Saying that the post-pandemic economy will be “very bad” for the youth, retired Supreme Court Associate Justice Antonio Carpio on Wednesday, August 25, urged the youth to “elect the right leaders” in the 2022 polls because the Philippines, in terms of economy, has already “hit rock bottom.”

Carpio echoed the previous statement of Vice President Leni Robredo, saying that Filipinos cannot afford “another six years of this kind of leadership, of this kind of administration.”

Not voting for the right leaders next year will be “very bad for the youth because they would have no jobs” and education will suffer, Carpio said during the 1Sambayan Ateneo-La Salle Joint Launch.

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Citing economists who said that the Philippines will be the last in Southeast Asia to recover economically, the opposition coalition 1Sambayan convenor stressed that “we will be left behind by our neighbors.”

“So, it is really bad and I think we really have to come together as a nation and decide to elect really the best leaders we can elect because we can’t continue with this kind of leadership,” he said.

“(We) have to think very hard of who will govern our country after 2022,” Carpio added as he projects that continuing with the present administration “will really bring us back even maybe more than two to three times pre-pandemic levels.”

The coronavirus pandemic shrunk the Philippines’ economy by 9.5 percent in 2020, the worst contraction since World War II, economists reported in January.

Although the country’s gross domestic product (GDP) grew 11.8 percent in the second quarter of 2021, economic experts warned that this does not mean the economy is back to pre-pandemic levels since the GDP plunged by 16.9 percent in the same period last year, marking the start of the recession.

READ: PH economy accelerates 11.8% in Q2

“And we don’t see the light at the end of the tunnel because the COVID-19 seems to be getting more infectious,” Carpio lamented, adding that the concept of herd immunity is confusing since no one knows “whether it is 70 percent, 90 percent, or 100 percent.”

Carpio alleged that there is an “attempt by (the) government to curtail our freedom” because of the Anti-Terror Law that the present administration’s forces are using to intimidate activists and critics of the government.

“We must oppose. Because if we don’t oppose then you lose and you lose and you lose until it becomes now part of the normal state of things,” he said.

The Anti-Terror Law, the former magistrate added, “is a very bad law and we must all oppose it.”

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“The government thinks that they have to curtail the freedom to be more efficient, to develop the economy, to put, to ensure peace and order, but then that means there is a curtailment of freedom,” he added.

He warned that Filipinos could “lose all our freedoms” if the government’s encroachment of individual freedoms is not opposed.