A Counterrevolution in the Philippines: Marcos 2.0

The German philosopher G.W.F. Hegel once claimed that “all great world-historic facts and personages appear, so to speak, twice.” For his radical pupil, Karl Marx, the repetition comes with a twist, namely “the first time as tragedy, [and] the second time as farce.” Almost 50 years after Ferdinand Marcos placed the entire Philippines under Martial Law, his namesake son has become the country’s 17th president.

In fact, Ferdinand “Bongbong” Marcos Jr., who garnered as many as 31 million votes in the May 9 election, became the first Filipino president in recent memory to win a majority of votes in the Philippines’ uniquely bizarre single-round electoral system. (In 1992, Fidel Ramos became the Philippine president with barely a quarter of the total votes.)

Throughout the campaign, Marcos Jr. largely shunned political debates, including those organized by the Commission on Elections, in favor of well-curated videos on social media platforms, especially TikTok and YouTube, as well as glitzy interviews with trusted journalists and prominent talk show hosts. At once, Marcos Jr. combined elements of authoritarian nostalgia and populist antics: He vowed to bring about “unity” through decisive leadership, law and order, rapid economic growth and massive infrastructure projects, and affordable food for a majority of Filipinos. Soft-spoken and charming, he projected a reassuring image of self-confident leadership, adamantly refusing to directly engage any of his rivals. His campaign shunted aside any criticism of the Marcoses’ checkered record as nothing but a smear campaign (“paninira”), while doling out a healthy stream of toxic positivity via a torrent of revisionist vlogs and social media posts.

In the Catholic-majority country, the Marcos campaign even deployed a “messianic motif” to portray him as a secular savior. Exploiting the Philippines’ completely unregulated social media landscape, his army of impresarios and influencers recast the dark days of the Marcos dictatorship as a long-lost “golden era” in Philippine history. In the words of sociologist Randy David, the Marcos campaign construed a denialist-revisionist narrative, which appropriated “the messianic motif” in order to project the ex-dictator’s son as “a unifying figure” who would fulfill whatever “promise that his father left unfulfilled.” Ultimately, his notoriously vague promises and heavily-sanitized image struck a chord among a majority of voters from all major demographics, especially the youth, but also those from the middle and upper classes of society.

Marcos’ victory was the fortuitous upshot of three intersecting factors.

The liberal opposition, led by outgoing Vice President Leonor “Leni” Robredo, struggled against widespread perceptions of incompetence and indecisiveness among the majority of the electorate. For the past six years, outgoing President Rodrigo Duterte and his legions of supporters systematically denigrated Robredo and her liberal allies, who suffered heavy losses in the 2019 midterm elections as well as the 2022 elections, where more than 18,000 offices were up for grabs.

Moreover, the opposition remained notoriously dithering in the run up to the elections, visibly struggling to unify around a charismatic tandem. Following her 11th-hour bid for the presidency, Robredo enjoyed a sudden bump in support, yet muddled communications, recycled narratives, and a lack of a proactive strategy dented her campaign’s potential. Massive celebrity endorsements and eye-catching “grand rallies” only came toward the end of the presidential elections, when most voters had already made up their minds. But Marcos Jr. also benefited from the collapse of centrist candidates, most especially the charismatic Mayor of Metro Manila Francisco “Isko” Moreno Domagoso, whose campaign sank amid contradictory messaging and poor communications.

The biggest contributor to Marcos’ victory, however, was the decision of Sara Dutetre, the daughter of President Rodrigo Duterte, to reconsider her initial bid for the highest office. The former Davao City mayor repeatedly topped pre-election surveys, comfortably cornering close to a third of prospective votes. Just months before filing his candidacy for the presidency, Marcos Jr. was at a distant third, garnering only 13 percent of votes in an authoritative survey. Amid spats with her father, who preferred a trusted protégé to succeed him, Sara Duterte eventually decided to become the vice presidential running-mate of Marcos Jr. under the “UniTeam” tandem.

Thus, Marcos Jr. was able to combine his own “Solid North” base, concentrated among Ilocano-speaking groups and northern provinces in the island of Luzon, with Duterte’s “Solid South” base among Visayan-speaking Filipinos and voters across the island of Mindanao. All of a sudden, Marcos Jr. could count on close to half of the total votes, a massive share that further expanded throughout the campaign as other centrist-conservative candidates succumbed to the “UniTeam” juggernaut.

Make no mistake: This was not just another election, but instead a full-fledged counterrevolution. Unlike the divided and dithering opposition, the Marocoses have been preparing for this moment since their return in 1991 following a brief and luxurious exile in Hawaii. Their recapture of the Malacanang Palace wouldn’t have been possible had they not systematically exploited structural weaknesses in Philippine democracy.

Over the past three decades, the country’s legislative offices have turned into a plaything of rapacious dynasties, which now occupy more than 80 percent of legislative offices in the country. The new Senate, the country’s highest chamber, now features multiple sets of siblings (the Cayetanos and Estradas) as well as a mother and son (the Villars), who also happen to constitute the country’s richest family. Meanwhile, the Philippines’ narrow elite, roughly composed of 40 fabulously rich families, has gobbled up to three-fourths of newly-created wealth in the past decade.

Thanks to the scandalous concertation of wealth and political office among a few families, almost half of Filipinos said that “most elected officials do not care” about ordinary citizens, according to a 2020 Pew Research Centre survey. In fact, surveys show that barely 15 percent of Filipinos are fully committed to liberal democratic system, while the majority have expressed openness to, if not preference for, autocracy and even military rule. In short, the Marcoses won not only because of disinformation per se, but widespread desperation for ending decades of dysfunctional politics, which has made a mockery out of the Philippines’ democratic aspirations.

This was precisely what I saw on the faces of countless people, dancing along to nostalgic music with teary eyes and clearly desperate for overnight change, who attended the Marcos-Duterte “Miting de Avance” final campaign rally shortly before election day.

What can we expect from Marcos Jr.? Does he have the same authoritarian drive and blind ambition as his father? And how will he handle the Philippines’ relations with major powers, especially the U.S. and China? Well, let’s first try to understand the man of the hour himself.

The Prodigal Son

The last time a Filipino president won close to 60 percent of the votes in a competitive election was in 1969, when Marcos Sr. became the first post-war Filipino president to win re-election. Marcos was a brilliant orator, who rose through the ranks by the sheer force of ambition. Hailing from a marginal political clan in the impoverished northern province of Ilocos Norte, he exploited widespread dissatisfaction with the Philippines’ dysfunctional institutions in the 1960s. Between 1964 to 1971, the Philippine Congress, dominated by the landed elite, repeatedly failed to pass the national Appropriations Act in its 100-day regular session, while the total number of bills passed (as a share of introduced bills) dropped from 11.4 percent in 1946 to only 1.7 percent in 1970. Meanwhile, congressional expenditure ballooned from 2.7 million Philippine pesos in 1946 to 53.9 million in 1968. On its part, the Philippine Supreme Court dragged its feet on key legislation that was pivotal to economic recovery.

The looming fiscal and monetary crisis came on the heels of a burgeoning communist movement at home. Marcos wasted no time in exploiting the climate of fear and rage at the height of Cold War. Only a few years after his unprecedented re-election, the once-promising statesman transformed into a kleptocratic dictator. Marcos oversaw untold human rights violations as well as the complete disintegration of the Philippines’ economy by the early 1980s. In an interview with Amnesty International in 1975, Marcos himself admitted that “over 50,000 people had been arrested and detained under martial law from 1972-1975.” The actual number of victims of human rights violations, including torture and enforced disappearanc,e throughout his reign is believed to be significantly be higher.

Promising a “New Society” based on meritocracy and egalitarianism, the Marcos dictatorship instead turned the Southeast Asian country into the “sick man of Asia.” Marcos was even an embarrassment to his regional peers. Singaporean Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew once described Marcos as a “crook” and “a self-indulgent ageing ruler who allowed his wife and cronies to clean out the country through ingenious monopolies and put the government heavily in debt.” Ultimately, Marcos himself ended up as a tragic figure, with his once menacing regime collapsing under the gravity of its incompetence and corruption.

Unlike his father, Marcos Jr. is no natural leader. Nor is he a fiery speaker. In fact, it’s not even clear whether the urbane and soft-spoken son has ever actually graduated from any university, notwithstanding his short stints in Oxford and the University of Pennsylvania.

When asked about whether her son would “pursue the vision of his father,” and run for the presidency, former First Lady Imelda Marcos once nonchalantly claimed, “He’s committed to that. Humbly speaking, his leadership qualities, his intellectual and managerial skills and moral and ethical upbringing, I am confident he will not fail, especially since Bongbong was educated at Oxford University, England in 1978 … and at Wharton School of Business, University of Pennsylvania…”

But extensive investigations by independent journalists, not to mention a statement by the University of Oxford administration, have revealed that Marcos Jr. never attained an undergraduate degree. He nonetheless managed to, under mysterious circumstances, attend graduate school at Wharton, where he also failed to finish a degree. Throughout the years, and up until his runs for the two highest positions of the land, Marcos Jr. continued to misrepresent his educational background, partly to avoid embarrassing comparisons with his father.

Marcos Jr. has also not been fully transparent about his own actual achievements in almost four decades across various positions in government. First serving as a vice governor of Ilocos Norte (1980-1983), the home base of the Marcoses, he would go on to serve as governor of the same province (1998-2007), a congressman (2007-2010), and a senator (2010-2016), a national position that coincided with the presidency of Benigno Aquino III. His terms in high executive office did not produce any major developmental breakthroughs for his home province; meanwhile, as a legislator, a New York Times investigative report revealed, “nearly 70 percent of the 52 laws he pushed for were on designating holidays and festivals, renaming highways and reapportioning provinces and cities.” In short, his decades-long track record in politics pales in comparison to the scale and ambition that animated his father’s.

Early on, even his own father had doubts about his son’s work ethic and commitment to politics. His ultimate source of pride was his daughter, Maria Imelda, affectionately known as “Imee,” who clearly inherited her father’s fiery ambition and domineering personality. On April 20, 1970, the former strongman glowingly wrote in his diary about his daughter winning “the topmost honors in school” and how “her teachers were proud of her.” He recited the old Ilocano saying, “an apple tree will not bear orange fruit” (Ti paria hangan nga agbunga ti tarong) and, quite tragically, added, “I wish she had been a boy.”

A month earlier, Marcos had expressed worries over his sole son, bemoaning how his wife (Imelda) “feels calamity has befallen us because she cannot control Bongbong who does nothing but play with his friends to the prejudice of his schooling” and how “the boy’s willpower has not developed enough.” Apparently, his son, the heir apparent, could barely even speak his native language, Ilocano. Agonizing over “the fate of Presidents’ sons in the Philippine society that gave them no incentive for excellence,” and how presidential sons could end up either “spoiled or hated,” Marcos Sr. decided to dispatch his son to a boarding school in the United Kingdom.

When Marcos Jr. returned for vacation after his first three months in the U.K., a teacher couldn’t help but complain about the princeling, namely how “Bongbong has been lazy… [and] makes believe he knows but he does not. In History [courses] he has been observed to be ‘flippant’ and his ideas not well thought out.”

Over the ensuing years, Marcos Jr. would develop a distinct taste for British language and culture, even picking up some musical instruments such as the saxophone along the way. Known as a “wild party boy” by contemporaries, and equipped with a sharp mathematical mind, the anglophile princeling would eventually turn into a self-assured and increasingly hawkish figure in the twilight years of Marcos dictatorship. Trained in the special forces, he donned fatigues during the fateful final days of his father’s reign in 1986, when the princeling even contemplated a ”bloodbath” to preserve his father’s regime. As one Filipino writer put it, Marcos Jr. “was among the hawks demanding an uncompromising and fierce response from his ailing father,” including “blast[ing] the [military] rebels with artillery or bomb[ing] them” altogether.

Wavering in the face of defections within the top military brass, including a former defense minister (Juan Ponce Enrile) and a top general (Fidel Ramos), Marcos Sr. ultimately chose a U.S.-sponsored exile instead of risking a civil war. The upshot was the victory of a bloodless civilian-based coup, which would later be dubbed the “People Power” revolution.

A Hybrid Regime

The dramatic collapse of his father’s regime inspired caution and an air of moderation in Marcos Jr. Yet, the family remained committed to regaining power despite repeated setbacks, including their defeats at national elections throughout the 1990s and 2000s. Former First Lady Imelda Marcos lost in the 1992 presidential election, while Imee and Bongbong were unsuccessful during their first senatorial runs. Undeterred, the notorious dynasty re-established itself in Ilocos Norte and gradually clawed its way back to the presidential palace by leveraging a wide network of supporters, including multiple presidents as well as a “deep state” of loyalist lawyers, who ensured the Marcoses never spent a single day in jail despite multiple criminal convictions.

Without a doubt, the Dutertes were the best thing that happened to the Marcoses. Shortly after winning the presidency in 2016, Rodrigo Duterte buried the remains of the former dictator in the Cemetery of National Heroes, thus effectively completing the political rehabilitation of the notorious dynasty. More crucially, the strongman populist oversaw the disintegration of the country’s democratic institutions by ruthlessly deploying the politics of fear, disinformation, and patronage, which heavily weakened the liberal opposition.

Moreover, Duterte set a dangerous precedent by unleashing a scorched-earth drug war, which has claimed the lives of thousands of civilians, and unabashedly exploiting the COVID-19 pandemic through emergency powers, which swiftly crushed any signs of opposition. It’s quite telling that the shutting down of ABS-CBN, the country’s largest media network, and conviction of Maria Ressa, the country’s leading journalist, took place at the height of the pandemic.

Duterte also showed the power of “performative populism,” namely maintaining high approval ratings through a sophisticated network of perception-management and disinformation. By 2022, the general populace was largely prepared for the return of the Marcoses to the presidential palace, an outcome that was effectively sealed after Sara Duterte’s withdrawal from the presidential race.

With the opposition in disarray, and centrist candidates driven into the political wilderness, Marcos Jr. is now in a unique position to alter the Philippines’ political system altogether. Just days after winning the presidency, he demonstrated his newfound power by sidelining erstwhile allies in favor of trusted partners. On one hand, he backed his cousin, Martin Romualdez, for the speakership in the House over former President Gloria Arroyo, who was instrumental to the Marcos-Duterte alliance in the 2022 elections. Meanwhile, he backed Miguel Zubiri, who defected to the “UniTeam” camp as the election neared, as the Senate president. Shockingly, Marcos Jr. walked back his earlier promise to hand the Department of National Defense (DND) to Sara Duterte, who was instrumental to his election victory. Instead, Sara Duterte was appointed as Department of Education secretary, while the DND was handed to a former military chief, Retired Gen. Jose Faustino Jr.

The ex-dictator’s son also appointed the former defense minister, Juan Ponce Enrile, who was instrumental to the collapse of the Marcos regime, as his chief legal adviser. Meanwhile, Marcos Jr., similar to his father, appointed veteran technocrats from the prestigious University of the Philippines School of Economics (UPSE) to take charge of the central bank, finance, and trade and industry departments. To project “unity,” he also appointed a number of progressive figures, most prominently Arsenio Balisacan (to head the National Economic Development Authority) and Susan Ople (to head the Department of Migrant Workers).

With the legislature dominated by Marcos allies, and a presidential cabinet representing various sectors and persuasions across the society, the new Filipino president is in a unique situation to bend the Philippine political system to his will. Most likely, the Southeast Asian country is headed toward becoming a “hybrid regime,” whereby a hegemonic coalition defangs institutional checks and balances, seamlessly dominates semi-competitive elections, places friendly oligarchs in charge of major media networks, and restricts civil liberties and political rights in the name of national security. Should Marcos Jr. successfully pass a new constitution, thanks to his super-majority support in the legislature, the Philippines will likely look more like Victor Orban’s Hungary or Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s Turkey.

Should he stick to the current constitution, given public skepticism of constitutional change, the Marcos-Duterte alliance can still establish a Malaysia-style “democracy,” where an illiberal coalition can enjoy almost indefinite political hegemony. At the very least, the Marcos Jr, who has criticized basic education textbooks as full of “hot air” and “propaganda” against his father’s regime, will almost certainly trigger new “history wars” as did the Park Geun-hye administration in South Korea.

There are, however, areas where the Marcos Jr. administration may end up as an improvement on its predecessor, albeit starting from a very low base. On one hand, he will likely tone down his predecessor’s scorched-earth drug war, which has claimed thousands of lives, in favor of a more surgical and public health-driven approach. The Marcoses have also expressed their openness to reinstating the ABS-CBN franchise via their proxies in the legislature.

The most surprising area of improvement, however, will likely be in the foreign policy realm. It’s true that the Marcoses have had historically warm relations with China, dating back to their father’s normalization of ties with Maoist China in the mid-1970s. And it’s also true that Marcos Jr. has repeatedly emphasized his commitment to warm and economically-fruitful relations with Beijing.

Nevertheless, he is more likely to follow his father’s strategic playbook rather than Duterte’s. To begin with, Marcos Jr. will have to contend with widespread anti-Beijing sentiment among the Philippine defense establishment, which is primarily trained by the United States, as well as the broader public, which frets over China’s harassment of Filipino fishermen in the South China Sea. In recent years, China’s net trust rating reached -33 percent, reflecting the depth public skepticism toward the Asian powerhouse. Beijing’s non-fulfillment of its promise of big-ticket investments to Duterte hasn’t helped either, making it difficult for Marcos Jr. to justify strategic acquiescence in the name of economics.  

Marcos Jr. also has to contend with the legacy of his father, who aggressively expanded the Philippines’ strategic footprint across the South China Sea, including the establishment of one of the first modern airstrips in the Spratly Islands. Moreover, the former Filipino dictator deftly established optimal strategic ties with competing superpowers at the height of Cold War, allowing him to extract maximum possible strategic dividends from the U.S., China, and the Soviet Union.

Moreover, the new Filipino president, who visited Australia just days after his election victory, doesn’t share his predecessor’s lifelong resentment toward the West. If anything, Marcos Jr., who was educated in the West, has welcomed robust trade and strategic ties with the U.S., Australia, and Europe. In fact, he held conversations with at least three high-level U.S. officials, including a phone conversation with U.S. President Joe Biden, in the weeks before his inauguration.

No wonder then, Marcos Jr. has taken a far tougher stance on the South China Sea disputes, even vowing to deploy warships to the disputed areas in order to “show China that we are defending what we consider our territorial waters.” Projecting a strong and patriotic image, he has not only underscored his commitment to upholding the Philippines’ arbitration award victory against Beijing, but also warned the Asian powerhouse, “We will not allow a single square millimeter of our maritime coastal… rights to be trampled upon.”

Only time will tell whether Marcos can rise out of his father’s shadow, and vindicate his family’s tarnished image, after pulling off a successful counterrevolution. So far, however, he has shown his commitment to be his own man in both domestic and international affairs.