Rodrigo Duterte, the bombastic mayor of a major southern Philippine city, was poised yesterday to become Philippine president-elect after an incendiary and populist campaign that projected him alternatively as an emancipator and a looming dictator.
Philippine Senator Grace Poe, one of his biggest rivals, was the first to concede Duterte’s victory in the early hours of yesterday, and his harshest critic conceded that Duterete, known for his off-color sexual remarks and pledges to kill criminal suspects, emerged the unquestioned winner in Monday’s presidential election.
“I will not be the party pooper at this time of a festive mood,” Philippine Senator Antonio Trillanes IV, who has filed a graft complaint against Duterte, told reporters. “I will step back, listen to his policy pronouncements. This time we don’t expect a stand-up comedy act but a president who will address the nation.”
Photo: EPA
Duterte, 71, has not spoken since casting his vote on Monday, and remained at his home in Davao, on the southern Philippine island of Mindanao.
Results from a semi-official count gave Duterte an unassailable lead, thrusting him into national politics for the first time after 22 years as mayor of Davao and a government prosecutor before that. In those two jobs, Duterte gained notoriety by going after criminals, although he was accused of carrying out hundreds of extra-judicial killings.
During the three-month campaign, Duterte made audacious promises to eradicate crime and corruption within six months.
His explosive outbursts and curses against the inequality and social ills that bedevil the Filipino everyman resonated among different classes of the people that his big political rivals clearly underestimated until he began to take a strong lead in opinion polls in the final weeks of the campaign.
He captured domestic and international attention with speeches peppered with obscene jokes about sex and rape and anecdotes about his Viagra-fueled sexual escapades, and for undiplomatic remarks about Australia, the US and China, all key players in the country’s politics.
He has not articulated an overall foreign policy, but has described himself as a socialist who us wary of the US-Philippine security alliance.
He has worried members of the armed forces by saying that communist rebels could play a role in his government.
When the Australian and US ambassadors criticized a joke he made about wanting to be the first to have raped an Australian missionary who was gang-raped and killed by inmates in a 1989 jail riot, he told them to shut up.
He said he would talk with China about territorial disputes in the South China Sea but if nothing happened, he would sail to an artificial island newly created by China and plant the Philippine flag there.
China, he said, could shoot him and turn him into a national hero.
He has also threatened to form a one-man rule if legislators in the Philippine Congress oppose him.
On Monday, Duterte was asked to comment about his image as a mass-murder advocate.
He replied without elaborating: “I’m sure that there will be a resurrection one of these days.”
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