The last gasp of Philippine democracy: How the kleptocratic Marcos family closed in again on the presidency

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Miguel Syjuco is a Filipino author, journalist, civil society advocate, and professor at New York University Abu Dhabi. His latest novel, I Was the President’s Mistress!! is a satire about Philippine politics.

On May 9, the Philippines holds an election – arguably the most pivotal in our long history. What’s at stake is exactly that history, and facts and truth, culpability and accountability, and how we’ll define ourselves as a people. In short: it’s a fight for our nation’s soul. It may also prove the last gasp of the proverbial canary in the coal mine of democracy – which includes, in truth, yours.

Across Asia’s oldest republic, patterned after that of the United States, we Filipinos will be electing 77 national and 18,103 local positions while a storm of disinformation and historical revisionism rages. But of those races, only one truly matters: that of the presidency, a position that, over the years, has evolved into one of near-omnipotence, despite the constitutional safeguards of a lone six-year term and a vice-president elected separately to ensure greater representation and checks and balances on power.

Of the prime spot’s 10 current candidates (the “presidentiables,” as we’ve dubbed them), only five are vaguely viable, along with half of the nine candidates for veep. But it’s really two that all eyes are on: Ferdinand (Bongbong) Marcos Jr., the unapologetic namesake of the dictator whose regime plundered billions and killed thousands; and Leni Robredo, a human-rights lawyer who beat the despot’s son for the vice-presidency six years ago, and consistently disproved in the courts his claims of electoral fraud.

Despite Ms. Robredo’s victories, her battles have always been uphill. By winning that election, she had ruined the declared plans of our current president, Rodrigo Duterte, to eventually step down and cede the office to Mr. Marcos Jr., whom Mr. Duterte considered an ally. She was sidelined by the president her entire term and now finds herself the underdog. For the dictator’s son has joined forces with the president’s daughter, Sara Duterte, who in this election is gunning for vice-president – with their tandem leading in recent surveys, by miles.

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Clearly, ours is a democracy tailored to suit dynasties and despots, with our only remaining democratic choice being whether to condone it – and even that’s been perverted by propaganda, troll armies, an oppressed news media, and well-funded machinations to rewrite history using social media to exonerate the Marcoses and Dutertes of their decades of sins.

What’s at stake on May 9 – when we Filipinos will choose – cannot be overstated.

The most obvious concern, geopolitically, is the influence of China, whose theft of islands, militarization of the West Philippine Sea and influence in our economy has received only simpering kowtowing from the usually bellicose Mr. Duterte. But more urgent is the choice, faced increasingly throughout the world, between the strongman type of rule (which promises to solve our problems by disciplining and controlling us) and the imperfect project that is democracy (which demands faith and constant participation from us citizens).

So all that is the who, the what, when, and where of this story, and why it matters. But the how, now, will prove the most consequential. How did all this happen? How did our democracy decay enough to allow the resurgence of the kleptocratic Marcos family, 36 years after they stuffed diamonds into the dictator’s diapers and fled the Philippines under cover of night?

What follows is our tragic story of hope and disillusionment.

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A dictatorship of dynasties

I remember like yesterday that hopeful afternoon in 1986 – 14 years after Ferdinand Marcos Sr. had declared martial law under the pretense of preventing a communist takeover.

We were watching on TV from Vancouver as an endless flood of Filipinos rose in the streets of Metro Manila and my mother and father held each other and cried. “I cannot believe it,” my mom kept saying. “Maybe we can go home now,” my dad finally said.

On Manila’s main thoroughfare, EDSA Boulevard, students chanted in protest, nuns faced down tanks, mothers and priests stood in front of rifle barrels, and Filipinos from all walks of life united around Corazon Aquino, the widow of an opposition senator who’d been assassinated under the regime.

Mr. Marcos Sr. had been in power since 1965 and in that time an estimated US$10-billion had been plundered, national debt rose fifty-fold, the Philippine peso devalued from 3.91 pesos to the U.S. dollar to 19.03, and in his last two years our GDP shrank by around 7 per cent a year, while almost half of all Filipinos lived in poverty. More than 70,000 people were jailed without proper due process, 34,000 tortured, and more than 3,000 killed.

Though the early years of dictatorial control had afforded some good – in terms of economy, infrastructure and pet vanity projects – it was far outweighed by all the bad that inevitably bankrupted the country, financially and morally. Filipinos had had enough.

As the lupus-ridden dictator weighed his options from the fortified presidential palace, his only son, Bongbong, aged 29 and the governor of his father’s province, sported military fatigues and reportedly urged his father to crush the protestors. But as factions in the armed forces switched sides, the dictator’s long-time American allies in Washington telephoned, offering sanctuary in Hawaii. The family stripped the palace of all things valuable and portable and fled, leaving behind his wife Imelda’s infamous shoe collection and a country they’d bled dry. The Marcoses’ 21-year rule was finally over.

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The months and years that followed in the Philippines brought an optimism that prompted regular citizens to join the political process, as my businessman father and later my mother did, eventually serving in Congress. A sparkling-new Constitution was designed to prevent a repeat of authoritarian abuses of power. Freedom of speech and of the press were guaranteed. The legislative, judicial and executive branches of government were enshrined as co-equal. A commission was formed to retrieve the plunder hidden in the Marcos family’s Swiss bank accounts, in Manhattan real estate, and under their mattresses, where priceless works of art had been secreted away. And, most importantly, a constitutional provision tasked Congress and Senate with implementing laws against political dynasties.

But reality hit quick and hard. Political factionalism, a system rooted in patronage, and the nepotism of clans were followed by unsuccessful coup attempts – as the new order spread its elbows and dug its heels in – along with a refusal by lawmakers to pass those anti-dynasty laws.

For power’s temptations form the themes and narrative arc of the clichéd telenovela that is the modern-day Philippines. Cue now what would be its backstory montage:

There’d be years of corruption, of course. And a brazenness behind injustices suffered upon those without privilege and clout. There’d be the death of the exiled dictator, and the return of his family from Hawaii in 1991, followed by their forays into regional politics. There’d be nationwide poverty, and a trendy spate of kidnappings that made entrepreneurs of even the police. There’d be an action-movie star turned president and his embezzlements, gambling sprees, 21st-century harem, and 24-hour palace buffets that would make Caligula drool. And there’d be yet another peaceful revolution on EDSA Boulevard hijacked by yet another batch of cunning politicians offering us yet another set of promises that ultimately delivered for few others than themselves.

There’d also be facts and figures poignant and heavy across the screen, from recent research showing dynastic capture of an entire democratic system on a scale that almost trivializes concerns about too many Trudeaus and Fords. Only about 234 families – in a country of nearly 110 million people – now control 67 per cent of Philippine Congress, along with 80 per cent of governorships, and 53 per cent of mayors, with “fat dynasties” (defined as families controlling simultaneous elected positions) growing by 1 per cent each election cycle since 1988.

Finally, in this montage of travesties, we’d zoom in on the capital: Metro Manila, where national power is centralized, and the city’s crime, pollution, flooding, kilometric gridlock, and disparity between haves and have-nots all seem to exemplify the exhausted hopelessness of our entire society. This city is where millions of Filipinos also departed from these past decades for places offering opportunity and optimism – which seemed to be everywhere but the Philippines. No wonder the world nicknamed us the Sick Man of Asia. The mismanagement of our democratic, fertile and resource-rich country was sick and sickening.

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But the new millennium somehow brought nuanced, gradual but positive change, via a problematic president (Gloria Macapagal Arroyo, an economist and daughter of the president who’d preceded Marcos Sr.), then another contentious president, Benigno (Noynoy) Aquino III (son of former president Corazon Aquino), who furthered his predecessor’s economic reforms and sought to clean up government by holding even powerful politicians to account for corruption.

Yet all those dynasties fighting dynasties seemed to only emphasize the permanence of squabbling dynasties. And despite a wildly surging economy, investment-grade stability, diminishing poverty, a fast-rising middle class, and the cosmopolitanism of a globalized work force, a swath of our electorate remained marginalized – and impatiently clamoured for change.

That came in 2016, in the form of a governor’s son: Rodrigo Duterte, a tough-talking long-time ruler of a provincial capital of the historically neglected region of Davao, whose children shared his power by swapping places amongst themselves, dancing around mayoral and congressional term limits. A law-school-educated, extrajudicial-minded mayor, he’d become nationally notorious for his “Davao Death Squad.”

His presidential campaign slogan was “Change is coming,” its symbol a punching fist emoji – a knockout combination in a poor, undereducated, sick-and-tired country with one of the world’s highest usage of smartphones, over which most news is read and spread. Nicknamed the Punisher, or Tatay Digong (Daddy Digong), the paternalistic Mr. Duterte and his pugnacious, provincial, purportedly anti-elite family proved perfect for our outraged era where infamy is as good as fame and impunity feels more honest than piety.

Last election, in a field split among five presidentiables, he won 39 per cent of the vote – a plurality but not a majority, which in our fractured country proved enough. Change had come indeed.

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The strongman legacy of weak men

History teaches that authoritarianism starts with a lie – a bold one. “I alone can fix this.” That’s what they all say, from the Caesars through to Mussolini and Hitler, from Ferdinand Marcos Sr. through to Putin and Trump. It is a decidedly undemocratic statement that implies the powerlessness of everyone else against a problem that nobody – especially not democracy – has been able to solve.

In the Philippines, such wholesale spurning of essential democratic liberties began with Marcos Sr. – who called his brand “constitutional authoritarianism” – before it went out of fashion with his ouster, and the truth came out about his false heroism in the Second World War, his fake military medals, his daughter’s conviction in the U.S. for the death of a student who’d insulted her and their family’s systematic plundering of the country.

But in those three decades after, as our faith in democracy succumbed to government dysfunctionality, Mr. Duterte was well-situated to make authoritarianism attractive again. This he did with surgical nipping and tucking of the constitution’s checks and balances against abuses of power – in what the Nobel Prize-winning journalist Maria Ressa calls “death by a thousand cuts of our democracy.”

We Filipinos have only ourselves to blame for Mr. Duterte; his intent was clear from the start. As a candidate, he exaggerated a problem that he claimed he alone could fix: a drug epidemic felt acutely in communities but whose alleged prevalence was not founded in fact. As a president, he sought to solve that public-health crisis not with a public-health solution, which is gradual, but with violence, which is fast – unleashing it with all the power of the presidency.

As many Filipinos cheered his efficient defiance, he promised effective immunity to the police and military, repeatedly threatened to suspend democracy, imposed martial law in certain regions, jailed activists and opposition figures on trumped up charges, deported outspoken foreigners, and targeted journalists and publications who put him under proper scrutiny.

He withdrew our country from the treaty that bound us to the International Criminal Court and threatened to arrest any investigators. He publicly “broke up,” as he said, with the U.S. and Western countries over their concerns about human-rights abuses, and he curled into bed with China and Russia and their pillow-talk of investment, military aid and other sugary support that had no strings attached to democratic values.

And while railing against so-called elites and oligarchs, this governor’s son has profited, so to speak, from empowering a nouveau riche whose loyalty and protection he needs.

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As with all authoritarians, the big talk hides the weakness of the man and the failures of his regime. He could not succeed legitimately in the democratic system that had voted him in, so he perverted it through falsehood, judicial manipulations and extrajudicial dealings to empower his agenda. And despite Mr. Marcos Jr.’s pledge to continue the popular president’s legacy, Mr. Duterte will leave as a failure – his promises mocked by his performance.

His six-year term ends with the drug problem unfixed, despite his vow that he would need only six months. Corruption is record-breakingly rampant. And the law-and-order president failed to reform the judiciary in any meaningful way that would punish criminals, instead of murdering them without trial. His regime has killed more than 6,000 alleged suspects, with watchdog groups and the ICC estimating the death toll to be as high as 30,000.

The vivacious economy Mr. Duterte inherited is also reeling, its steadily decreasing gains before the pandemic shot through the heart by his inept, militarized response to the global health crisis – his lockdowns among the world’s longest and most stringent – resulting in millions of Filipinos sinking into poverty, and our national debt more than doubling to a record high. Yet, the Philippines has consistently placed at or near the bottom of COVID-resilience rankings.

What’s more, he’s left the country less free and able to hold politicians like him to account. Disinformation has been professionalized and traditional media cowed into self-censorship after efforts to either control, shut down, bankrupt or force the sale of such major outlets as the Philippine Daily Inquirer national newspaper, the ABS-CBN network, the Philippines Graphic weekly and Rappler, a news website that’s bravely fought to hold the line.

Meanwhile, laws supposedly meant to protect against cyberlibel and terrorism have been levelled against dissent as armies of trolls and sycophantic influencers build on the work of companies such as Cambridge Analytica (who, one Canadian whistle-blower said, used the Philippines as “a petri dish” to test methods later used to help elect Donald Trump) by sowing fake news and attacking defiant voices.

And though a younger generation may not remember, with about 56 per cent of registered voters now aged under 41, the facts of history show that Ferdinand Marcos Sr. similarly thrived through propaganda, oppression, impunity and crony capitalism. But what happens to such facts in this day and age when history’s so easily rewritten? What happens when our rulers take the truth and bury it – as Mr. Duterte did to the frozen body of the dictator, now in pride of place in our National Cemetery of Heroes? What happens when lies – reposted enough, repeated enough, in a way attributable to the Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels – create an illusion of truth? What happens when enough people around you come to believe that illusion as fact?

That is Mr. Duterte’s greatest achievement, his place in our true history. The self-confessed killer’s work is done and he’s ostensibly off to the pastures of retirement – having now set the stage for both his spiritual and actual progeny: Ferdinand Marcos Jr. and Sara Duterte.

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Truths versus lies

Who has the most convincing story? On that is what these elections will hinge. Narrative. Not platform, policies, or even personalities from among our ruling archetypes: the showbiz celebs, social-media figures, sports stars, traditional politicians, military brass, defiant political widows and inheriting heirs apparent, all of whom we call our presidentiables.

And though it’s clear who will likely face whom in this season’s finale – about good versus evil, burdensome democracy versus comforting authoritarianism – our cast of would-be contenders is compelling for what they reveal about Philippine politics, present and future.

For president we have Isko Moreno, former actor and current Manila mayor, running with Willie Ong, a cardiologist who dispenses online medical advice to his 16 million followers.

We have Manny Pacquiao, boxing great and “the Fighting Pride of the Philippines,” who parlayed his fame into his Senate seat and government positions for his family – while in his corner, as his veep, is Lito Atienza, former mayor of Manila, now one of the 33 absurdly numerous and loyally rewarded deputy speakers of the House of Representatives.

We also have Ping Lacson, serving senator, former police general, whose shady background included a high post in the dictator’s feared intelligence services. He runs with Tito Sotto, a comedian-turned-Senate-president once forced by an internet backlash into apologizing to the family of Robert F. Kennedy for plagiarizing him in speeches against reproductive rights, and who soon after spearheaded draconian laws inhibiting internet speech.

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Then we have Ms. Robredo, the lone woman among them – the anti-dynasty development worker who rose to the vice-presidency after her one term in congress that sought to continue the legacy of her late husband, a mayor and interior secretary who was celebrated for his pro-poor advocacy before he died in a plane crash. To offset criticisms of inexperience, she’s running with Senator Kiko Pangilinan, a career politician whose uncle by marriage is the senate president, Mr. Sotto, and whose actress wife was an icon of her generation.

And we’ve Mr. Marcos Jr., a former senator who was found to have lied about graduating from the University of Oxford and has had to fight off rumours he is a cocaine abuser, going so far as to present a negative drug test in an attempt to clear his name. His candidacy is challenged by a past conviction for tax evasion and an outstanding penalty of US$3.9 billion (though to the electoral body laggardly overseeing that case, Mr. Duterte recently appointed new commissioners – including a former lawyer for Mr. Marcos). Alongside the dictator’s son is the killer’s daughter, Ms. Duterte, mayor of her father’s stronghold, herself dubbed the “Slugger” for publicly beating a sheriff, as he was restrained by her towering bodyguard, for the sin of serving a legal eviction notice against illegal residents of a slum (earning her administrative reprimands, and love from poor voters).

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Such colourful characters, all brandishing name recognition and tensile narratives – yet it’s the overall plot that thickens. Despite Ms. Robredo’s defeat of Mr. Marcos Jr. in 2016, he now leads firmly in the race for the presidency. So what’s changed these past six years?

It’s not the candidates. While as vice-president, Ms. Robredo was relegated to being a rock in the president’s shoe, Mr. Marcos Jr. did little else but falsely claim that her election was stolen, while he banged on with the big lie that his family oversaw our country’s “golden years” before they were ousted and vilified by a small elite who stole the Marcoses’ power to tell their own stories – yet to presidential debates and interviews with reputable journalists, Mr. Marcos Jr. has consistently not shown up.

So what has changed these six years? Or these 36 years – as now another principled widow faces down another Marcos?

Clearly, it’s the country itself – and perhaps the world. And whether the junior Marcoses and Dutertes win or lose, the damage in our democracy is deep and disturbing. The mechanisms that should hold figures like them to account have been rigged – a gift from their daddies. All while our history is being relentlessly rewritten – through Facebook feeds, TikTok posts, YouTube explainer videos, comments sections, pro-authoritarian influencers and organized hordes of trolls – altering the Philippines forever.

If you’re concerned about the state of democratic values around the globe, you should be watching my country. Like the canary kept by miners to warn against threats in the air that could kill them all, Philippine democracy has gone from singing to squawking to gasping for breath. After May 9, once the votes have been tallied, the world must check what’s lived or died. Then you must prepare.

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