Philippines’ Imelda Marcos evokes glory days
PAOAY, Philippines: It is close to midnight and Imelda Marcos is dancing in a trademark pink butterfly gown at a small Philippine town fiesta with adoring voters who still revere her dead dictator husband.
At an age when many others are in nursing homes, the tireless 83-year- old is on the campaign trail, aiming to keep her seat in parliament in next week’s midterm elections and continue her family’s remarkable political resurrection.
“It’s funny because the older I become the more committed I am and the more I feel I can do it,” Marcos told AFP on the weekend from the family’s ancestral home in the rural north of the country before heading to the nearby fiesta.
The widow of Ferdinand Marcos is seen as a certainty to win after first being elected to Congress in 2010, representing half of Ilocos Norte province whose voters have stayed loyal to the family throughout decades of tumultuous politics.
But the matriarch has eyes on a bigger prize a return to the presidential palace as first mother via her son, Ferdinand Marcos Jnr, who is sitting comfortably in the Senate and eyeing a 2016 run for the top job.
“You always have dreams for your children, and the more they can serve the people, the better,” Marcos said when asked about her charismatic son’s well-known presidential ambitions.
Ferdinand Jnr, popularly known by his nickname, ‘ Bongbong’, appears well-positioned for a presidential run after one in three voters nationally elected him to the senate for a six-year term in 2010.
Their political fortunes have come a long way from 1986, when millions of people took to the streets in a bloodless ‘people power’ revolution to end the patriarch’s two-decade rule of the country and force them into US exile.
Ferdinand Marcos, his wife and their cronies were accused of stealing billions of dollars. Human rights campaigners said thousands of the regime’s critics were murdered or jailed, while martial law also muzzled the press.
Imelda Marcos’s giant shoe collection, jet- setting lifestyle and other extravagances — while the majority of the population endured crushing poverty — came to symbolise the excesses of her husband’s rule.
But the current government is winding down a global wealth hunt for the embezzled Marcos billions, and the family has been able to beat every charge of corruption against it. — AFP