If only Marcos would let Filipinos choose their president in 2028

THE political chaos consuming the country today — the Senate turmoil, the International Criminal Court (ICC) surrender of Rodrigo Duterte, the impeachment drive against Vice President Sara Duterte, the weaponization of the Ombudsman and the Department of Justice (DOJ) against opposition senators, the National Bureau of Investigation’s (NBI) brazen disrespect for the upper house, even the Pirma-style constitutional maneuverings that surfaced early in the Marcos administration — all point to one central political obsession: the determination of the Marcos family to remain in power beyond 2028.

If only President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. would agree to let voters decide who would be president in 2028, we would have some measure of stability, which has become so important as our government needs to come up with a detailed program to respond to the severe economic depression, created by the Middle East crisis, that is coming this year.

It is so unfair for former senator Franklin Drilon to boast that the Senate when he was its president had never had its prestige deteriorate. In the three times that he was Senate president, the three presidents of the Republic (Joseph Estrada, Gloria Macapagal Arroyo and Benigno Aquino III) never tried to control the Senate to do its bidding to further their agenda.

Yes, that’s how unprecedented, and obnoxious, have been Marcos’ recent moves to control the Senate that no other president before him had done.

This is the thread connecting events that otherwise seem disconnected: Marcos’ determination to prevent Sara Duterte from winning the presidency in 2028. Remove that thread and the pattern disappears. Restore it, and suddenly everything makes sense. Using that vivid Filipino term, the “puno’t dulo” of the Senate’s problems now is Marcos trying to control it.

ICC

Why would a sitting administration risk ripping apart the political system by pursuing an unprecedented ICC arrest of a former president? Why provoke an all-out war against the country’s most popular political family outside Malacañang? Why attempt to destroy the vice president despite the obvious risk of national polarization? Why pressure senators, weaponize investigations, mobilize the Ombudsman’s Office and attempt to reorder the Senate leadership itself?

Because the Duterte camp is the single greatest obstacle to the perpetuation of Marcos-Romualdez rule beyond 2028. Everything else is secondary.

The central political fact haunting Malacañang is simple: If elections are held under relatively normal conditions in 2028, Sara Duterte would very likely win overwhelmingly. Every survey before the present campaign of political destruction showed precisely that. She was not merely leading; she was politically dominant. About a year-and-a-half to the 2028 election period, there is no one Marcos can field to challenge Sara.

There is the argument that candidates like Jojo Binay, Fernando Poe Jr., Ramon Mitra were leading in the polls, but ultimately lost in the actual elections. But Sara’s popularity is on an entirely different level, even I would say transcendent of politics. Not only has her father’s charisma rubbed on her, Filipinos will sympathize with her for the horrible jailing of her father at The Hague because of Marcos’ order to the police to kidnap him and haul him off to the ICC prison. Filipinos — most famously in the case of Cory Aquino — have a deep sense of justice as to vote overwhelmingly for a victim of injustice.

The impeachment case Marcos has undertaken against Sara has only served to depict her more as such a victim. Ask a man on the street what is the case about, and he won’t be able to respond. In Binay’s case, he’ll tell you about the alleged kickbacks on Makati government buildings — thanks to the Philippine Daily Inquirer for splashing its front pages with photos of those edifices.

Existential

The problem confronting the Marcos camp is existential. Power after 2028 cannot be retained unless the Duterte political machinery is crippled beforehand.

Hence the sequence.

First came the early “people’s initiative” or Pirma-style moves for constitutional revision — suspiciously resurrecting the very method used during the Ramos era to attempt constitutional change. The public was told these were innocent efforts at “economic reform.” But Filipinos are not fools. Everybody understood the lurking objective: eventually alter constitutional constraints to permit extension of power, transition arrangements, parliamentary restructuring, or some mechanism to perpetuate the ruling bloc.

The ferocious backlash forced a temporary retreat. But the ambition did not disappear.

Then came the ending of the Marcos-Duterte alliance that had brought the dictator’s son to power. This is his excuse to mobilize the entire machinery of government and the stamp-pad House of Representatives to persecute Sara out of office.

The ICC operation against Rodrigo Duterte was the most dramatic and ruthless stage in Marcos’ plot. The sheer brazenness of it remains astonishing. A former president surrendered to a foreign tribunal despite repeated declarations by Marcos himself that the ICC no longer had jurisdiction over the Philippines after withdrawal from the Rome Statute.

Duterte

The objective was obvious: Remove Rodrigo Duterte physically, psychologically and politically from Philippine politics while simultaneously terrorizing his allies.

The message delivered to every senator, governor, congressman and political financier was unmistakable: if this can be done to Duterte, it can be done to anyone in different ways.

The ICC case against Sen. Ronald dela Rosa serves the same purpose. Whether or not conviction ever occurs is almost secondary. The process itself becomes punishment. An ICC prosecution can consume years, even more than a decade, fortunes, reputations and political careers. Even acquittal after a decade becomes meaningless politically.

That is the real utility of the ICC mechanism.

Then came the impeachment campaign against Sara Duterte herself.

Observe how every institution gradually aligns itself toward that end. The House becomes an impeachment machine. The Ombudsman suddenly becomes hyperactive against opposition figures. The DOJ launches investigations. Congressional hearings multiply. The NBI acts like Hitler’s Gestapo enforcing a foreign warrant, totally forgetting it is primarily a bureau for investigating alleged crimes, rather than for enforcing court orders. Why the NBI? Marcos is afraid that the Philippine National Police (PNP) will not really arrest dela Rosa and might even secure him, as he had been one of the most respected heads of the PNP.

The Senate itself becomes the final battlefield because it alone still possesses enough institutional independence to obstruct total consolidation of power.

Thus the current Senate turmoil.

Reconfiguration

The change in the Senate leadership is to free it from Marcos’ control, which will unjustly convict Sara; cooperate with anti-Duterte prosecutions; neutralize opposition blocs; and even support future maneuvers to amend the Constitution for Marcos himself, not some proxy, to continue to power.

The Senate is being pressured because it is one of the last institutions not yet fully placed under Marcos’ thumb.

History and literature repeatedly warn what happens when rulers become obsessed with perpetuating themselves in power.

William Shakespeare’s King Lear destroyed his kingdom because he could not truly relinquish authority even after supposedly surrendering the throne. His vanity and refusal to let go plunged the realm into betrayal, civil war and madness.

France’s Louis XVI could not accept genuine constitutional limitation of royal power. His hesitation and insistence on preserving dynastic supremacy radicalized the French Revolution until the monarchy itself collapsed, and he ended beneath the guillotine.

Russia’s Tsar Nicholas II similarly resisted meaningful reform while insisting on preserving autocratic rule amid economic collapse and military catastrophe. The result was revolution, civil war and the extermination of his dynasty.

Dictator

And then there is the dictator Ferdinand Marcos Sr.

The elder Marcos should have left office in 1973 under the 1935 Constitution after eight years in power, and reportedly accumulating billions of pesos. Instead, he declared one-man rule, rewrote the constitutional order, centralized institutions, weaponized the courts and military against rivals, and justified everything as necessary for national stability. He should have stepped down when his kidney disease worsened in 1982. Instead, he still clung to power, resulting in his ignominious fall in 1986, his neck saved by the United States which actually plotted his removal.

But regimes obsessed with preserving themselves often produce precisely the instability they claim to prevent.

Marcos Sr.’s refusal to relinquish power gradually destroyed the legitimacy of institutions themselves. Courts became suspect. Congress became ornamental. Cronyism metastasized. Corruption exploded. Public trust evaporated.

Eventually, the system lost all elasticity. And when the crisis came after the Aquino assassination, the entire regime cracked apart.

The same pathology is now reemerging. History may not be repeating itself, but it is certainly rhyming, to use Mark Twain’s words. Indeed, just as the dictator Marcos fall was accelerated by the steep recession in 1984 to 1985 partly as a result of the global debt crisis, his son faces a more serious cataclysm triggered by the rocketing of oil prices, which will fan Filipinos’ hatred of this regime.

The political center is collapsing, Marcos has lost control of the Senate, and thrown under the bus a pillar of his rule, his cousin Martin Romualdez, to be the scapegoat of the ghost flood control scam. A year-and-a-half is too short a time to prevent his slide into the abyss.

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If only Marcos would let Filipinos choose their president in 2028
Source: Breaking News PH