MANILA, Philippines — President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo faced intense pressure yesterday to step down as 10 of her Cabinet members and former President Corazon Aquino added their voices to those demanding her resignation.

Arroyo had sought to pre-empt a Cabinet mutiny this week by firing her entire team. But the month-old leadership crisis, sparked by a vote-fixing scandal, escalated dramatically when disaffected Cabinet secretaries, including most of her top economic advisers, announced that it was Arroyo who must go.

Hours later, Aquino also broke with the president, urging her to make the "supreme sacrifice." A moral icon since she replaced longtime dictator Ferdinand Marcos 19 years ago, Aquino said in a televised statement, "I am asking the president to spare our country and herself."

In recent days, Arroyo's support has eroded with the country's influential Roman Catholic Church and junior ranks of the often restive military, which has launched more than a half dozen coup attempts in the past two decades.

To avoid chaos in the capital, the armed forces and Manila police both announced they were putting the metropolitan area on the highest state of alert. Senior military commanders repeated their pledge that the armed forces would seek to remain neutral in the political standoff.

Arroyo, speaking in a taped message released late yesterday, accused her detractors of subverting the country's laws.

"Their actions cause deep and grievous harm to the nation because they undermine our democratic principles and the very foundation of our constitution," she said. She insisted she would stay in office and soon name a new Cabinet to work on improving the economy.

The president's critics have been demanding she account for her role in the vote-fixing scandal, which erupted after tapes surfaced of wiretapped conversations she allegedly held last year with a national election commissioner. The recordings indicate they conspired to ensure that Arroyo would win a second term by at least a million votes.

Late last month, Arroyo went on television to apologize for her "lapse in judgment" in calling an election commissioner but stressed she had not cheated. Then, she announced her husband, who has been named in the vote-rigging and other scandals, was leaving the country.

After the release this week of a survey showing her approval rating at a record low of 20 percent and news reports of creeping dissent in her inner circle, Arroyo returned to the airwaves Thursday.

"It is simply the truth that the political system that I am part of has degenerated to the point that it needs fundamental change," she said.

Cabinet members, including the finance, trade and budget secretaries, agreed yesterday to step down. But they also urged that Arroyo be replaced by Vice President Noli de Castro, a relative newcomer to government who was a popular television-news anchor before entering politics four years ago.

"More pressing and immediate concerns confront our people today than poisoned politics or infirmities in our constitution," said Finance Secretary Cesar Purisima. "The longer the president stays in office under a cloud of doubt and distrust and with her style of decision-making, the greater the damage on the economy and the more vulnerable the fragile political situation becomes to extremists seeking to undermine our democratic life."