Philippines fails to change its ways
Bongbong Marcos Jr. didn’t just win the presidential election in the Philippines last week. He won it by a two-to-one landslide, despite the fact he is the entitled son of a former president who stole at least $10 billion and a mother who spent the loot partly on the world’s most extensive collection of designer shoes (3,000 pairs). Moreover, Ferdinand Marcos Jr., to give him his real name, has virtually no accomplishments other than that name.
Equally deplorable is the electoral triumph of his vice-presidential ally, Sara Duterte, daughter of the mass murderer Rodrigo Duterte. The latter is leaving the presidency at the end of his six-year term, still wildly popular despite the many thousands of extrajudicial killings of alleged “drug fiends” that he ordered.
Indeed, those killings are precisely why Rodrigo Duterte is so popular, and his daughter basks in the reflected glory of his violence. A lot of Filipinos adore politicians and other prominent people who are loud, rude and macho — but it’s more complicated than that. Sometimes they elect murderers and thieves; sometimes they elect apprentice saints.
The senior Ferdinand Marcos was legitimately elected president in 1965, but declared martial law when he was nearing the end of his second term in 1972. Martial law lasted for another 14 years.
After that first president Marcos ran the country’s economy into the ground, he was ousted in 1986 in the first of the “people power” non-violent revolutions. The saintly Cory Aquino, whose husband had been assassinated on Marcos’s orders, was elected to the presidency, while everybody applauded the Philippines’ restored democracy.
But in 1998, the Filipinos elected Joseph (Erap) Estrada, a former movie star famed for playing the villain, in another landslide. He immediately began feathering his nest, and, after three years was impeached for “plunder.” But it took a second “people power” popular uprising to get him out.
After the fall of Estrada there were two modestly competent and non-criminal presidents — and then, in 2016, Rodrigo Duterte. Another landslide, of course, and if Duterte stole a lot in the past six years it has not yet been exposed, but he killed even more people than Marcos senior.
Duterte delighted in insulting people — he called both Barack Obama and the Pope “son of a whore” — and his supporters lapped it up. And this time the Filipinos haven’t even paused for an interlude of dignity and sanity before electing Bongbong Marcos to succeed him.
It’s as if the same country were to elect Viktor Orbán, Boris Johnson, Donald Trump and Jair Bolsonaro to the presidency with only brief intervals in between, just to see what would happen.
The Philippines is a leading contender for the title of “world’s most populist country,” which is hard to explain because its lost twin behaves in a quite different way. Just to the west of the Philippines is Indonesia, another country of many islands whose people are ethnically and linguistically very close to the Filipinos.
However, since Indonesia became a democracy it has elected only presidents who were neither killers nor thieves, while the Filipinos hurl themselves enthusiastically at any plausible fraud who gains a bit of notoriety. Why?
Two hypotheses come to mind. First, the Philippines has an unusually powerful elite of big, rich families with strong regional bases. This week’s vote, for example, was shaped by a recent alliance between the Marcos family (northern and central Philippines) and the Duterte family (southern Philippines).
The other hypothesis? Ninety-nine per cent of adult Filipinos are online, and Filipinos aged 16 to 64 spend on average nearly four hours a day connected to social networks.