Did poor intel help Duterte win?

COULD a foreign government have saved the Philippines from Rodrigo Duterte? Even then-candidate Duterte didn’t expect to be president. Winning was as big a surprise to him as it was to the whole country.

Whether Mr. Duterte used the services of Cambridge Analytics, as alleged by some observers, or whether the Filipinos simply rejected Mar Roxas, Grace Poe, Jojo Binay, and Miriam Santiago, is now moot, of course. Duterte is president, albeit just a plurality and not a majority president. (He only won 38 percent of the vote.)

Cambridge Analytics was a UK based political consulting outfit that was reputedly savvy in getting its clients elected through mind-conditioning of voters. They reportedly pushed US President Donald Trump’s successful run in 2016.

Cambridge has now disbanded after several probes into its activities in a number of countries commenced after key elections in the United States and other parts of the world.

In any case, did this particular foreign country fumble the ball and, by default, help Duterte win the presidency in 2016?

As we all know, Duterte hemmed and hawed before finally throwing his hat into the presidential ring in late 2015. Whether the overt hesitation was part of the strategy or not wasn’t clear. His admirers said he did it to whet the people’s interest.

Other observers said it was just the normal testing by a candidate of the waters and gauging whether a run would be successful, which, as we all know, it was.

Whatever, he did finally join the fray, surely thinking the rest of the field was beatable.

But, did this foreign nation and others that consider the Philippines a key geopolitical outpost, have a chance to stop Duterte from becoming president? A look-back tells us, that because of the shortness of the time available, it was too late to do anything.

Duterte shot out of nowhere. Even he tells the story, that nobody knew who he was and that he didn’t even have a single barangay chairman on his side during the campaign. But, all of a sudden, his name was up in the surveys.

Frantically, this foreign country began searching for answers to their questions: Who is this guy? Where did he come from? What’s he doing way up in the survey charts when he was a virtual unknown just a few months earlier?

They went around asking local political observers and pundits who was likely to win. The only clear answer was that Duterte now had a winning chance, having surged in the polls (at that point in third place to Poe’s first).

Did this foreign country drop the ball with poor intelligence work? Why was Duterte nowhere on their radars? They couldn’t believe what they were seeing and hearing, that Duterte could upset the applecart and actually win!

There was no immediate answer to why Duterte was surging in the polls. And, even if they had wanted to do something, it would have been too late.