The Prince’s new clothes

The Prince’s new clothes | Daily Tribune

Niccolò Machiavelli, that cold-blooded Florentine scribe of power, must be laughing from his grave dating back to the 1500s. Somewhere in Malacañang Palace, his ghost may have found a new pupil.

President Ferdinand Marcos Jr., who recently ordered his Cabinet secretaries to submit courtesy resignations, made an uncharacteristically blunt admission: sometimes, he said, it’s better for a leader to be feared. For a man who has carefully cultivated an image of composure, civility, and TikTok charm, it was an unguarded moment — a peek behind the velvet curtain, showing the iron mask underneath.

This wasn’t just a personnel shake-up. It was a signal, a threat in business-casual tones. For Cabinet members not dancing to the President’s tune, the message was clear: shape up or ship out. The order functioned both as a purge and a performance — a demonstration of authority for the bureaucracy, the public, and perhaps more importantly, to the looming beasts of Congress.

Even before a new Senate is seated, and long before the 2028 presidential chatter turns up the volume, Marcos seems determined to remind everyone — secretaries, lawmakers and speculative successors — that he won’t go gently into that lame-duck night. Congress, in fact, is preparing to put Vice President Sara Duterte on trial next month, under Martin Romualdez’s and Chiz Escudero’s batons.

Machiavelli would applaud. The Prince, after all, was never about virtue in the moral sense. It was about virtù — the force of character, cunning, and will necessary to hold power amid political chaos. The philosopher advised rulers not to be good, but to appear good, and if the mask must come off to survive, then so be it. Better feared than loved, if you can’t be both.

But here’s the rub, so to speak, borrowing from that keenly missed columnist, Conrad de Quiros.

Marcos Jr. doesn’t look or sound the part of a Machiavellian prince. He isn’t feared like his father, nor adored like a populist messiah. He governs not with fire and brimstone but with calibrated restraint. Yet this very restraint — strategic silence, selective appointments, vague, even disjointed, yet sweeping statements — is its own form of political calculus. Less tyrant, more tactician.

In extending an olive branch to the Dutertes — who’ve made a sport of sniping at him from Davao, The Hague, and the Office of the Vice President — he wears the garb of a benevolent patriarch, above the fray. But Machiavelli would recognize the maneuver for what it is: either the softening of a target or the staging of an alibi. Love me, says the prince, but know also that I can make heads roll.

And so they have. Department heads axed and shuffled. Underperformers nudged aside. Loyalists rewarded. The realpolitik is that perception is power. Firing secretaries isn’t merely about policy alignment. It’s about reminding the ecosystem who holds the leash. The bureaucracy, like any medieval court, must be reminded periodically of the sovereign’s teeth.

Yet Machiavelli also warned that fear must never curdle into hatred. The leader who brutalizes for sport, or moves without finesse, invites the same chaos he tries to control. The trick, always, is to command obedience without provoking rebellion. To be feared just enough.

Bongbong, in this sense, walks a finer line than his father ever did. The elder Marcos ruled with martial muscle and myth-making. The younger plays a quieter game — less apocalypse, more attrition. Fewer grand decrees, more calibrated disruptions.

Still, one cannot ignore the irony: a president propelled to power partly on the nostalgia of his mother’s City of Man and his father’s Bagong Lipunan “golden age” is now executing maneuvers that echo the more brackish aspects of that era. The purge, the assertion of control, the reminder that he alone sits on the throne.

For now, the reshuffle may stabilize Marcos Jr.’s rule, but musical chairs isn’t strategy; the chairs are instruments. A prince survives not only by instilling fear but by producing results. And results, in this country, are judged less by GDP than by gut feeling — food on the table, traffic on the roads, jobs, peace and a sense of direction.

So, yes, the prince has growled. But now comes the harder part: delivering. In this century, leadership isn’t about conquest but about consequence. And in a democracy that still believes it is one, fear without results is just noise.