Why Duterte poses a threat to democracy
There are no holy cows for the Philippines president, who has adopted a cavalier attitude
No Philippine leader since Ferdinand Marcos has held the democratic fate of his nation in his hands so decisively, yet so perilously, as President Rodrigo Duterte. Authoritarianism may not be Duterte’s political goal, but it defines his manner and his temperament. And with no institution or political force strong enough to counter him, authoritarianism is where the Philippines seems to be heading.
Last weekend, Duterte warned that if lawlessness escalated in the country, he might suspend the writ of habeas corpus to allow for arrests without warrants. “I can be ordered by the Supreme Court to stop it, but there are things that they cannot stop and, maybe, I will not stop,” he said of a possible suspension of the writ. “Whatever, I will tell them I will finish this first,” he added, referring to his administration’s campaign against drugs and terrorism, “then I can go to jail.”
Duterte operates on a hair trigger, and runs his presidency on impulse. Until recently, this tendency was scarcely known beyond his home town, Davao City, which as mayor he ruled like an autocrat for more than two decades. Even as these traits began to be revealed during the presidential campaign in the spring, they hardly mattered to the 39 per cent plurality of voters who elected him. If anything, Filipinos seemed to be looking for a strongman to solve their problems, be it crime or poverty. So far they have gotten just what they asked for, and Duterte’s popularity is running high. In a poll by Social Weather Stations last month, 76 per cent of respondents said they were satisfied with his performance.
Upon assuming the presidency, Duterte began a ruthless campaign against drugs, dealers and users nationwide, conducting it much like his administration in Davao City had fought crime — doling out justice by summary execution. To the stern reminders about the rule of law he has received from Washington, other Western governments and human rights groups, Duterte has replied with his usual belligerence and profanity. He does not want to be told.
Fewer and fewer people will tell him anyway. Duterte has surrounded himself with a sycophantic cabinet, and his administration is trying to co-opt or intimidate the democratic institutions or traditional political forces that might act as counterweights. Now a self-professed socialist, he has struck a cease-fire deal with communist rebels. Members of the mainstream left, which previously took to the streets to denounce the ruling powers, were invited to the presidential palace on the day of his inauguration.
The Catholic Church, the rallying force behind the popular revolt that deposed President Ferdinand Marcos in 1986, has lost much of its ascendancy. Its main council, the Catholic Bishops’ Conference of the Philippines, has not formally denounced the extrajudicial killings being carried out in the name of Duterte’s antidrug campaign. Meanwhile, Duterte has called the church a “hypocritical institution” and accused “many churchmen” of corruption and sexual misconduct.
The army has come under his intense, unsubtle courtship: He has been going around camps throughout the country, promising to double soldiers’ salaries by the end of the year. The business community has been largely acquiescent — unsurprisingly, perhaps, given its natural interest in profit over politics. The media, thrown off by a subject the likes of whom they have never seen, are still trying to get their bearings — except for those journalists who seem only too
willing to play along: The Philippine Daily Inquirer has given a regular column to the president’s publicrelations man. Duterte, benefiting from an overwhelming majority in Congress, is proposing that the Philippines’ unitary system be abandoned in favor of a federal government.
He casts federalism as long-overdue redress for regional inequalities. For example, the island of Mindanao is rich in minerals and agricultural goods but income-poor, and Duterte has ascribed this to a lopsided distribution of tax benefits that favors the central government. But given Duterte’s ways, any devolution of power to regional or local authorities would likely weaken democratic institutions further and only reinforce the patronage networks that dominate political life in this country. “The train may have left the station,” the human-rights lawyer Chel Diokno told me, in reaction to Duterte’s recent warning that the writ of habeas corpus might be suspended.
For a time in the early 1970s, Diokno’s own father, Jose, a senator, was sanguine in the face of growing repression under Marcos. “Marcos can create a throne of bayonets,” he once famously declared, “but can he sit on them?” He was arrested on the first night that Marcos declared martial law in 1972, held in prison for two years and then was under house arrest for over a decade. Back then Marcos had prefaced martial rule by suspending the writ of habeas corpus. One can sit on a throne of bayonets, it turns out, and Duterte may now be setting up his own. The writer is a columnist for Rappler, a Manila-based online news site The New York Times
If anything, Filipinos seemed to be looking for a strongman to solve their problems, be it crime or poverty