried to destabilize the economy and the country politically" pushed her to run again for president in 2004 — a position she won amid allegations of cheating.

Arroyo served as the country's chief executive until 2010. Afterward, she ran and won the seat she is currently holding in the House of Representatives. —JST, GMA News