JakartaPost/AFP-May 11
The son of late Philippine dictator Ferdinand Marcos cemented a landslide presidential election victory on Tuesday, after Filipinos bet a familiar-but-tainted dynasty could ease rampant poverty — while dismissing warnings the clan’s return would deepen corruption and weaken democracy. With an initial count almost complete, Ferdinand “Bongbong” Marcos Junior had secured over 56 percent of the vote and more than double the tally of his nearest rival, liberal Leni Robredo. His now unassailable lead of 16 million-plus votes spells another astonishing reversal in the fortunes of the Marcos family, who have gone from the presidential palace to pariahs and back again in the space of a few decades. The Marcos victory is a hammer blow to millions of Filipinos who hoped to reverse course after six bloody years of increasingly authoritarian rule by outgoing President Rodrigo Duterte. Far from repudiating Duterte’s excesses, Filipino voters elected his daughter Sara as vice president by a landslide in a parallel vote. In 1986, Marcos senior and kleptocratic first lady Imelda Marcos were chased into exile by the “People Power” revolution. Marcos junior steadfastly refused to denounce his family’s brutal and corrupt excesses in a campaign marked by a relentless online whitewashing of history. With memories of the regime fading with time and muddied by countless misleading Facebook posts, Filipino voters turned to Marcos to rekindle past glories that were mostly imagined. Read more at: https://www.thejakartapost.com/paper/2022/05/10/philippines-sees-marcos-family-return-to-power.html.
