Marcos returns to the Philippines

Another President Marcos – how?

DOROTHY GUERRERO on the shocking election victory of former dictator Ferdinand Marcos’s son in the Philippines.

Ferdinand Marcos Jr, popularly known as Bongbong, will be sworn in as the Philippines’ 17th president on 30 June 2022. How did the son and namesake of a man known worldwide as a brutal dictator and one of the world’s worst kleptocrats, who drove his country to economic bankruptcy, manage to win an electoral landslide 36 years after his father was ousted?

Philippine democracy is in tatters after six years of Rodrigo Duterte’s government, notorious for brazen killings under its ‘war on drugs’, muzzling the media and disregarding the rule of law. With Duterte’s daughter Sara elected to the vice-presidency, it seems that the Philippines’ future is getting more and more similar to its dark past.

PATRONAGE POLITICS

The wide margin won by the MarcosDuterte tandem proved that Philippine elections are still dominated by the wellentrenched machineries of political dynasties which rely on patronage politics. These politically influential families monopolise public offices from generation to generation, treating it almost as their birthright. Local politicians depend on them for largesse, which they in turn use to distribute favours to local residents. On election days these translate into votes.

Political dynasties are power gatekeepers. They have very close relationships with business tycoons who support their electoral campaigns. Given the Philippines has around 7,100 islands, running a national election campaign requires huge funds. The Marcos-Duterte ticket was a powerful combination, which brought together political clans from both the north and southern part of the Philippines. The Marcos family is one of the most successful, going back over a century to Marcos Jr’s great grandfather in the northern province of Ilocos. After Ferdinand Marcos Sr was ousted following the mass

What has been popular struggle of 1986, his family exile lost, and with proved to be shortlived. New president terrible effect, is the Corazon Aquino collective social allowed the family’s return to face various memory. court charges in 1991, after Marcos’s death in 1989. This was actually a precondition by the Swiss government in exchange for cooperation with efforts to recover the Marcoses’ wealth. Since their return, the Marcos family have taken turns occupying various elected posts.

VOTE-BUYING AND OTHER ELECTION PLAGUES

Running against well-entrenched gatekeepers and well-oiled machinery is an uphill battle. It is an ‘open secret’ that vote-buying is part of the electoral culture, and there were allegations of vote-buying in many areas in the presidential election, which reportedly even boosted the local economy. Closest rival candidate Leni Robredo, a human rights lawyer and current vicepresident (elected independently in 2016

Right: A protest in Quezon City in February to mark the 36th anniversary of the People Power revolution, which toppled dictator Ferdinand Marcos in 1986.

and not from Duterte’s party), lacked the financial resources to match the billions of campaign funds mobilised by the combined Marcos-Duterte machinery.

Thousands of Robredo supporters did house-to-house campaigns and used their own money to produce the campaign’s pink-themed wristbands and t-shirts and distribute food at rallies. Artists, bands and actors wrote songs, painted murals, performed and endorsed her campaign on social media. Hundreds of thousands joined her rallies in many key cities – the last one held in Manila had 700,000 attendees. Those rallies were the biggest in Philippine electoral history.

Robredo’s campaign in just six months generated a lot of inspiration and put up a very good fight but time was not on their side. The toughest battle was on social media, which was central to Marcos’s campaign. He shunned TV debates and avoided questions from media seen as unfriendly, while internet trolls spread lies about Robredo and distorted the history of the Marcos dictatorship and martial law. Such historical denialism will sadly continue.

Marcos’s popularity can also be attributed to the failure of the country’s education system to educate the population about the brutality of the martial law period. The media and the church share this responsibility. What has been lost, and with terrible effect, is the collective social memory. There is also the bigger factor of the socio-economic conditions that make a large segment of the population vulnerable to historical distortion and denialism.

PART OF A WIDER GLOBAL PROBLEM

The Marcoses’ restoration to power presents a crisis not just to Philippine democracy. The inclination towards authoritarianism and the rejection of liberal democracy, trolling and manipulation by the far-right media are globally shared problems. Bongbong ran a Trumpian campaign. It is expected that the already limited progress in holding the Marcoses to account for their various crimes and violations while they were out of power will grind to a halt now that the family are back in power. What will now happen to an existing US verdict that holds Bongbong in contempt of court for failing to pay reparations to victims of his father's human rights violations?

More broadly, the Philippines is in a key geopolitical location. The question of how the Philippines relates to both China and the US in the coming years is key – and this election will have a big impact.

Dorothy Guerrero is head of policy at Global Justice Now. She was part of the people’s movement that overthrew Marcos in 1986.