Seeking political relevance in the present time is a good description as any of former President Rodrigo Duterte’s theatrical appearance last week before a largely docile Senate.
Though some of his self-incriminating admissions under oath — thanks largely to the courageous efforts of feisty Senator Risa Hontiveros — opened him up to criminal charges, the 78-year-old Duterte did effectively fire up the Duterte faithful.
And, his allies and fanatics badly needed that shot in the arm. With the aging Duterte manifesting his vintage tough anti-crime persona, his acolytes hoped to repurpose the political landscape to their advantage — which in recent days increasingly had no place for them.
But no matter how convincing Duterte was to his sworn faithful, he didn’t get far with his largely unproven claim that drug-related crimes in the country were on the rise.
Duterte alleged before the zombie senators that “drug-related crimes are on the rise again. Every day, you can read about children being raped, people getting killed and robbed.”
Senior Marcos officials and police, however, quickly refuted his testimony, trotting out statistics showing the crime rate had significantly plummeted in the past three years or so.
Officially thwarting Duterte’s claim on rampant crime, of course, didn’t gain as much attention as his confession about his regime’s brutal drug war.
On that score, Duterte literally hijacked and monopolized the eight-hour Senate hearing, mesmerizing the Duterte faithful with rhetorical flourishes like he was taking “full legal, moral responsibility” and offering “no apologies, no excuses” for the drug war.
But many others thought he actually sounded stale, tired and boring, even as he managed to raise the ghosts of the drug war brutalities.
He also crumbled under the relentless probing of Hontiveros. Near the end of the hearing he openly admitted he kept a “death squad” when he was Davao City mayor and that he had ordered policemen “to encourage suspected criminals to fight back” so that “they could be killed.”
Both these unambiguous admissions subsequently led to mounting calls for the filing of criminal charges against him.
Despite this, however, it was his passing claim of a rising crime wave that caught the Palace’s ears and concern.
Whether he made the claim by design or not, the immediate Palace reaction definitely indicated his claim counted as more politically relevant to the present Malacañang occupant than his headline-worthy revelations.
Wary Palace officials in effect made it clear they weren’t giving the strategic advantage to the former strongman, that Duterte’s perceived anti-crime persona can’t again hog the political stage.
This, largely because Duterte’s tough anti-crime persona is his political strength. This got him elected in the first place.
Denying Duterte his political strength, therefore, indicates that the foul-mouthed former strongman had strategic intent not only to recover his fading political clout but also to reorder the present political landscape to make it conducive to the Duterte brand of strongman politics.
Obviously, the Marcos regime sensed it all.
For all intents and purposes, the present regime has already spent a lot of political capital in not only politically displacing Duterte and his allies but also in expunging whatever political hold Duterte may still have had in government. Nothing was more strikingly evident about these intentions than Vice President Sara Duterte’s continuing political troubles.
Thus, allowing the elder Duterte to stage a political comeback, by convincing the people that illegal drugs still backdropped the present affairs of state, constituted a serious political challenge.
Serious enough that it needed to be promptly defeated since it would also mock the administration’s pronounced policies to reject the previous regime’s murderous approach to illegal drugs.
On a side note, notable was the fact that Duterte’s efforts to regain his relevance was to purposely aid his allies gunning for national posts in next year’s midterms.It remains to be seen, however, if the aging Duterte’s efforts to regain political relevance will help his candidates.