Dynastic battle royale in May

Dynastic battle royale in May | Daily Tribune

More than just a political battle waged between opposing candidates, the elections this May will pit two of the country’s most prominent politicians against one another: President Ferdinand R. Marcos Jr. versus his predecessor, Rodrigo Duterte, both of whom will be fighting for their survival.

The midterm Philippine elections will take place amidst a turbulent time for politics in the country, with the two political camps — Marcos’s and the Dutertes’ — at odds, particularly after the Vice President, Sara Duterte, was impeached by the House of Representatives for, among other charges, corruption, gross misuse of public funds, and plotting the assassination of the President, his wife Liza Marcos, and cousin House Speaker Martin Romualdez

The fracture in the once united Marcos Jr.-Sara Duterte team has turned the May polls into an extremely high-stakes power struggle that is seen to culminate in the presidential elections in 2028.

Marcos Jr. is limited to one six-year term and must groom a successor to be pitted against Sara Duterte who, currently, is the strongest contender for president in 2028 — that is, if she survives her impeachment trial which has been set for end-July.

While getting a majority of candidates aligned with Marcos into the Senate is crucial to securing his administration’s agenda for the remainder of his term ending in 2028, the stakes are seen to be much higher for Vice President Duterte.

Should the midterm elections result in a majority of the Senate seats going to candidates allied with Marcos, the fate of the Vice President and her family’s will determinedly be sealed. If the Senate impeachment court convicts her, and in all probability it will with a majority of the senators aligned with the administration, Sara Duterte will be barred from occupying any and all political office for life, quashing her hopes for the presidency in 2028.

Her fall from power will likewise put her father in a precarious position, particularly if the Marcos administration cooperates with the International Criminal Court which is hot to convict the former president over the thousands killed during his bloody drug war.

It is thus imperative that the administration has as many of its candidates in position on both the local and national levels, particularly on the latter, as this would serve as a clear enough gauge of how he and his performance are measured by the electorate with three more years to go in his term.

Both camps have dived in earnest into the campaign, with President Marcos in a kick-off rally in family-dominated Laoag, Ilocos Norte firing the opening salvo which laid it on thick against the Dutertes’ perceived pro-China sentiments.

“No Filipino wants to go back to that kind of governance,” he said, as the crowd roared its approval. “And that’s why you can be sure that when our candidates are elected to the Senate, they will not participate in these policies we have left behind and don’t want to return to.”

A day or two later, Duterte fired back in a rally at Club Filipino in Greenhills, accusing Marcos of being a “drug addict,” even as he kidded about killing incumbent senators in the administration line-up to increase the chances of victory of his own candidates, who have so far been lagging in pre-election surveys.

In a much bigger rally that followed in vote-rich Cebu, he made some wild unfounded accusations that Marcos is plotting to be a dictator like his father, the late Philippine strongman Ferdinand Marcos Sr.

He also, for the first time, mentioned his daughter’s impeachment, asking the crowd to vote for all of his senatorial bets to prevent the Senate impeachment court from ousting her from the vice presidency.

Clearly, political observers point out, where the former president is concerned, the electoral game no longer concerns just ballots to be cast in the May midterm polls.

“This IS about the impeachment of his daughter,” says Aries Arugay, senior fellow at the leading research center, Singapore-based ISEAS-Yusok Ishak Institute, which is focused on sociopolitical, security, and economic trends and developments in Southeast Asia.

For his part, Ateneo Policy Center senior research fellow Michael Yusingco opines that if Marcos is able to secure a “big” victory in the coming elections, “we will see the Dutertes recede into the darkness.”

However, he says, if the administration merely wins by the skin of its teeth, expect the second half of President Marcos’s term to be acrimonious.

That said, the President has little choice but to secure a grand win for his candidates in the midterm polls to lessen, if not totally quash, the chances of the Vice President’s non-conviction by the impeachment court.

We can only imagine all sorts of things — none favorable — plaguing the President if Sara Duterte hurdles the impeachment trial in the Senate in July and remains the Vice President, with a vengeful family behind her.