Strongman nostalgia, conspiracy theories, and lies. It’s a powerful blend that keeps populists in power. In the Philippines, political clans have weaponized these messages against each other.
By Cecilia Lero
June 2025
While former Philippine president Rodrigo Duterte sits in a cell at The Hague to await trial by the International Criminal Court (ICC) for crimes against humanity committed during his “drug war,” the results of the May 2025 Philippine midterms show that Dutertismo retains considerable appeal. In a sharp disappointment to current president Ferdinand Marcos Jr., Duterte allies topped the Senate races while, to no one’s surprise, Duterte himself won an in absentia landslide for the mayoralty of Davao, his home base on the big southern island of Mindanao.
President Marcos would very much like to neutralize the Duterte family (led within the country now by Rodrigo’s daughter Sara, who is also Marcos’s vice-president) as a national political force. Yet that goal remains elusive. Duterte and his kin are skilled practitioners of populist political tactics and narratives pioneered in the Philippines by Ferdinand Marcos Sr. until he was toppled four decades ago by the People Power Revolution. In its current form, the Marcos-Duterte brand of populism traffics in a nostalgic celebration of strongman rule, a penchant for dismissing human-rights abuses by blaming their victims, and the use of social media to spread disinformation and conspiracy theories. The midterms have made it painfully clear how effective this blend remains, and how little issues of human rights and democracy mean to most Philippine voters.
Nearly two months before the May 12 voting, Interpol and the Philippine National Police (PNP) arrested Rodrigo Duterte and flew him to the ICC. Estimates of those killed by summary execution during the drug war he waged while president (2016–22) run as high as thirty thousand. Human-rights advocates welcomed the arrest — instances of the powerful being held to account are rare in the country — even as they soberly recognized that the move was driven not by respect for democratic accountability and human rights, but by the current president’s desire to sideline the Dutertes. The rivalry between the two political families had been mounting for years, but shifted into higher gear in December 2024. That month, Marcos allies in the House of Representatives released a report claiming that Duterte had masterminded the deadly “drug war,” that there had existed a system of monetary incentives for killings, and that the “war” had largely benefited a drug-trafficking syndicate connected to the Duterte family by eliminating rival dealers. The report recommended charges against Duterte and several other officials for violating the Philippine Act on Crimes Against International Humanitarian Law, Genocide, and Other Crimes Against Humanity.
The four months of televised House hearings that led up to the report formally documented mechanics of the drug war that the targeted communities and human-rights defenders understood, but which had not been common knowledge. Multiple impeachment complaints were working their way through the House at the same time against Vice-President Sara Duterte. In February 2025, the House voted overwhelmingly to impeach her (a step it was unlikely to have taken had President Marcos not approved). The charges, which have yet to be tried, include graft and corruption, involvement in extrajudicial killings, and plotting to assassinate Marcos.
It is often said that Filipino politics loves an underdog. President Marcos had been scoring in the 40s and 50s when voters were asked if they approved of him, but plummeted to 25 percent approval in a pair of surveys taken two weeks after Duterte’s arrest. At the same time, Sara Duterte’s approval rating jumped by seven percentage points to 59.
Two sitting senators whom the House has recommended for drug-war charges were resoundingly reelected in the midterms. Christopher “Bong” Go had been responsible for the incentive scheme that paid police officers to kill, while Ronald “Bato” dela Rosa had run the PNP under Duterte and still exerts informal influence over the still-unreformed force. Marcos had a Senate supermajority before the midterms, but his allies won only six of the twelve seats that were up for a vote in the 24-member Senate. His supermajority is gone. All of “his” senators, moreover, are like him in being former Duterte allies. Unlike their House counterparts, they have said little about the former president beyond insisting that his former office entitles him to respectful treatment. Senator Imee Marcos, the current president’s sister, has said that “Justice rendered by a foreign country is not justice. It’s slavery.”
The Marcos political dynasty has made several attempts to return to national politics since Ferdinand Marcos Sr. was deposed in 1986. Local wins go back to the 1990s, though it was not until 2010 that Ferdinand Jr. broke through nationally with a Senate win (in the Philippines, senators are chosen from an at-large nationwide list). His winning campaign laid the basis for what has become a pervasive social-media machine that paints the Marcos Sr. years as a “golden age” of prosperity and low crime while attacking those who governed after his ouster. Human-rights abuses are defended on the ground that they harmed only criminals and antigovernment activists.
In the 2016 presidential election, these efforts to promote nostalgia for a strongman and to demonize liberals helped to propel Rodrigo Duterte to the presidency. While the Marcos disinformation machinery continued throughout Duterte’s presidency, the Duterte camp not only learned from the Marcos approach but institutionalized disinformation as part of the state apparatus. Duterte’s messages focused on aggrandizing him personally, contributing to a cult of personality, as well as attacking drug-war critics and human-rights defenders.
As the Duterte personality cult rages and disinformation peddlers dismiss rights defenders and critics of the drug war, Marcos’s turn against Duterte stands out for its cynicism. The Duterte hearings were chaired by congressmen who had backed Rodrigo Duterte and his drug war, reinforcing the narrative that the hearings were nothing but a theatrical production staged by opportunistic turncoats such as Rep. Ace Barbers. He had urged other ASEAN nations to emulate the Philippines’ “aggressive” approach and, as late as 2018 was calling for continued public support of the “war.” Now he is widely rumored to be in line for a cabinet post.
Beyond the dramatic show in the House, there has been no attempt to deal with the legacy of the “drug war” and the continued effect it is having on Philippine institutions and families. By the end of 2024, only four junior police officers had been convicted of extrajudicial killings. There are no signs that other perpetrators will be identified and tried. The Marcos government has said nothing about a truth and justice process or restitution for victims’ families. The infrastructure and institutional culture of the drug war remain part of the PNP, and the internal circulars that shaped the campaign of extrajudicial killings remain in effect. The Marcos machine’s corruption of school history textbooks and suppression of news about rights abuses or corruption under Marcos Sr. fed to this climate of silence and impunity.
Just as the Duterte camp has proven itself adept at using the Marcos disinformation playbook, it was also more effective at using the power of the executive to block opponents from elected office. In the 2019 midterms, not a single opposition candidate was elected to the Senate. This year, two candidates who oppose both Marcos and Duterte became surprise Senate winners: Francis “Kiko” Pangilinan and Paolo “Bam” Aquino. Additionally, Akbayan, a party that has openly criticized both the Dutertes and the Marcoses, came in first in the party-list elections, besting a pro-Duterte list. Ex-senator Leila de Lima, held as a political prisoner under Duterte, also won a House seat while running on a liberal list.
While these opposition wins are heartening, they must be kept in perspective. Opposition forces are still single-digit minorities in both legislative houses. While their victories signify hope that a future beyond the Marcos-Duterte dichotomy is possible in the next few election cycles, they also reaffirm that human rights and democracy are not winning electoral stances. Aside from de Lima, no opposition victor focused on structural social-justice reforms or human rights as campaign topics. Instead, economic woes and social-service programs held center stage while the Marcos-Duterte backdrop drew no comment. The voters rewarded this approach. Given their clear message, the opposition’s limited gains, and the overall weakness of civil society, we are unlikely to see meaningful reforms to democratic institutions or the security sector in the immediate future.
The Dutertes are down but not out. Rodrigo, age eighty, was already past the peak of his public influence. President Marcos must have calculated that sending him to The Hague would be the easiest way to blunt the family’s influence, but the decision seems to have bolstered the Dutertes’ underdog appeal. The next important flashpoint is Sara Duterte’s Senate impeachment trial. Ironically, the unexpected election of two opposition figures could benefit Marcos in the impeachment as both Pangilinan and Aquino are likely to vote for conviction even without wheeling and dealing from the Marcos camp. Yet the strength that the Duterte camp showed in the election as well as Sara’s strong poll numbers mean that the other senators are likely to raise what they will demand in exchange for a “guilty” vote. As of this writing, the Senate majority, theoretically allies of the Marcos regime, are using procedural tools to delay convening the impeachment trial, thereby casting doubt on whether or not it will go forward at all. The telenovela of Philippine politics continues.
Cecilia Lero is a political scientist and former civil society activist, campaign strategist, and congressional staffer in the Philippines. She completed a Ph.D. at the University of Notre Dame and a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of São Paulo. Her research focuses on democratization/autocratization processes, social movements, and political violence.
Copyright © 2025 National Endowment for Democracy
Image credit: Ezra Acayan/Getty Images
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