Then-Davao City mayor Sara Duterte was initially a frontrunner to succeed her father President Rodrigo Duterte, but she later formed an electoral alliance with Bongbong Marcos and ran for the Vice Presidency instead. What led to the coalition?

The Philippines is dominated by political families, but observers from afar tend to focus on explanations that revolve around control over resources or which congressperson is for or against someone. In this particular case, the explanation is relatively simple: she dislikes her father. Sara is the daughter of Elizabeth Zimmerman, who is Rodrigo’s first wife. Rodrigo is a womanizer. After Zimmerman caught Rodrigo in adultery and had her marriage annulled, Sara lived with Zimmerman and her two siblings. Sara’s relationship with Rodrigo hit a low point when Zimmerman developed breast cancer and underwent chemotherapy. Instead of coming to help his ex-wife, Rodrigo found another mistress. This was the final break between Sara and Rodrigo.

Since then, Sara dislikes Rodrigo and the people around him. What happened in the 2022 presidential election was that Rodrigo asked Sara if she wanted to run for president. When she hedged, Rodrigo turned to his favorite senator, Bong Go, and endorsed him for president. Sara took that as an insult. She questions why he is preferring an outsider to someone in his family. So, she defected to Bongbong Marcos’s camp and became his running mate.

Did she decide to run for the vice presidency because of a family feud?

Yes. She did not originally want to run for president. It was her dad who wanted her to run. She kept refusing until her father said he preferred Senator Go for president. She then defected to Marcos’s camp and ran for the vice presidency, exactly because her father did not want her to. It was all motivated by a family feud arising from the sickness of her mother. Rodrigo thought Sara would listen to him, but she did not. Sara is an interesting person, but you cannot look at her as a national figure. You have to look at her as a local politician, who takes everything extremely personally.

The Marcoses and the Dutertes have been engaged in a public feud that is escalating into threats to kill each other. What started the rift?

The rift is due to two things. First, there are tensions between her and Marcos’s wife, First Lady Liza Araneta Marcos. Second, she is politically ambitious and extremely popular. Marcos and his allies know that Sara will be a formidable opponent in the next presidential election, and she needs to be brought under control. The feud itself started with small things. At first, Sara thought she attracted a lot of votes for Marcos in the last presidential election and in return wanted to be the Secretary of National Defense. Instead, she became the Secretary of Education, and she did not do well in that position. At the same time, Sara and Araneta Marcos’s relationship deteriorated.

The feud worsened when Marcos’s allies in the House of Representatives decided to investigate alleged corruption in the Department of Education and found a lot of anomalies. The House started to go after Sara’s friend and secretary when she was mayor of Davao, which Sara took personally. When her secretary was hospitalized due to the stress of congressional hearings, she lashed out at Marcos’s allies and said that Marcos has been systematically trying to undermine her. At a press conference at 2 a.m. in the morning, Sara threatened that she will have all the Marcoses killed, and she has a contract with an assassin. If something bad happens to her, the assassin will kill all the Marcoses.

The problem Marcos’s allies are facing is that they do not have anyone to replace him. They do not have someone as charismatic as Marcos or Sara. The best thing to do then is to undermine her image now. It worked well;. When the corruption cases came out, public regard for Sara started to decline. Then, her father was arrested, and she positioned herself as the loyal daughter going to the court to rescue her father. She rose in the polls again. Marcos is trying all he can to make sure Sara does not win the next presidential election.

The fact that Sara used to want to lead the Department of National Defense was interesting because she has been strenuously avoiding talking about the South China Sea. How do you not talk about the issue when you are responsible for the armed forces?

You cannot, but Sara and her father are pro-China. They look to China as a source of foreign investment, an economic partner, and a potential market for Philippine products. They thought the U.S. economy is eventually going to be overtaken by the Chinese market in size, so it is unwise to mess with China. Rodrigo tried to influence military decision making in the armed forces, while Sara made a prominent speech in Chinese on the anniversary of the founding of the People's Republic of China in Davao. In 2016, Rodrigo tried to replace American military assistance with Chinese weapons. The military balked and told him that he can pursue a pro-China foreign policy, but he should not touch military ties to America. He backed down. 

Under Marcos, who is more pro-United States, the U.S. military expanded its presence in the Philippines, built more bases, and sent in weapons for a potential war with China. There is an ongoing large-scale military exercise (Exercise Balikatan) in the northern Philippines involving Australian, Japanese, the Philippine, and U.S. forces. I do not know if Sara can reverse this trend if she became the president, as the Philippine and U.S. militaries are closely intertwined.

Another big issue in the Philippines is drugs. As Davao mayor and as President, Rodrigo ran a brutal campaign to clamp down on drug use and drug dealing. A lot of innocent people were allegedly punished or executed extrajudicially by death squads in the name of maintaining law and order. His drug war was criticized internationally, but at the same time, his clan is still popular in the country. What explains this?

There are two reasons. First of all, he localized the drug war. Journalists only report on Duterte’s crazy public assertions and official statements in Tagalog Filipino and English, such as if Adolf Hitler killed 3 million Jews, he can do the same to drug addicts. Most of the scholars studying the drug war also tend to just look at the aggregates, like how he allegedly killed 30,000 people, including children. People take these things as indications of his brutality. But the way he sells it at the local level is completely different.

I am from the southern Philippines and my language is Cebuano (just like Duterte). If you listen to him speaking locally, it is a different conversation that he had with his constituents about this drug war. He speaks in the local language, and explains that what he was trying to address is not a national problem, but a neighborhood problem. He promised that he will clean citizens’ neighborhoods, and they do not have to worry about the big picture. Many people did run into traffickers selling drugs on their neighborhood corner, and they worried about their children going to school and passing through these corridors. Duterte promised to get rid of them, and this made residents feel more secure. He projected the image that the drug war was a private, personal problem to be resolved rather than a massive crackdown that violated civil liberties. Thus people then approved of him. 

Second, people also forget about a couple of things. Under Duterte, government social spending reached its highest level in 32 years, both as part of public spending and as a percentage of GDP, in 2017-2018. Public education from first grade through college is now free. Education spending reached 174.9 billion pesos, which at 16.7% of the total budget, made up a lion’s share of government spending. He instituted a nationwide universal health care and engaged in large-scale road construction and infrastructure projects that provided jobs for many (spending on public works reached 135.6 pesos and made up 15.4% of the national budget). 

Duterte also turned a US$34 million loan from the World Bank to help the poor via “conditional cash transfers” (financial assistance given to poor families who were able to keep their children in schools and also healthy) into a part of the national budget. 

The social welfare projects that he implemented helped the poor to a certain extent, although only a tiny sliver of people got out of poverty on Duterte’s watch. The Philippines remain a very unequal country. The World Bank ranked the Philippines 15th place in income inequality, and its Gini coefficient of 0.423 is the highest in East and Southeast Asia. The top 1% of earners capture 17% of the income while the bottom 50% only capture 14%. A caveat is that a big chunk of the people who support him are people who live outside of the formal economy, which contributes about 30 percent of the overall income. This means they do not pay taxes and their earnings do not get recorded in the data.

Overseas Filipino workers (OFWs) had sent home US$34.88 billion in 2021, up from US$33.19 billion in 2020. Business process outsourcing (BPO) earned the country US$27.4 billion in 2021, up from US$26.7 billion in 2020. This means a combined total of US$60.59 billion from foreign sources in 2021. This steady and increasing flow of overseas incomes to families back home helps create the illusion that life is good. And if it has some drawbacks which affect incomes, these are seen as only temporary. Filipinos may complain about a hard life but they are comforted by the fact that every month, a family member working abroad will send the money for household needs.

Duterte remains extremely popular with OFWs because he assured them that he and his allies (as well as his daughter Sara) would take care of their families in the country. OFWs overwhelmingly supported him in the 2019 midterm elections, where Duterte won all but three countries where there were polling stations. That said, 70% of Filipinos are afraid that they might become a victim of the drug war. There is a weird contradiction going on.

Do Filipinos think Duterte did a lot for them, and the drug war was not as brutal as we might see it?

It was quite brutal, actually. In addition, a lot of the reporting on the drug war was done in the urban areas, where the greatest number of journalists and media people are based. What is happening in rural areas is not reported as much, since there are hardly any media operating there. The few journalists that are there can easily be intimidated; many had been assassinated. The true casualty count is unclear. I do not think the official statistics included all the victims, and there are many other estimates.

What is Marcos’s approach to drug policy, and how is it different from Duterte’s?

Marcos stepped back from it, thinking it was too bloody. When he ran for office, his message was that he was going to rebuild the golden years when his father Ferdinand Sr., was president. He ran a positive campaign. He did not want Filipinos to worry too much about drugs because it would detract from the economy’s success, the growth in jobs, and how US$30 billion are coming from abroad each year on average. He could say that the days of chaos and brutality were over, and he was restoring the golden age that his father started. Drugs are no longer the country’s main concern, and he had shown that he was not as brutal as his predecessor. That said, there are still killings going on under Marcos, though not on the same scale during Duterte’s presidency.

What led the Philippine House of Representatives to impeach Sarah Duterte? The Senate is supposed to try the impeachment, but the 2025 midterm elections are happening before the trial. What are the stakes?

The official reason is to uproot corruption in the Department of Education and the office of Vice President, but what Marcos and his allies are doing is undermining her path to the presidency. In the Philippines, unlike in the United States, everyone in Congress switches sides to the president's party after a new President is elected. People do this because the office of the president has vast resources – from access to development permits, tax revenues, international aid, and has a huge executive bureaucracy that is responsible for disbursing these funds by distributing them to congressional districts. Presidents use this money as a carrot to get Congress to vote for their priorities and to pressure detractors. In 2022, when Marcos was inaugurated, many independents and Duterte allies switched to Marcos’s camp. Marcos then uses his allies in Congress to try to undermine Sara, who as Vice President does not control the development fund. Indeed, her own budget is set by Congress.

Like in the United States, the Philippine House impeaches while the Senate acts as the judge. The House has impeached Sara, but Senate President Francisco Escudero is taking his time to call the Senate to session. This is clearly a tactical move on his part as he has to await who wins in the midterm elections, If Sara’s allies prevail then the impeachment is over, and Escudero will have managed to keep himself in her good side and keep the Senate presidency. If the Marcos senators win, then he can continue with the impeachment proceedings. That said, we also do not know Sara’s chances of surviving her impeachment, since the Duterte allies who are running for the Senate are not necessarily her supporters. Her strongest supporter at the moment, is Senator Imee Marcos, the estranged older sister of the President, who is not polling very high. 

The battle now is over money and supporters. One interesting thing in the Philippines is that twenty years ago, a majority of both houses of Congress were lawyers. Now, members of Congress are primarily in the construction business because this is where much of the money allotted for regional development goes. Politicians want to tap on this and the best way is to set up your own “construction firms” and “bid” for government contracts, Marcos will control development funds for the next four years, and he is looking at how he can use that to make sure that Sara has very little congressional support. At the other end, Sara is trying to convince Senators, her father's allies, and local political families from the provinces and regions that she will be the next President, and when this happens, they do not want to be on her bad side.

Why did Marcos allow the Philippine police to arrest Rodrigo Duterte under an ICC warrant, and what impact does this have on the Philippines’ domestic politics?

Marcos thought if he removed Rodrigo, then not only will he remove a major opponent, Duterte’s arrest could also worsen the rift between the father’s and daughter’s supporters. It was a risky move as Marcos has expectedly faced one blowback after another from Duterte supporters. It is also unclear whether Rodrigo’s arrest will stop Sara from being elected president in 2028. The problem for Marcos is that the arrest might be legally proper, but using social media, Duterte’s allies have managed to make it appear that Marcos did something illegal; like flying a Filipino out to the country to be jailed by white foreigners. To fight for Duterte now has become a fight for Filipinos’ right to deal with their own issues without “external interference.” Duterte’s allies have changed the narrative. 

Duterte’s arrest however has also struck fear in the Duterte’s camp, because his allies like Senators Bong Go and De La Rosa have been accused of being involved in it. For now, however, Duterte’s arrest has faded from the news as everyone is campaigning. And as has always been the case all electoral campaigns are local and a matter of self-promotion. To use Duterte’s arrest as a campaign rallying may not work for someone who wants to enhance “name recall” among voters even as he or she tries to buy their votes.