Marcos and Duterte want to install their heirs at the helm of the country

Philippines reinvents Game of Thrones

photo_camera PHOTO/AP - Rodrigo Duterte

If anyone thinks that Marcos is a surname with a mere whiff of the past in the Philippines, they are sadly mistaken. Not only is Ymelda alive at 92 years old. She also maintains her prized shoe shop and her wealth. And her aspirations for power. Her ultimate dream is to finally place her son, Ferdinand Marcos Junior, governor and senator, as the great heir to his father, the dictator who ran the island nation for twenty years until he was deposed in 1986, only to die in exile in Hawaii. 

The cards are already stacked for next spring's election. The big surprise at the close of nominations has been a major one. Not because of the Marcos choice, but because Sara Duterte, the current president's daughter and mayor of the southern city of Davao, was expected to follow in her father's footsteps and become de facto president from heir in pectore. Duterte's dictatorial line, with more than eight thousand deaths at the hands of the police in the fight against drug trafficking, suggested that, harassed by domestic and international complaints of human rights violations, he would seek to stop the persecution through his daughter when he leaves office. The move did not work out that way.

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In the Philippines, with the presidential term limited to six years, politicians' moves to secure an offspring resemble a Game of Thrones-style script. Already 97 candidates are registered, including everything from a comedian to a boxer to the mayor of Manila. As the presidential and vice-presidential lists are separate, Duterte's daughter Sara has made a surprise announcement that she is only running for number two. An almost irrelevant position, with no power at all, unless the president-elect gives it to her. President Duterte, faced with the ugliness of his daughter, has thrown in his right-hand man Senator Christopher "Bong" Go to succeed him. And he himself has positioned himself as a candidate for the Senate, from where he could manoeuvre to escape prosecution at the International Criminal Court for his human rights abuses.

The United States and China are watching the outcome of this comedy, spiced up by the background violence in the Philippines, which seems to be torn between an action film directed by Brillante Mendoza and an hour-long serial by Lav Díaz, the two internationally successful directors of the last few years. The oldest of America's allies in the region, since the Spanish colony passed into its hands, is considered a key player in the strategy to contain China's geostrategic advance in the region.

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The golden eighties of Cori Aquino's democracy, not without its ups and downs, are beginning to look like a chimera, after Duterte's heavy-handed exercise of power and the growing and alarming symptoms of a dictatorship. Marcos Junior's rise to power would make it clear that the Philippines' democratic period is at an end.  The arrest of opposition members, police violence and harassment of the independent press are the marks left by the Duterte period. A wounded and, for some, mortally wounded democracy. Human rights activists make this diagnosis, which has been endorsed by the chronicles and persistence of journalist Maria Ressa, one of this year's two Nobel Peace Prize laureates. Although her star illuminates the battle for freedom of expression, the predictions of the concerted advance of the most hard-line candidates dampen any illusions of an improvement in the level of democracy in the former Spanish colony.

To complete the script, the surprise of the wayward daughter who would not want to succeed her father might not be so much of a surprise. After all, the Duterte family controls the south of the country, and the Marcoses have their electoral base in the north. Mutual support between the two allows them to stay out of each other's way, and to profit from their alliance. With the country in a depressed economic situation, especially affecting employment as a result of COVID, expectations for the immediate future are not very promising. The only "consolation" is to contemplate these power moves as an old-fashioned soap opera. Ymelda's shoes are still stomping in the Philippines.
 

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