‘Betrayal,’ De Lima says of Duterte's shift to China

MANILA — President Rodrigo Duterte's declaration of “separation” from the US and shift to China and Russia was a “whole level of betrayal” when he bared this “for the first time in front of foreigners” instead of the Filipino people, Senator Leila de Lima said yesterday.

De Lima, a staunch critic of Duterte who the president has publicly accused of involvement in the drug trade, scathingly called his foreign policy “kagimbalgimbal” (horrible) and asked if his declared realignment to the “ideological flow” of China meant “he’s going to he’s going to sponsor a change in our democratic set-up of government into something that approximates or resembles the communist or totalitarian system of mainland China?”

“If you isolate yourself from the world, it isn’t you who suffers, Mr. President, it is the Filipino people. By all means, make friends! But stop making yourself the enemy of the world!” she urged Duterte.

Because his declaration “goes into the very basis and philosophy of our foreign policy in particular, and the democratic character of our government in general,” De Lima said “probing questions must be asked in light of (this) earth-shaking policy overhaul.”

Mocking Duterte as “star-struck and starryeyed,” De Lima asked if Filipinos “can expect more” from relations with two countries whose people, she said, “have limited expectations about respect for their human rights, labor law protections and, in general, freedom from violence from their own government.”

She also called him a “naïve child looking at the world through distorted lenses when it comes to a lot of things, including foreign policy,” with “a really inflated, if not delusional, view of himself as a strongman at the level of China and Russia’s leadership.”