The price of Marcos’ obsession to hold on to power

THE most damning indictment of Ferdinand Marcos Jr.’s administration is not any single scandal, but the pattern. Since 2022, an extraordinary share of the Marcos administration’s energy, money, and attention has gone not into governing, but into a single, unstated project: making sure the Marcos clan survives as the dominant Lord of the Realm, and ideally expands, past 2028, when the president’s single six-year term expires.

Marcos is, indeed, the son of the dictator, who clung to power after his second and constitutionally last term by weaponizing the Constitution to declare one-man rule in September 1972.

Charter change, the impeachment war against Vice President Sara Duterte, and the extraordinary decision to hand former president Rodrigo Duterte to a foreign tribunal are not isolated events. They are three fronts of the same battle for continuity in power.

This required raising funds to bribe legislators, the media, and the Left, as well as other allied political forces and even the judiciary. Thus, the biggest and most shameful scam ever undertaken in our history, the so-called ghost flood-control scam, which siphoned at least P120 billion to the bank accounts of legislators, local government officials, and bureaucrats of the public works department. Indeed, that old adage is true: “The fish rots from the head down.” Corruption at the top is not a leak; it’s a signal flare — everyone below reads it as permission to help themselves.

The pollster Social Weather Stations’ long-standing corruption-perception series found in October 2025 that 84 percent of Metro Manila respondents believe there is “a lot” of corruption in government — the highest reading in the survey’s 25-year history — with 77 percent saying it has gotten worse than three years ago. A nationwide survey by another pollster, Pulse Asia, in December 2025 found that 94 percent described corruption as “widespread.

It is Marcos’ obsession to remain in power — not just his DNA for kleptocracy and incompetence — that has left the country’s poverty and development agenda on autopilot while corruption metastasized to a scale that even jaded Filipinos found shocking.

Charter change

Barely a year and a half into his term, Marcos’ allies in the House of Representatives — led then by his cousin, former speaker Martin Romualdez — launched a “people’s initiative,” dubbed “Cha-cha” or “Charter change,” that was ostensibly meant to lift constitutional restrictions on foreign investment. In practice, the petition being circulated in January 2024 asked Filipinos to approve something else entirely: letting the House and Senate vote jointly, rather than separately, on charter amendments — a change that would let the 300-plus-member House swamp the 24-member Senate whenever the Constitution’s political provisions, including term limits, come up for revision.

The campaign collapsed under its own stench. Lawmakers were caught offering mayors “mobilization funds” and constituents ₱100 payouts for signatures. Imee Marcos herself disclosed that districts were offered as much as ₱20 million to deliver 20,000 signatures, and the Commission on Elections was forced to halt the signature drive amid allegations it lacked “informed consent” (Rappler; Philippine Star). The push went quiet for a while, only to resurface in January 2026, when then-Senate president Vicente Sotto III floated charter amendments again, explicitly as a way out of the constitutional deadlock created by the Supreme Court’s rulings on Sara Duterte’s impeachment. Cha-cha, in other words, keeps being pulled off the shelf precisely when the succession question gets messy and never as a serious economic reform in its own right.

The impeachment war

The Marcos-Duterte “UniTeam” alliance that swept the 2022 elections shattered within two years, and what followed has consumed Congress ever since. The House first impeached Sara Duterte on Feb. 5, 2025, on charges of budget mismanagement, unexplained wealth and — most explosively — threats against the president, the first lady and the speaker. The Senate convened as an impeachment court in June 2025, then abruptly remanded the case to the House; by July 2025 the Supreme Court had declared the whole complaint unconstitutional, ruling that the one-year bar on multiple impeachment attempts had already been triggered.

That should have ended it; it did not. The moment the one-year bar lapsed in February 2026, new complaints were filed, and on May 11, 2026, the House impeached Sara Duterte a second time — the first Philippine official ever impeached twice — by a lopsided 257-25 vote, with most representatives not even bothering to read the articles of impeachment.

The Senate impeachment trial opened on July 6, 2026, complete with a mid-trial fight over who gets to preside over the impeachment court. Strip away the legalese about “betrayal of public trust,” and the subtext is unmistakable: Sara Duterte, at 47, was the clear frontrunner for the 2028 polls, riding on her father’s base. Removing her from office and barring her from politics — the automatic penalty for conviction — would eliminate the single most formidable threat to whoever the Marcos camp anoints as its own 2028 standard-bearer, or even the dictator’s son if he succeeds in changing the Constitution. Two years of legislative and judicial machinery, dozens of hearing days, and untold political capital have gone into this fight — not into any comparable push on poverty, jobs or agriculture

Handing Duterte to The Hague:

Principle, or leverage?

The same falling-out that produced the impeachment war also explains the government’s stunning reversal on the International Criminal Court (ICC). For most of 2022–2024, Malacañang at the start echoed Rodrigo Duterte’s line that the ICC had no jurisdiction over the Philippines, which withdrew from the Rome Statute in 2019.

That posture melted away after the political break: by November 2024 the administration was signaling it would cooperate with Interpol if a warrant came through, and on March 11, 2025, Philippine police arrested the 79-year-old former president at the airport and, within 24 hours, put him on a plane to The Hague. In reality, Marcos created the conditions for the death abroad of Rodrigo Duterte, whose forces brought the ingrate to power.

The ex-president remains in ICC custody in Scheveningen; the court confirmed charges against him in April 2026 and rejected his bid for provisional release on health grounds in late 2025. There, Rodrigo Duterte is likely to suffer to the end of his life: ICC cases last 10 years on average, and despondency is known to cut a person’s lifespan, especially if he is elderly.

Whatever the legal merits of the drug-war murder charges, the timing — surrendering him only after he and his daughter became a political enemy — makes it impossible to separate the decision from the succession fight. Removing the Duterte patriarch from the political chessboard entirely, while his daughter fights for her career in the Senate, serves one interest above all: clearing the field for 2028.

Marcos’ weaponization of the justice system is undeniable. Sen. Rodante Marcoleta, who has, in a short period as an articulate leader of the opposition and likely a leading senator-judge in Sara Duterte’s impeachment trial, is promptly thrown in jail after a few weeks of a dubious investigation that found the campaign funds he received for his 2022 election constituted — absurd, really — “plunder,” which is a nonbailable crime. In contrast, many witnesses — including Romualdez’s right-hand man, former party-list lawmaker Elizalde “Zaldy” Co — have testified against the ex-speaker more than a year ago that he received about a billion pesos through the flood-control scam. Yet, he remains scot-free, even saying: “I will not go quietly, and I will not go alone. I will not be the fall guy for other people’s corruption.” Many interpreted that as a message to Marcos himself.

Meanwhile, poverty policy became patronage — and the money vanished.

While Malacañang and Congress fought over charter votes and impeachment articles, the substantive economic agenda withered. Gross domestic product growth missed the government’s own target for a third straight year in 2025, slowing to just 4.4 percent — its weakest post-pandemic performance — with fourth-quarter growth down to a mere 3 percent. Rather than fix structural anti-poverty programs, the administration gutted them: an Ateneo School of Government study found that the Department of Social Welfare and Development lost ₱94.3 billion in the 2025 budget, including a ₱50-billion cut to the rules-based “4Ps” conditional cash transfer program, while politician-controlled dole-outs — AKAP, MAIFID, AICS, and similar “ayuda” schemes with no transparent beneficiary criteria — ballooned to ₱130 billion. Social protection, in other words, was converted from a right into a favor dispensed by politicians — the classic patronage tool of a dynasty securing loyalty ahead of an election, not a development strategy.

Marcos and his wife had 40 trips abroad, which turned out to be junkets, as no major official development aid nor foreign investments have come in under his term. Foreign direct investment inflows fell from about $9.2 billion in 2022 to $7.8 billion in 2025.

The ghost flood-control scam is inarguably the starkest proof that governance took a back seat to power politics. An estimated ₱100 billion of the ₱545-billion flood-control budget from 2022 to 2025 was cornered by just fifteen contractors, many of them tied to sitting legislators. Two cabinet secretaries resigned in November 2025 as the scandal reached the Palace itself, mass protests erupted in Manila for months, and economists now directly link the corruption paralysis — stalled public and private investment as officials scrambled to cover their tracks — to the growth slowdown.

None of these four stories happened in a vacuum. They happened because an administration treated political self-perpetuation as its central project.

This is the real State of the Nation, one under the grip of an accidental president ruling a people whose suffering is rivaled only during the first Marcos regime.

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The price of Marcos’ obsession to hold on to power
Source: Breaking News PH