Marcos Jr urges supporters to keep watch as he leads presidential poll
BATAC CITY: The son of late Philippines dictator Ferdinand Marcos commanded a massive early lead in the presidential election on Monday, according to an unofficial tally of results that pointed to a historic landslide victory.
Nearly 40 years after his namesake father was deposed by a popular revolt and his family chased into exile, Ferdinand Marcos Jr was seen doubling the tally of his nearest rival.
With more than 60 per cent of the country’s precincts reporting, Marcos had garnered more than 20 million votes, to liberal candidate Leni Robredo’s 9.4 million. In the Philippines, the winner only has to get more votes than anyone else.
But if sustained, the tally -published by local media from Commission on Elections figures -- would make Marcos the first Philippine president since his father’s ouster to be elected with an absolute majority.
It would also signal an astonishing turnaround for the fortunes of the Marcos clan, who have come from pariahs to the presidential palace in a generation.
“This will be a historic election,” said Cleve Arguelles, an assistant lecturer in political science at De La Salle University in Manila.
Commission on Elections chief
George Garcia said: “Until the last vote is counted, it’s not yet the end of everything.” But the writing appeared to be on the wall for Marcos’s nine rivals, vying to succeed President Rodrigo Duterte in elections seen by many as a make-or-break moment for the Philippines’ fragile democracy.
The results would be a crushing blow for supporters of Robredo, the incumbent vice-president who turned her campaign into a movement to defend democracy and brought almost a million people onto the streets in one recent rally.
From before dawn, mask-clad voters formed long queues to cast their ballots in 70,000 polling stations across the archipelago. Polls officially closed at 7 pm. At Mariano Marcos Memorial Elementary School in the northern city of Batac, the ancestral home of the Marcoses, voters waved hand fans to cool their faces in the tropical heat.
Bomb sniffer dogs swept the polling station before Marcos Jr, 64, arrived with his younger sister Irene and eldest son Sandro.
They were followed by the family’s flamboyant 92-yearold matriarch Imelda, who was lowered from a white van while wearing a long, red top with matching trousers and slip-on flats.