SENATE President Vicente Sotto III brushed aside talk of “term-sharing” in the Senate leadership, saying the idea of installing Sen. Loren Legarda as Senate president started as a joke and later evolved into a serious discussion about making history.
Sotto said it was Sen. Francis “Kiko” Pangilinan, who first jokingly suggested “term-sharing” or “power-sharing,” while senators were chatting in the lounge.
“Kiko was joking at the beginning,” Sotto recounted. “We were in the back. I was upstairs, I came down, we came down to the lounge. They were joking about Loren.” The joke, however, led to a more thoughtful conversation among senators, Sotto said, particularly about the possibility of finally having the Senate’s first female president.
“Then we thought about it, we all thought about it, maybe it’s good,” he said. “They want to have the first woman Senate president. Let’s do it.” Sotto stressed that calling the plan “term-sharing” is inaccurate, since there would be no division of the Senate presidency. Legarda would be elected Senate president only toward the end of the 20th Congress, after the passage of the 2027 national budget, or sometime in 2028, before her term ends.
“So it’s not exactly term-sharing,” Sotto said. “If term-sharing is one-and-a-half years, one year, one-and-a-half years, that’s not it. The right term is we plan to make her Senate president toward the end of her term, end of the 20th Congress.” He said former Senate president Juan Miguel Zubiri was among those who liked the idea, even if only a few months remain in the term. “He said, OK, why not?” Sotto recalled.
The discussion gained public attention after Pangilinan posted a photo on social media showing Sotto and Legarda standing side by side, accompanied by the hashtag “#PowerSharing.” Asked about the post, Pangilinan said that the term was used jokingly and that no final agreement had been reached.
“Power-sharing was only proposed, but it was not final,” Pangilinan said, noting that at the time, only nine senators were present and counted as part of the majority.
Legarda said she has yet to be formally informed about any plan for her to lead the Senate and declined to comment until she speaks directly with Sotto.
“I will first talk to Senate President Sotto to ask and clarify the meaning of their plan,” Legarda said.
She confirmed the discussion in the lounge and the presence of several majority bloc members, but said it was focused primarily on the Blue Ribbon Committee report.
She declined to answer questions on whether members of the minority had urged her to seek the chamber’s presidency or what agreements, if any, were reached when the session resumed.
Sotto maintained that the idea remains a plan, not a settled deal, and that its core motivation is symbolic rather than political.