All these talks about former Vice President Maria Leonor “Leni” Robredo cutting a deal with incumbent Vice President Sara Duterte are all fire and fury signifying nothing.
Ms. Robredo is running not for a national position, but for mayor of Naga City, and she’ll win without any help from anybody, least of all from Ms. Duterte whose father is facing charges and possible arrest for the innumerable crimes he committed while in office.
In short, Ms. Robredo wouldn’t gain anything from the alliance, if indeed the offer was made. On the other hand, she would earn the eternal condemnation of 15 million Filipinos who put their trust and hope in her when she ran for president in 2022 against Ferdinand “Bongbong” Marcos Jr.
That unannounced visit could have been just a hello-and-goodbye affair, but Ms. Duterte was certainly there to test the water. She is waging the war of her lifetime.
Perhaps she was on a quest, on her own or at the behest of her family, to win over Ms. Robredo and her fellow kakampink warriors, such as Jose Manuel “Chel” Diokno, Paolo Benigno “Bam” Aquino IV, and Francis “Kiko” Pangilinan, and replenish the decimated ranks of the Duterte power base.
From its supermajority status, former President Rodrigo Duterte’s Partido ng Demokratiko Pilipino (PDP) as a political party has been relegated to the fringes, so much so that it could only come up with three names for inclusion in its senatorial ticket: reelectionists Christopher Lawrence “Bong” Go and Ronald “Bato” Dela Rosa, and actor Philip Salvador.
The quest undertaken by Ms. Duterte was therefore fruitless. Its objectives were impossible to achieve.
Ms. Robredo is a product of clean politics — a rarity these days — and was the anointed one of the late former President Benigno “Noynoy” Aquino III. She proudly bears the legacy of her husband, the late Jesse Robredo, who distinguished himself as a no-nonsense, incorruptible mayor of Naga and former secretary of the Department of the Interior and Local Government (DILG).
In 2016, she handily defeated Marcos Jr. for the vice presidency. She lost in the 2022 presidential election, but the suspicion persists that the presidency was stolen from her with the connivance of the corrupt Commission on Elections (Comelec) and Smartmatic, the computer company that was deeply embroiled in the controversial November 2020 presidential election in the United States. The question as to who was the real winner in that election was quickly settle — it was Joe Biden — by manual recount of the paper ballots in the battleground states.
Up to now, Comelec has refused to grant the demand of the opposition to recount the ballots even in a few selected provinces. One thing is sure, according to political pundits: Ms. Duterte is feeling that the world is closing in on her. In her desperation, she must have assumed that Ms. Robredo and her bloc of voters hate the Marcos family so much that they would regard her as a welcome addition to their ranks.
Ms. Duterte is not thinking clearly.
The historical resentment against the Marcos family is rooted in the fact that, during the Marial Law regime, the late dictator, Ferdinand Marcos Sr., persecuted his political enemies, stole public funds, and, yes, committed mass murder.
Ms. Duterte must have forgotten for a while that she and her father, former president Duterte, committed the same crimes a hundredfold. This is why Ms. Robredo’s and the political opposition’s followers regard both families with much revulsion.
From all indications, President Marcos Jr. is hell-bent on putting the Dutertes in their proper place, not out of moral considerations but for self-preservation. If the Duterte family regains power, through the incumbent vice president, the Marcos family runs the risk of complete annihilation. And that is no hyperbole.
The late former president Corazon “Cory” Aquino allowed Marcos Sr., his wife Imelda, their children, and their whole entourage to go on exile in Hawaii. Ms. Duterte and her allies would not be as lenient to the current generation of the Marcoses.
Impeachment in the works?
President Marcos Jr. has only to say the word, and it will be done. His cousin, Speaker Martin Romualdez, with a snap of his fingers, can get majority of the Congressmen to prepare the articles of impeachment and send them to the Senate, where she runs the risk of conviction, which carries with it perpetual disqualification from holding public office.
The president of this country wields tremendous powers, it is easy for him to get two-thirds of the Senate majority. If former President Noynoy Aquino was able to muster the necessary number in 2011 to remove the late then-Supreme Court chief justice Renato Corona, so could Marcos Jr. do so with Vice President Sara Duterte, who has antagonized legislators in the upper and lower House.
If Mr. Marcos gets cold feet, Ms. Duterte will be able to contest the presidency after all, but it will be an uphill climb. The name she carries is the only thing going for her, and that name has lost its luster, as it is now being associated with the optics of mass murder and rampant corruption.
Ms. Duterte cannot promise — at least not with a straight face — that she would save the nation from corruption and illegal drugs, the way her father did, for the simple reason that, as many Filipinos now see her, the embodiment of corruption.
The House Committee on Budget has uncovered during its hearings that Ms. Duterte spent billions of her confidential and intelligence funds in so short a time — P125 million in 11 days at one time — that the members could only conclude she stole the money.
Ms. Duterte is also being probed by the International Criminal Court with crimes against humanity, along with her father and a number of others, for authorizing mass murders. Her greatest vulnerability, however, lies in her cavalier attitude in the handling of public funds.
The ghost employees that cost Davao City millions every year in her four-year term as mayor haunt her still. The confidential funds, although she was not entitled to it but granted to her by a cowed and compliant city council, ran into billions, and she had nothing to show for how the money was spent.
Ms. Duterte was granted billions of pesos by the previous Congress, when she was appointed secretary of the Department of Education. She was supposed to use the money for the construction of tens of thousands of much-needed classrooms all over the country, but she accomplished nothing of the sort.
Instead, she authorized the purchase of overpriced laptops, books, etc. These materials rot in warehouses to this very day. Apparently, she had no intention of distributing them.
Ms. Duterte will be carrying the weight of her father’s failed presidency: the extrajudicial killings, rampant corruption, and persecution of their political enemies.
Moreover, she lacks grace and charm to become president. Like her father she can only win through fear and intimidation. That won’t work in a nationwide election, especially with all her allies gone, except for the overarching influence of China’s Xi Jinping who is reportedly planted in the Duterte corner.
The China factor, true or not, should not be underestimated by Ms. Duterte’s political foes. – Rappler.com
