Filipinos should expect 2018 to be the year when the country’s constitutional democracy is replaced with “constitutional authoritarianism” as President Rodrigo Duterte and his allies continue to lay the groundwork for an eventual dictatorship, Sen. Leila De Lima said on Tuesday. Thousands of people in the Philippines attended a day of protest in September over Duterte’s controversial law-and-order policies. Three turbulent decades after the Philippines shed dictatorship, President Rodrigo Duterte is offering a return to authoritarian rule as a solution to all the problems democracy has failed to fix.