Philippines election 2022

Ferdinand Marcos Jr, the son of the former dictator, is on the cusp of winning the Philippine presidential election by a landslide, according to preliminary ...

Despite his record on human rights and the Covid-19 pandemic, which made the country's hunger crisis worse, Duterte remains hugely popular domestically. Marcos Sr died in exile three years later, but his family returned in 1991 and became wealthy, influential politicians, with successive family members representing their dynastic stronghold of Ilocos Norte. Political analysts say Marcos Jr appeals to Filipinos tired of the political bickering and promises of progress and economic reform from successive administrations that many feel have failed to benefit ordinary people. The Philippines' Presidential Commission on Good Governance (PCGG), tasked with recovering the family and their associates' ill-gotten wealth, estimates about $10 billion was stolen from the Filipino people. Partial and unofficial results show Duterte Carpio is also leading the race for the vice presidency. "Even though the counting is not over yet, I cannot wait to thank all of you...

Filipinos have decisively elected another Marcos and another Duterte to the nation's two highest offices.

It remains to be seen whether six years of Marcos presidency will come to be seen as the point at which the Philippines turns decisively from the hollow “cacique democracy” described by Benedict Anderson in the late 1980s to a more open form of autocracy. In explanations of the Marcos phenomenon, much attention has focused on the historical revisionism engineered by the Marcos campaign, especially via social media, which has asserted the earlier Marcos reign as an era of stability and order. However, in most ways we can expect a continuation of the vague, improvisational Duterte agenda of the past six years, with adjustments for personal style and inclination. As Gregory Poling of the Center for Strategic and International Studies noted in an article yesterday, “Marcos might well try to revive Duterte’s early outreach to Beijing, but he is unlikely to toss the U.S. alliance overboard as part of the effort.” The margin of victory was accurately reflected in pre-election polls, which showed both Marcos and Duterte-Carpio far out front of the rest of the field. Another immediate question concerns the Philippines international alignments in an era of growing strategic turbulence. But as I’ve noted before, the return of the once-shunned Marcos clan speaks to more profound social and political forces; disinformation alone can neither explain the Marcos victory, nor account for its massive scale. The president-elect will inherit from Duterte the seemingly perpetual challenges of poverty and unemployment, which have been exacerbated by the economic downturn of COVID-19. He will also be faced with stubbornly persistent Muslim and communist insurgencies that a string of presidents have failed sufficiently to address. Gloria Macapagal Arroyo won with just under 40 percent of the vote at the 2004 election, around the same proportion of the vote that lifted Joseph Estrada to the presidency in 1998. The immediate question concerns how Marcos will lead the Philippines once he begins his six-year term on June 30. “If we’ll be fortunate, I’ll expect that your help will not wane, your trust will not wane because we have a lot of things to do in the times ahead.” At the 2016 election, current President Rodrigo Duterte won the presidency with just 39 percent of the popular vote, while in 2010, the late Benigno Aquino III gained 42 percent.