Election of the day: The Phillipines
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On Monday, The Philippines will hold (are holding, we’re well into Monday there) a rare thing in the world: an American-style midterm election. All 317 seats in the House of Representatives and 12/24 seats in the Senate are up, as we are at the midpoint of the six year presidential term. Despite neither the President nor the Vice President are on the ballot, but this election will largely about them and their rivalry, and will have significant and near-immediate implications for the rivalry between the two. The 12 seats in the Senate are generally seen as more important than the house, because a) while the House has many formal important powers, in practice this body rarely puts up much resistance to the president and their plans, and b) a big struggle between the current president and vice president (both elected in 2022, but not on a ticket, they were nominally allies at the time but that deteriorated quickly) that is playing out through the impeachment process. The VP has already been impeached (the bar for impeachment in The Philippines is, curiously, minoritarian; 1/3 of the house voting for impeachment is sufficient.) The next step is her trial, the outcome of which will be shaped by the election of half the Senate currently underway.
Both the current President and Vice President have depressingly familiar names, as both are scions of dubious politicians, looking to establish a dynasty. The President, Bongbong Marcos Jr., is of course the son of the notorious Ferdinand and Imelda, while VP Sara Dutarte’s father, Rodrigo, was the more recently the Trump ally President with authoritarian tendencies from 2016-2022. So what happened? What’s going on? Here’s a good summary:
Only three years ago, Ferdinand “Bongbong” Marcos and Sara Duterte formed an unlikely populist alliance to win a landslide election mandate. Their victory installed the son of the country’s former dictator as president and the daughter of the controversial outgoing president as his deputy. But the partnership unravelled fast.
In February Duterte, 46, was impeached by Congress for plotting to kill Marcos and his first lady, misusing millions from her private office, violating the constitution and “other high crimes”. If convicted at her trial in July, she will be barred from office for life. If she is found not guilty, however, her chances of becoming president will soar — and with them the prospect of taking revenge against Marcos, 67, who turned on her and helped the International Criminal Court (ICC) detain and extradite her father.
Half of the 24 senators who will vote in the trial will be elected tomorrow, along with the entire House of Representatives and thousands of regional and urban seats. Duterte has therefore spent the campaign fighting for her political life.
In its final days she was in her family’s southern heartland to hold a series of hot, noisy and colourful rallies that were often more like mass karaoke sessions, the candidates sporting brightly coloured sports shirts, belting out a series of hits and swaying their hips. Pity the Filipino politician who cannot sing or dance.
Throughout, Duterte was defiant. I asked her after one rally if allying with Marcos had been a mistake. She replied: “I do not regret anything. I am vice-president right now. I am able to help a lot of people. And now everyone can see what a Marcos can do to a country, and that is to bring us to the road to perdition.” Was she worried about impeachment? “I am at peace whatever the outcome, whether it be acquitted or guilty. I leave it up to the lawyers to prepare for the impeachment.”
Filipino presidents and vice-presidents are allowed only a single term, a change to the constitution introduced after Marcos’s infamously corrupt late father, Ferdinand Marcos, held on to power with his wife Imelda for 21 years before they were toppled by a popular revolt.
“This election and the trial are an existential threat to her,” said Aries Arugay, visiting senior fellow at the Iseas-Yusof Ishak Institute. “But it’s also an existential threat to Marcos Jr because if she gets acquitted, her chances of being president will increase and that doesn’t bode well for Marcos. She will surely put him in jail somehow.”
For now, the walls appear to be closing in on Duterte and her family. Weeks after her impeachment, Marcos allowed the 80-year-old former president Rodrigo Duterte to be detained by the ICC on charges of crimes against humanity for his alleged involvement in a drugs war that involved thousands of extrajudicial killings of suspected drug dealers.
Sara Duterte has since admitted that she and four key allies — including two senators on whose votes she is counting in her impeachment trial — are on an ICC list and could yet face arrest. Her elder brother Paolo, a congressman, once linked with drug trafficking, is now facing criminal charges for assaulting a man and threatening him with a knife in a nightclub. Highly incriminating video emerged last weekend.
I have no idea whether the charges are fair, although I have no doubt she’s done something eminently worthy of impeachment (The standards for Impeachment, as in the US, are vague, broad, and open to interpretation); it’s widely assumed that the goal is to prevent the Duterte clan from reclaiming the presidency in 2028. As with the recently concluded Albanian election (Socialists won handily, so a status quo outcome, by the way), I have no idea who to root for. On the one hand, entrenching a Marcos dynasty seems quite bad. On the other hand, entrenching a potential Duterte dynasty also seems quite bad. But this is where we are.