Dutertes are triumphant, Marcos is screwed

Impeachment won’t happen

DESPITE tens of billions of pesos hijacked from government’s dole-out funds to bribe voters, President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. lost the crucial Senate elections, which was both a referendum on his administration and a proxy war between him and former president Rodrigo Duterte.

Marcos would not have become president if not for Duterte’s support. Yet he politically stabbed him and his daughter Sara in the back a year later.

With the dictator-DNA running strong in his veins, he had to remove Vice President Sara and destroy the Duterte legend that was the sole obstacle to his clan continuing in power after 2028. In his first year, he and his cousin House Speaker Martin Romualdez launched a project to amend the Constitution to install a parliamentary system in which he or his cousin would become prime minister.

When that failed miserably, Marcos threw everything but the kitchen sink at the Dutertes. He bribed his minions in Congress through government dole-out funds for the House of Representatives to impeach the Duterte daughter. Marcos had them undertake hearings in Congress to demonize Duterte and his daughter. He connived with the Communist Party to get a neocolonial body, the International Criminal Court (ICC), to kidnap him and throw him in jail to await a kangaroo-court, media-based trial. He even got the National Bureau of Investigation to frighten off anti-Marcos bloggers by issuing subpoenas against them, some for unspecified crimes.

Filipinos proved not to be stupid. They practically gave Marcos the dirty finger in the elections, giving reelectionist Sen. Bong Go, Duterte’s assistant during most of his political career, the biggest number of votes, and another reelectionist, his former Davao City police chief, Bato de la Rosa, the third biggest (at 80 percent counted). A hitherto obscure party-list congressman, Rodante Marcoleta, who defended the Dutertes in the Congress hearings had the sixth biggest number of votes. Marcos’ estranged sister Imee who had bolted out of her brother’s camp got the 12th and last slot.

In contrast, there wasn’t a single winning candidate that Marcos could say was his candidate: those who ran under his fake alliance and won — the veteran reelection senators Ping Lacson and Tito Sotto, the popular broadcaster Erwin Tulfo, and actor Lito Lapid — have long been household names whose electoral victory owed nothing to Marcos.

Tattoos
The two that had the Marcos tattoo on their foreheads — Interior Secretary Benhur Abalos and the rabidly anti-Chinese Francis Tolentino — lost miserably. Marcos even proved to be the kiss of death for such candidates as Abby Binay of the Binay clan, actor Bong Revilla, and even the world boxing champion Manny “Pacman” Pacquiao despite the latter reportedly spending P2 billion for his electoral campaign.

The election dismantled as a political force the so-called “Solid North” (the provinces of the Ilocos, the Cordillera Administrative Region and Cagayan Valley) which purportedly voted as one for a Marcos candidate. It proved to be as solid as puffed rice (ampaw), with Go and de la Rosa leading the winning pack in the region.

Another insult to the notion of a Solid North is the fact that Paolo Benigno Aquino IV, a nephew of the assassinated opposition leader Benigno Aquino Jr., whose eyeglasses are an attempt to look like his uncle, was in the top three winners in the region.

A big reason Aquino and another non-Duterte candidate, Francis “Kiko” Pangilinan, got into the top six slots, is the fact that the words “Aquino” and the “Liberal Party” of which the latter is chairman, have been etched in many Filipinos’ minds as sworn political enemies of Marcos, whom they wanted to repudiate so much in this election.

Another proof of the Marcos’ clan’s political enfeeblement is that Region 8 (Eastern Visayas) which is supposed to be the stronghold of the Romualdezes, could not get a single Marcos senatorial candidate to win. (Marcos’ cousin, House Speaker Martin Romualdez, won with 144,175 votes — unopposed, with announced candidates’ withdrawing or being disqualified.)

Upended
The midterm election results have upended the previous Marcos-controlled Senate structure. The Dutertes have the support of 10 senators, now the biggest bloc there: Go, de la Rosa, Alan Cayetano, Robin Padilla, Marcoleta, the two Villars (Mark and Camille), Imee, Zubiri (if we can include him as Marcos had him removed as Senate president in May last year) and Pia Cayetano, who would if push comes to shove vote with her brother Alan.

Nine of the senators, including the sole “Marcos straggler,” Lito Lapid, are of the “I-am-for-me” ideology: the two Tulfos, the two Estrada sons, Sherwin Gatchalian, Loren Legarda, Joel Villanueva, Lacson and Sotto. Even if he was essentially placed in the post as Senate president, nobody really believes Francis Escudero is a Marcos man, as he has been buddies with Bongbong in their younger days, and knows his (very short) limits.

The political calculus of most of these senators is how support or non-support for Sara will help their ambitions to be vice president or even president in 2028. All of them though are very good readers of the political winds, and they know Marcos really can’t hack it, and that he would be presiding over a major economic downturn in the coming three years.

Hontiveros, Bam Aquino and Pangilinan are strongly anti-Marcos personalities, because they were one way or another part of the movement against the Marcos dictatorship in their youth.

A big question is their positions towards the US, whether they would adopt the Dutertes’ stance of neutrality on the US-China rivalry, or continue Marcos’ servility to the US.

Impeachment
A clear result of the elections is that Sara won’t be removed as vice president in an impeachment trial, which won’t happen. After all, it was the plot of a now lame-duck president, indeed a debilitated one. Why would they waste time undertaking a project by a president whom the country is sending to the dustbin of history? It’s obviously a waste of time, just by the arithmetic.

Sixteen senators (two-thirds of the senators) have to find Sara guilty, which means that nine senators would be enough to acquit her, and right now I can count 10 to be definitely for her.

And after all, except for Risa, who is in the political departure lounge, I don’t think any of the other 23 senators would like to cross somebody who is proving to have inherited all the charisma of her father.

Senators JV Ejercito and his half-brother Jinggoy Estrada have expressed what I think would be foremost in the senators’ minds, that an impeachment not only would be divisive, and would be seen by the global investing community as political instability here, in a period when the world is bracing for an economic crisis, triggered by President Trump’s tariff wars.

I don’t think even the pro-Marcos senator Lito Lapid would want to have a headache reading voluminous documents and sit for hours listening to accountants and boring lawyers in a trial that in no way would benefit him.

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Dutertes are triumphant, Marcos is screwed
Source: Breaking News PH