It is difficult to gloss over the record of former Philippine president Ferdinand Marcos, a man with film-star looks who manipulated the political machine, plundered the state to the tune of US$10 billion, and was responsible for the deaths of thousands of his opponents and the torture of tens of thousands more. His wife, Imelda, with her shoe collection — not to mention 888 handbags, 71 pairs of sunglasses and 65 parasols — became a byword for autocratic excess.
Yet, less than four decades after the elder Marcos was forced to flee Manila in a US Air Force plane, his son appears to be on his way back to the Malacanang Palace.
Despite surveys last year suggesting an overwhelming popular preference for Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte’s daughter, Sara, she agreed to run for vice president and let Ferdinand Marcos Jr, known as “Bongbong,” run for president.
Illustration: Mountain People
Now campaigning in “tandem” with Sara Duterte, the polls put Marcos Jr ahead across the country, with a near-unassailable lead over his nearest rival, opposition icon Leni Robredo, the Philippine vice president.
Even in a country known for its dynasties, the prospect of Marcos Jr winning is not politics as usual. It is the culmination of a decades-long effort by the family of a deposed kleptocrat to nurture a fantasy, and of their willful distortion of collective memory.
It helps that a majority of voters are between 18 and 40, but it is also the result of the broken promises of 1986’s peaceful uprising that have left economic and political power still staggeringly concentrated.
In more ways than one, it is the natural conclusion to the six-year presidency of Rodrigo Duterte, a supposed man of the people who forged alliances with old-school elites, eroded civil liberties and talked up martial law.
A fragile democracy and an economy struggling to recover from the effects of COVID-19 are to bear the cost.
Political clans are the building blocks of power in the Philippines, thanks to a system of weak parties where privilege is entrenched and local fiefdoms — Ilocos Norte for the Marcos family — are tightly held. Clans accounted for 70 percent of legislators elected to the Philippine House of Representatives from 1987 to 2016.
Many of those families have hung on to economic and political power through generations of colonial regimes and republics. Despite a provision in the 1987 constitution that sought to limit the holding of multiple positions in one family, no enabling law was passed.
However, the likely victory of Marcos Jr is more than that. It is the prize that the family has sought from the days of exile. Retaining substantial wealth and influence, they rapidly regained political primacy once they returned to the Philippines. Marcos Jr was elected to the Philippine Congress in 1992, three years after his father’s death, and the family has held a raft of positions since.
The family has consistently played up the myth, leaning on matriarch Imelda Marcos’ continued appeal and mixing the past with the present, as with their insistence on the return of the autocrat’s body to the Philippines and on his burial at Heroes’ Cemetery in Manila, allowed by Rodrigo Duterte shortly after he took office in 2016.
Sons should not be held responsible for the sins of their fathers, but the entire presidential campaign of Marcos Jr has been notable for only two things: A lack of substance and its reliance on a glorified past.
Political scientist Aries Arugay, a visiting fellow at the Yusof Ishak Institute of Singapore’s Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, said that providing policy specifics would only erode the lead of Marcos Jr in the polls.
Where Robredo has emphasized her experience and competence, the campaign of Marcos Jr has used the slogan Sama-sama tayong babangon muli (“Together we will rise again”), churned out glossy ads featuring reminiscences against tinkling music and black-and-white footage of the glory years, and promoted songs from during martial law jazzed up for the TikTok generation.
With that comes a troubling selective memory. Marcos Jr refers to the high growth of the early 1970s and perceptions of low crime — but not the crumbling mid-1980s, high external debt, import restrictions and unemployment.
He has repeatedly failed to acknowledge the brutal side of a regime that, Amnesty International has said, imprisoned about 70,000 people during the nine years of martial law, tortured 34,000 and killed more than 3,200.
“Will I say sorry for the thousands and thousands of kilometers [of roads] that were built?” Marcos Jr asked in 2015. “What am I to say sorry about?”
How has this failure — with worrying implications for other nations wrestling with the errors of the past — been possible?
First, the teaching of history in Philippine schools has tended to gloss over the period of martial law, and education reforms have allowed students to drop the subject in high school.
Sociologist Gretchen Abuso said that the Philippines has no official mechanism compelling an appropriate remembrance of the past, something that other post-authoritarian states have put in place, and none of this is helped by the failure of subsequent Philippine governments to hold the Marcos family to account.
“Alibaba is gone, but the 40 thieves remain,” as Cardinal Jaime Sin, the late archbishop of Manila, has been attributed as saying.
Second, there is social media, where the canny image-building campaign of Marcos Jr has enabled the revisionist narrative to fill the gap left by poor education. Filipinos spend more time on social media than almost any other nation on earth, and they heavily depend on online “influencers” for their opinions. While on average about one-fifth of respondents globally said they used influencers as a source of information, more than half of Filipinos did.
As Imelda says in a 2019 documentary about her: “Perception is real and the truth is not.”
All of this thrives on fertile terrain, given that so few Filipinos, especially outside Manila, feel like democracy has brought much economic or political change. Similar families are in charge. Society remains deeply unequal, and is also bruised by a pandemic that battered livelihoods and punished the youngest, kept out of in-person school for virtually two years.
Filipinos have every reason to look forward, to elect a leader who can guarantee openness and, with a coherent vision, bring investment and positive economic change. Instead, they are choosing to look backward.
“There is nothing in [the Marcos Jr-Sara Duterte] tandem that suggests they will address the democratic deficit. You can’t say they are different from their fathers, because they see nothing wrong with the way their fathers acted,” Arugay said.
“Worse, they have neither the competence nor the charisma of the fathers,” he said. “There will be a sequel, but like all sequels, it will be worse than the original.”
Clara Ferreira Marques is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist and member of the editorial board covering commodities and environmental, social and governance issues.
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