AWOL

The Vice President is abroad again. France this time. She calls it “public service,” an official-sounding meetup with OFWs (who, conveniently, also turned out to be her fans), like she’s clearly auditioning for secretary of everyone else’s business abroad.

The veep has no mandate of her own. Unless Sara counts the applause of adoring fans in Paris as a personal mandate.

Her DepEd tenure was a disaster. The Constitution hands her four polite options: wait, sit, resign, succeed. That’s it. But she can’t sit. Not one minute. Why? She wants to be President. And she can’t wait.

Unbound by responsibility, she tests the limits of the law and punches every loophole for advantage: “Can I go abroad?” “Can I ignore my duties?” “Can I undermine the President and no one will stop me?”

And the answer, tragically, is yes. Because the law does not say no.

She brags that she pays her own way. Fancy. Very independent. But who really owns the Vice President?

That credit card might cover the ticket, but the republic foots the bill in chaos, broken trust, a vice presidency that’s just an empty chair.

The nation loses a guardian of its Constitution to a self-exiled dilettante who treats duty as optional. Call it what it is but it is not service. Sara acts on the same raw, unthinking impulse that once sent her swinging at a sheriff, protesting a government she imagines conspires against her.

Every plane ticket, every hour overseas, broadcasts the same message: “I answer to no duty. I am untouchable. I do as I please. My office is wherever my plane lands. The republic be damned. I am the real President. And I’m robbed of it.”

Leadership is forged under pressure, and the measure of a leader is how they act when everything can go wrong. A VP, or any heir apparent, cannot flinch at minor provocation.

A single twitch of impatience signals something far worse than temper: a damning predictor of how Sara would seize the presidency to flinch, evade, and weaponize her own ambition against the nation.

We see it in how she wields her office, her hours, her public appearances as weapons to campaign against her government.

We see it in how she conducts herself as the rival head of state who once threatened to kill Bongbong. No democracy on earth can square that circle.

Imagine that nuclear finger problem multiplied under China’s pressures. A hand that flinches in the hallway cannot be trusted to grasp the helm of the nation.

Sara Duterte is unfit to lead. Unfit to serve. Unfit to ascend. Every impulse she follows is a risk the nation cannot afford.