Writing on the wall for the Marcos-Romualdez regime
IN the past several days, the writing on the wall for the Marcos-Romualdez regime has clearly appeared: It is a moribund government that is merely waiting for the family’s history of being forcibly ousted to be repeated. In the best scenario, it will drag itself bloodied toward 2028, with Filipinos either hating the regime or just ignoring it, as happened to another US-puppet regime, Benigno Aquino III’s.
It deserves its likely fate. Ferdinand Marcos Jr.’s greed in wanting his clan to continue to rule to the next generation is unprecedented. Marcos should have been extremely content that by a quirk of fate — the popularity of the Dutertes who supported him and were willing to wait for six years for Sara to be president — Filipinos took a chance that the son would not be like his authoritarian father who eventually ruined the country. Marcos Jr. should have devoted heart and soul, given up everything else and use all his energies to change the current and global assessments of his father as the country’s most corrupt president ever.
No. He certainly didn’t do that. Rather than getting the best and brightest to join his administration, he took on spoiled boyhood friends, tycoons’ technocrats, and worse, those who think a big corrupt deal in government, even just one, would allow them to live their lives on banks’ interest.
Worse, never in our history has a sitting president moved to block his vice president from succeeding him, except — to stretch it — in the case of Marcos Sr. who blocked and aborted scheduled elections (in 1973) to instead impose authoritarian rule that lasted 14 years. Not even the Machiavellian President Ramos blocked his vice president, Joseph Estrada, whom he abhorred from becoming his successor.
In sharp contrast, Marcos spent huge resources and time in the first half of his term to undertake plots to block Sara from becoming president in 2028, or before that in case he becomes incapacitated. Early last year, the Marcos gang tried, foolishly I think, to have the Constitution amended to turn our government into a parliamentary system in which House Speaker Martin Romualdez would be prime minister with Marcos in transition as president. That was blocked, as no one in the Senate was stupid enough to give up his or her political and outrightly financial investments undertaken over many years to be one of the 24 senators of the land to just sit with the 300 mostly mediocre members of parliament.
Or was it his cousin Martin Romualdez who pushed him to take down Sara as soon as he could?
Unprecedented
Whoever between the two was the mastermind, the resources and efforts they undertook to politically assassinate Sara has been unprecedented in ferocity and scale. Four committees of the House of Representatives, even the communist congressmen, were mobilized by the regime to come up with some evidence, even the flimsiest, to impeach her. How much would it have cost — through outright bribes or pork barrel to do? At least P2 billion, a source in Congress estimated. Government investigative agencies were made to turn out dirt against Sara.
Staff in the Commission on Audit and Education Department, as well as the Office of the Vice President, were bribed to come out with what on the surface were juicy information to use against Sara such as one “Mary Grace Piatos” as a purported recipient of Sara’s confidential funds. A source in the military claimed that Communist Party of the Philippines was directly given the funds in order to get it to order its party-list representatives’ groups to become strident critics of Duterte.
And what crimes did they find for which she has to be impeached? Extrajudicial killings when she was Davao mayor, her failure to condemn China’s aggressive actions in the “WPS,” her display of lack of control?
The quad comm hearings were gradually exposed as a propaganda operation, its “resource persons,” for instance, who provided testimony against the Dutertes, were unscrupulous criminals who were not even cross-examined, and were obviously lying to get favors from the government.
Iglesia
What has totally routed Marcos’ plot was the homegrown religious organization, the Iglesia Ni Cristo’s (INC) show of support for the Dutertes — its nationwide demonstration last Jan. 13 attended by 1.8 million massing in the country’s major cities. While officially for “peace and unity,” the rally was, as even former senator Leila de Lima pointed out, an unequivocal defense of Sara, a demand for the Marcos government to drop its impeachment nonsense.
Marcos himself backtracked in a panicky way, emphasizing in a talk with the media on the day of the rally itself, that impeachment would be a waste of time and that he had never supported it. Yeah, right, his cousin, the representative of a small poor district somewhere, undertook the biggest political plot under his regime, and he didn’t support it? In ancient battles as well as in modern political battles, that kind of abandonment of the battlefield is the first sign of a force’s collapse.
Probably as fate would have it, the Social Weather Stations (SWS) right after the INC demonstration issued its unsolicited poll that I think is the second part of the writing on the wall, the collapse of the impeachment moves being the first.
The SWS reported that from having a high 63+ satisfaction rating (satisfied minus dissatisfied) in October 2022, two months after he became president, Filipinos in the 11 succeeding polls that the SWS conducted, continually thumbed him down such that by Dec. 24, 2024, he had only a +19 satisfaction rating.
Marcos’ ratings so far have even fallen after the first year in office below that of another bad president, Benigno Aquino III. Since he has demonstrated in the past three years little leadership qualities, I think the downward trend of Filipinos dissatisfied with him may even accelerate if prices of commodities continue to increase.
An alarming situation for Marcos is that as shown in the accompanying table, his net satisfaction rating in Mindanao is negative 18, which means that 50 percent of those living in Mindanao are dissatisfied with his leadership. Such clear majority dissatisfaction in a region toward an incumbent president has never happened before.
Sara Duterte’s net satisfaction rating has slipped from 44 at the start of 2024, to 27 in September, to 21 in December, which, however, is higher than Marcos’ 19. This is, of course, the impact of the massive campaign by the Marcos government to demonize her in the second half of last year. This happened in the case of Vice President Jejomar Binay, who had a 44 percent satisfaction rating in December 2014, but which slipped to just 22 in June 2016, as a result of the Aquino III government’s nonstop propaganda campaign against him in order to prevent him from winning the presidency in 2022.
The phrase in this column’s title is of course from the famous biblical story where, during a feast given by Belshazzar, the last king of ancient Babylon, a hand suddenly appears and writes on a wall in Aramaic, “numbered, numbered, weighed, and they are divided,” which was the prophecy for the fall of the Babylonian empire and the end of his reign. Indeed, Marcos’ lavish parties, claims of cocaine soirées, and a religious group’s condemnation of his regime, make it such an appropriate quote — even the “they-are-divided” part.
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Writing on the wall for the Marcos-Romualdez regime
Source: Breaking News PH
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