Break the Duterte run

This year arrives like a bullet with Sara Duterte’s name on it. Impeachment charges. Set to be refiled.

Timing is everything. The charges land as Sara tips her toes into the 2028 campaign pool. Lethal. The kind of strike that turns your first steps into a stumble and your rallies into defense exercises.

The move forces Sara from offense into a grind of damage control, whittling at her reputation long before any verdict is returned. Because public opinion is a fickle thing. It could chew up the veep or light her fire.

This country thrives on spectacle. The disgraced return, the unfit are crowned; stand in the light too long, and democracy will demand your redemption. They do not care why you fell. Only that you did. And how you rise, or fail.

The Duterte brand is built for this freak show. Grievance, grit, a calculated middle finger to “imperial” Manila.

It is designed for martyrdom. But martyrdom demands purity that Sara does not have. Her record is tainted. Her choices leave fingerprints on every promise of good governance.

She vanished when the country was calling. That absence was not quiet, and will speak louder than her campaign appearances.

It revealed the true measure of her priorities: dynasty over duty; defines her, limits her, signals what exactly she can bear and what the nation cannot expect from a brat.

Her father’s presidency rode the fury of the time. Crime fears. Hatred of the Yellows. Anger everywhere. He gave them the maverick they demanded. Sara inherited the machinery. And the betrayal.

Martyrdom demands a clear enemy, a fractured mob of grudges against a president who washes his hands with a Congress moving in lockstep, and the true opposition long eclipsed, returning with sharpened teeth and old scores to settle.

Yet miscalculation is always possible. Sara commands a body politic impervious to facts, immune to reason.

They rigged the Senate in advance. Allies placed in every seat to block impeachment. Turnout was engineered to guarantee victory. These are more than votes as pledges, signed in the ink of devotion, a testament that legal threats rarely reach those who refuse to yield.

If Sara survives 2026 battered but defiant, she could emerge with exactly the kind of “I fought the system” credentials that supercharge a base.

The real question is not if the impeachment of Sara Duterte will come but whether the opposition can resist turning her into the martyr she is desperate to become.