One possible conclusion: He wanted to virtually disable the second mode of impeachment. Published in Rappler on July 31, 2025.
As a writer, I was struck by the tone of much of the obiter dicta that Senior Associate Justice Marvic Leonen deployed, like IEDs in a war of attrition, in Duterte vs House of Representatives.
In his discussion of the Supreme Court’s power of judicial review, for instance, he wrote: “When used properly, impeachment is a tool for accountability. When abused, it is a tool for political retribution.” And then, apropos of nothing at all, he added: “Impeachment is not a chance to settle political scores. Both the House of Representatives and the Senate have the responsibility to treat the impeachment process with seriousness, not as a chance to go after personalities or political opponents, but as a constitutional tool to address specific acts of misconduct.”
Unlike his legal arguments, this criticism of the political or outright partisan conduct of Congress comes out of the blue. Who said anything about score-settling? Nothing in the facts he scrupulously laid out throughout the ruling could be reasonably construed as proof of political retribution.
But he wasn’t done. “Allegations like corruption demand careful, evidence-based scrutiny. This process was never meant to be a stage for political theater or personal attacks. It is about determining whether a public official has committed actions that truly rise to the level of impeachable offenses…. When the focus shifts to the person rather than the alleged wrongdoing, the process loses its integrity, and impeachment risks becoming a blunt political weapon instead of a safeguard for public accountability.”
He himself does not make the direct connection between weapon and procedure. But his words imply, in the same way that a ticking clock suggests the lethal presence of a bomb, that the House of Representatives, by choosing the second mode of impeachment (the one-third provision), had turned impeachment into a blunt political weapon.
Again, nothing in the facts as presented really supports this connection. Why even bring it up? Or does Justice Leonen think the mere recourse to the second mode already weaponizes impeachment?
There is no collective appetite in the Senate to confront VP Sara Duterte. But the 18-5 vote on June 10 does not mean a majority of senators all want the same thing. Published in Rappler on June 24, 2025.
Was the 18-5 vote in the Senate impeachment court on June 10 indicative of the depth of support among senators for Vice President Sara Duterte? The dynamics are complicated, but the answer is no.
The original motion Sen. Bato dela Rosa included in his privilege speech was for the outright dismissal of the impeachment case against the Vice President. It was not the first time he had raised the idea; the week before, he used a draft resolution to launch a trial balloon. If Duterte’s support in the Senate was in fact deep enough, the trial balloon would have gathered momentum and the motion would have been carried.
But Sen. Alan Peter Cayetano amended the motion, to one that ordered the remanding of the articles of impeachment to the House of Representatives, precisely because the original motion lacked the votes. Let me emphasize that. Dismissing the case would have ended the impeachment trial even before it began. But there weren’t enough senators willing to ignore the Senate’s constitutional duty to proceed with the trial, however “forthwith” is defined.
His papal writings sting because they assume that ‘the media’ is a threat to church and society. But he also understood the role and responsibility of journalism in a profound and revelatory way. Published in Rappler on May 6, 2025—15 days after his passing.
In his many writings, Pope Francis almost always referred to the media in negative terms. Exceptions exist: His Messages on World Communications Day (12 in all) and his occasional speeches on media-related events spoke of the media more comprehensively. He certainly had high hopes for journalism, and made himself more available to journalists than any previous pope.
But, in his other writings, he referred to the media as a looming or present threat to both church and society. In other words, when the focus of a document or a speech of his is not on the media itself, the media figures as a source of danger.
Let me limit my examples to his three encyclicals and his first apostolic exhortation. In Laudato Si, “media” is mentioned six times; in Fratelli Tutti, 14 times; in Dilexit Nos, once. In Evangelii Gaudium, the exhortation which served as a blueprint for his papacy, “media” is mentioned six times and “journalists” once. But the meaning is almost always negative: a source of risk.
Coming to terms with a post-American order, in Brussels and Berlin. Published in Rappler on April 22, 2025.
DE GAULLE AND ADENAUER. A memorial in Berlin, honoring two giants of post-war Europe.
A spokesperson for the North Atlantic Treaty Organization phrased it delicately. “Particularly these days, politics are so unpredictable.” She means the politics of Donald Trump. In the second week of April, when I and two other journalists from Asia visited with officials of the European Union and NATO, with policy experts in think tanks and with colleagues in European media, Trump was especially unpredictable about tariffs. He had also been unpredictable about Ukraine, about Taiwan, about NATO itself.
“Even the people within Trump’s inner circle don’t know what he’s thinking,” a global governance specialist based in Berlin said. Trump — the metaphor came readily to hand — is “like a child.”
The difficult questions converge on the same imponderable: the Trump factor. The future of NATO? Relying on the United States “is a concern at this time,” a Dutch official said. The fate of Taiwan? “The question is what would the U.S. do, which is of course hard to know right now,” a senior German journalist said. “Who knows where Trump stands on Taiwan?”
No, extrajudicial killings did not in fact make the public feel safe during the Duterte years. Column published in Rappler on March 27, 2025.
To the genuine shock of many, that someone as powerful as Rodrigo Duterte could be arrested and then flown to a jail cell in The Hague, influence operations have added layers of disinformation.
Our Gaby Baizas and Pauline Macaraeg reported that, on the day of the arrest, Duterte’s “supporter networks” were already “exploiting the platform (Facebook) with paid ads and coordinated behavior to manipulate online discourse.”
Two weeks later, journalist Regine Cabato identified four “emerging disinformation narratives” favoring Duterte (all of which had already surfaced in the Rappler report): painting the former president as the victim, creating the illusion of majority public support, discrediting the victims of extrajudicial killings, and smearing institutions like the media and the International Criminal Court itself.
I would like to add one more narrative, which emerged well before the arrest but now seems to have been accepted, or simply assumed, even by some of the critics of Duterte and his brutal war on drugs: that the EJKs made the public feel safe.
This is a terrible mistake, and compounds the tragedy of the violence with the silent violence of forgetting.
Rappler column No. 50, published on March 12, 2025.
Rodrigo Duterte made three calamitous mistakes in the last seven years that, through their accumulated weight, brought him, a former strongman, directly to Villamor Airbase and pushed him up the stairs of the chartered Gulfstream taking him to The Hague.
The first mistake was withdrawing the country from the jurisdiction of the International Criminal Court (ICC). This may seem counterintuitive, even incoherent. Wasn’t withdrawal meant precisely to avoid the possibility of prosecution? But in fact this was a tempting of the very fate he sought to avoid.
I wrote in March 2018, a few days after he issued his order: “President Duterte’s decision to withdraw the Philippines from the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court will not protect him; rather, it has only made him even more vulnerable to a potential criminal case. No amount of hiding behind the flag, or the ostentatious kissing of it, can mask the message his decision sends. He is saying: I do not consider myself accountable.”
It was the sort of legal maneuver that Duterte learned from his years as a fiscal: prosecution is in the end not about facts and the law, but rather about the calculated application of power through the processes of the law. That is why, as he proudly said in one of his many midnight press conferences, he used to plant evidence or intrigue, to trap the accused he had already judged guilty. Withdrawing from the ICC was a power move, not only in the sense that the architect of foreign policy could order it, but also in the sense that the order was issued to protect the issuer.
Published in Rappler on March 6, 2025. (With an excerpt from a speech I read at the 27th anniversary rites of the Akbayan party list group.)
Is the 2025 midterm election on track to be the most expensive in Philippine history?
It will almost certainly be the most expensive midterm election ever, says Jay Bautista, managing director of Kantar Media. Will it cost more than the 2022 presidential elections, the most expensive of all time? Maybe not, “but it will come close.”
It’s not ideal, but Senate President Chiz Escudero’s schedule for the impeachment trial of Vice President Sara Duterte may be the least bad of the available options. Published in Rappler on February 19, 2025.
Here’s an argument: An impeachment trial that starts in the 19th Congress makes complete legal sense only if it is concluded during the 19th Congress.
If the trial extends beyond June 30, when 12 newly elected or reelected senators take their oath of office, then the Senate would be changing judges in the middle of the trial. Assume that the Senate of the 20th Congress includes five to seven first-term senators. How can they be expected to render justice in their role as senator-judges if they were not involved in the first stages of the trial?
If evidence has already been presented, would these be presented again? Would witnesses be recalled to repeat their testimony, to benefit the new senator-judges AND to safeguard the rights and interests of the impeached? A trial that spans two Congresses does not only raise worrying legal questions; it creates troubling political implications too.
In late 2014, the redoubtable Anna Sobrepeña, the editor in chief of Lifestyle Asia at the time, asked me to write the cover story for the magazine’s January 2015 issue, to mark Pope Francis’ visit to the Philippines. I focused on the phenomenon of a pope who spoke plainly. Allow me to post the story here, in tribute to the extraordinary man the world buried today.
This is an essay on a plain-speaking pope, but it begins in Greek. One solitary word of Greek, which Pope Francis used to great effect. Please bear with me.
Parresia entered Christian discourse through the example of St. Paul. It means bold or candid speech, but between friends. The New Testament scholar J. Paul Sampley writes: “In Paul’s time … the term’s “social context” was friendship, and parresia is the frank speech delivered by a friend, and its aim is the friend’s improvement …”
Fast forward two thousand years, to October 2014, and Pope Francis’ rousing concluding speech at the Extraordinary Synod on the Family. He is describing the candid exchange that marked the synod, noting the “moments of running fast, as if wanting to conquer time and reach the goal as soon as possible; other moments of fatigue, as if wanting to say ‘enough’; other moments of enthusiasm and ardor.” He lists the “tensions and temptations” that marked some of the discussion, and then he confesses:
“Personally I would be very worried and saddened if it were not for these temptations and these animated discussions; this movement of the spirits, as St Ignatius called it … if all were in a state of agreement, or silent in a false and quietist peace. Instead, I have seen and I have heard—with joy and appreciation—speeches and interventions full of faith, of pastoral and doctrinal zeal, of wisdom, of frankness and of courage: and of parresia.”
The Marcos administration will win big in the Senate, but a few of Duterte’s allies will slip through. We’ve seen this film before. Published on February 16, 2025.
Pulse Asia released the results of its January 18-25 survey on February 10, while Octa Research and Development shared the results of its January 25-31 poll the following day. On February 12, I sat down with Dr. Ronald Holmes, president of Pulse Asia, and Professor Ranjit Rye, president of Octa, for separate, equally engrossing conversations about the prospects of the senatorial candidates.
(You can view Episode 106 of In the Public Squarehere.)
Holmes and Rye both recognized the volatility in the rankings. “Maybe the top quarter seems to be a bit more stable,” Holmes said. The top quarter would refer to the three candidates with the highest voters’ preference ratings: Erwin Tulfo with 62.8%, Bong Go with 50.4%, and Tito Sotto with 50.2%. The rest of the probable winners (11) and those immediately outside the probable winners’ circle (4) will figure in one of the most crowded, and likely the most expensive, of Senate elections.
Now that she has passed the point of no return, which options will the Vice President choose? The one from 2001, or the one from 1957? Published in Rappler on June 21, 2024.
The future of the Duterte political brand rests on the 2028 vote, and the run-up to it.
Davao City itself remains the family stronghold. The former president’s second son Baste Duterte easily won election as mayor in 2022, his vote total more than eight times that of his closest challenger. Rep. Pulong Duterte, who cruised to victory with 15 times more votes than the next candidate, is poised to win a third term in 2025. And Vice President Sara Duterte herself won the vice presidential contest in the city with 10% more votes than the mayor-elect; her vote total was 55 times that of the vice presidential candidate with the second highest number of votes. (Interestingly, the “people’s justice” constituency of Sen. Raffy Tulfo in Davao City was not enough to place him in the first 12 Senate slots; he came in 13th.)
The answers she gave in two Senate hearings were mystifying, and deeply problematic. But then the public discourse swirling about her is equally cringeworthy. Published in Rappler on May 29, 2024.
Without access to the so-called military “intel” that has reportedly reached some senators, I can only conclude from her answers in two Senate hearings that Alice Guo, the mayor of Bamban, Tarlac, is a willing corporate dummy.
There IS reason to think that she was a mere stand-in for some principal. She said she didn’t know who some of her fellow incorporators were (even though some of them were also listed as incorporators in other businesses she was a part of); she said she didn’t know how much rental income the Baofu compound in Bamban earned, even though she said that before divesting she owned 50% of the company; she said she couldn’t say exactly how much her businessman-father gave her, or how often, but only that the money came in large amounts—half a million, or a million, or 2 million, at a time.
There IS reason for the Presidential Anti-Organized Crime Commission (PAOCC), which led the raid on the Philippine offshore gaming operator (POGO) located in the compound, to believe that she remains involved in Baofu. Part of the evidence trail leads back to her: A letter of no objection she filed on behalf of Hongsheng Gaming Technology, the original company with a POGO license; utility statements for Hongsheng up until November 2023, six months after its license had been canceled and over a year since Guo became mayor; a vehicle in the compound registered to her; a current Tarlac Electric Cooperative bill in her name and title (“Mayor Alice Guo, Pandan, Bamban”).
The communist insurgency is at its weakest. Counter-intuitively, now is the best time for both sides to resume peace talks and reach a peace deal. Published in Rappler on May 11, 2024.
A new report by the International Crisis Group published in April concludes that the “Maoist insurgency in the Philippines is at its lowest ebb in decades.” From a high of 25,000 armed regulars in the last years of the Marcos regime, the number of rebels is down to somewhere between 1,200 and 2000 – roughly speaking, close to the same number when the first President Marcos used the then-new insurgency as a pretext for imposing martial rule in 1972.
The insurgency is hampered by serious organizational challenges, including “perhaps the most severe leadership crisis in its history” (provoked not only by the death of its founder but also by “the killing [by the Philippine military] of several high-ranking commanders over the last three years”); a reduction in revenues generated from so-called revolutionary taxation (because of the loss of territory and “the arrest of financial operatives”); and internal confusion (“differences among cadres regarding the movement’s political and military direction”).
These and other crises can be seen reflected, even without the benefit of context, in the message the Communist Party of the Philippines published to mark its 55th anniversary. Without reference to the combination of military pressure and development outreach that the government has been leveling against the insurgency, the message may read as yet another (though still remarkably candid) exercise in the revolutionary discipline of “criticism and self-criticism.”
But read in the context of the rebellion’s continuing loss of leaders, fighters, base areas, resources, and informal support structures, these passages from the December 26, 2023, message confirm that the movement is, in fact, in bad shape.
The untimely passing of Floy Quintos does not only deprive us of our leading playwright; it also took away from us one of our most important public intellectuals. Published in Rappler on April 30, 2024.
He would have rejected the very idea, that he was a leading public intellectual. He would have said something like, “Naaaaaaa! But thank you.” (That was his reply on Messenger when I once paid him a compliment.) But he was wrestling with important, consequential ideas in his plays, and while his plays invariably made us feel things, they also made us think things through.
A powerful example from The Reconciliation Dinner comes at the end of a long passage where Fred Valderrama, one half of the “pink” couple, marks their estrangement from their erstwhile best friends, the “red” couple Dina and Bert Medina, by recalling the milestones of outrage.
“Kami ni Susan…di naman kami leftist. Di kami aktibista. Simpleng tao lang kami. Dun lang kami sa tama, sa disente, sa dapat. And yet…wala.” (Susan and I, we’re not even leftists, we’re not activists. We’re simple people. We just side with what’s right, what’s decent, what’s moral. And yet…nothing happened.)
Then he adds: “You know what I really hated about the Duterte administration? Even the simplest, most human choices…ginawang battlefields.”
Today, the National Museum of Fine Arts unveils “Josephine Sleeping,” Rizal’s tribute in stone to his wife and companion-in-exile, Josephine Bracken. I plan to visit the museum again to see the sculpture with my own eyes, but the other day, while at the museum, I took pictures of some of Rizal’s other sculptures already on display. They include a tortured St. Paul the Hermit desperately hanging on to a cross (1893), a gift to his teacher (and rival in religious debate) Pablo Pastells SJ; a regal-looking Ricardo Carcinero, governor of the district that included Dapitan, Rizal’s place of exile; and “Mother’s Revenge” (1894), a powerful allegory of both oppression and resistance.
The controversial interview with the First Lady (this piece was published in Rappler on April 20, 2024) signals a new stage in the unraveling of the UniTeam.
For the second time, First Lady Liza Araneta Marcos has appeared in a candid and controversial video. Unlike the first one, which came out in January 2023 and which she herself recorded on the grounds of the presidential palace, the second video was an extended interview; it was released Friday and hosted by Anthony Taberna.
The most talked-about portion of the interview was her direct answer to the question about her relationship with Vice President Sara Duterte, her husband’s running mate. She said Sara was now a “bad shot,” Philippine English for someone who’s in disfavor. She explained that she was hurt when the vice president attended a political rally in Davao City last January and was seen laughing when the former president and Sara’s father Rodrigo Duterte called President Marcos Junior a drug addict. (Mrs. Marcos used the term Duterte used, “bangag” or stoned.)
“You went to a rally, then your President gets called a drug addict, right, and you’re going to laugh? Is that right?” she asked in a mix of Filipino and English. Then she added in English, for good measure: “Even Leni [Robredo] never did that.”
[Playing catch-up again!] This column making distinctions between journalism, media, and the press (following Jay Rosen) was published in Rappler on April 13, 2024. Confusing these all-too-familiar terms with one another allows disinformation peddlers like SMNI to claim rights they don’t possess.
Here’s an anecdote from the 1990s. A friend’s brother was waiting for a ride outside a convenience store in a gasoline station when a pair of men pulled a knife on him. Suddenly, a female journalist rushed out of the store, brandished her press ID, and ran toward the group, shouting, “Media ‘to! Media ‘to” (I’m media)! The startled men scattered, leaving the brother unharmed.
Much about this story seems incredible, even apocryphal. The woman rushing out to break up a crime in progress is only the most outstanding detail. But the fearless or even reckless use of press identification as a kind of shield hits different now, a decade and a half after the Ampatuan massacre and mere years after the Duterte presidency demonized the press wholesale.
Recalling the story now, I am struck by how dated—that is to say how characteristic of a particular time—the encounter was. It couldn’t have happened during the martial law era; I doubt if it can happen these days. It strikes me now as a relic from the last 15 years of the 20th century and the first 10 of the 21st, a high point for what we now call legacy media.
The second Marcos administration has deteriorated from a ‘stable era’ to a ‘chaotic’ one. Here’s a possible explanation. Published in Rappler on April 1, 2024.
The success of the Marcos-Duterte electoral alliance in 2022 was so massive it could be said that the political equivalent of Newton’s law of inertia applied to it. A body moving at constant speed in a straight line will continue moving at constant speed in a straight line unless a force acted upon it. The alliance—if all went well, if the different parts moved at the same speed and kept to the same line—had a lock on the 2028 presidential election, which in our part of the universe determines other political possibilities.
And then a force acted upon it. Now the alliance has descended into a war of the dynasties, between the Marcoses and the Dutertes, and an opening is starting to form, not necessarily for the political opposition but perhaps for a political third force led by someone like the populist, and popular, Senator Raffy Tulfo.
But the reality of politics has always been messy; perhaps Newton’s laws of motion cannot really explain it. For some analysts, the break between the Marcoses and the Dutertes was inevitable; inertia was never an explanation. But some politicians believed in the alliance, and continue to do so even in the middle of the dynastic war; the law of action and reaction governs their pragmatic attempts to end it.
Another way to look at the political situation today, to understand the “chaos” affecting the political class, is to borrow the theory at the heart of the popular Netflix series, 3-Body Problem, based on Cixin Liu’s The Three-Body Problemtrilogy.
He was the writer as columnist, earning his large and loyal audience through sheer skill in writing. But the power of his prose depended on the clarity of his thought. Published in Rappler on November 11, 2023.
When my students at the University of the Philippines hosted Conrad de Quiros at a forum they organized for my opinion writing class, back in 2009, they prepared an unusual reception for him. Instead of the usual set-up, with the speaker in front of the auditorium at the lectern and the audience seated in the usual rectangle of neat rows, my class covered the entire front part of the College of Mass Communications auditorium in handwoven mats and then spread throw pillows all over the place. In the middle of that large, improvised, banig circle was a lone chair, reserved for Conrad. It was a sit-in, the perfect setting for a forum my students titled “Jamming with Conrad.”
I was not prepared for it (my students do all the work in the forums; my only role is to invite the speakers), but when I walked into the auditorium I immediately realized it was an inspired idea. We all ended up literally sitting at his feet, while he took questions and gave calm, calming answers.
Some of his answers were deeply provocative, because Conrad was a provocative thinker. But in person, Conrad was a gentle, thoughtful presence. My students in 2009 must have come up with the concept for the forum because they saw Conrad as a guru to listen to, someone to jam with: long hair, crisp English, with an earned reputation for both hard drinking and fearless writing. And to borrow the rhythm of his own prose for a moment, Conrad did not only look the part, he did not only act the part, he WAS the part.
This is classified in the Rappler archives as a Newsstand column, but in fact it is a review, specifically commissioned by our executive editor Glenda Gloria, timed for release on the day Pat Evangelista’s book Some People Need Killing was launched in New York. (In the end, we decided to run it the morning after, so as not to compete with the news reports about the launch.) Published in Rappler on October 18, 2023.
Rodrigo Duterte was the only candidate for Philippine president who promised to kill thousands of his potential voters to solve what he called a drug crisis; he would fill Manila Bay with the corpses of as many as a hundred thousand drug addicts, he said. Once voted into office, he made good on that promise.
Some People Need Killing, the journalist Patricia Evangelista’s much-anticipated account of Duterte’s promised war on drugs, includes in its breadth of detail and casualty count and dramatic incident some of those very Duterte voters who ended up killed in Duterte’s war. There is even an entire chapter on Duterte supporters consumed by regret. This may have been an effort on Evangelista’s part to end her harrowing, thoughtful, absorbing account on a less bleak note, but she is above all else a reporter, and her faithful reporting does not sugarcoat reality. Thousands of extrajudicial killings had changed the country irrevocably. A nation of martyrs has become a country of killers. Some of the early vigilantes called it right. We are Duterte, they said.
Evangelista’s account is a memoir of her coverage of the EJKs and what led her to it (it is subtitled “A Memoir of Murder in My Country”); but it is also reportage, some new and some already published but expanded, filled with even more detail and drawn with more context, all of it reworked into a whole; it is, lastly, an analysis, of how a democracy can die.
The complicated but lasting legacy of Benedict XVI. Published in Rappler on January 4, 2023.
Benedict XVI was a pope of paradoxes: the progressive peritus in Vatican II turned conservative gatekeeper of Council teaching, the extraordinarily gifted theologian who limited debate and silenced Catholic academics, above all the guardian of reform whose startling resignation reformed the Roman Catholic Church in the most fundamental way.
His death at the age of 95 was truly the end of an era: He is the last of the popes (after John XXIII, Paul VI, John Paul I, and John Paul II) directly involved in the Second Vatican Council, which convened from 1962 to 1965. Pope Francis, who was still a Jesuit scholastic at the time, was ordained a priest only in 1969.
It is also possible that, if the pope who succeeds Pope Francis comes from the Global South again, Benedict may be the last European to serve as pope for some time to come. It is almost certain that the age of European dominance in the Church ended with Benedict’s death. Or to be more precise, the dominance of the thinking that understands the Church as a European institution, highlighted by Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger’s second reason for choosing Benedict as his papal name—to honor the great St. Benedict, he said, who “evokes the Christian roots of Europe.”
One of many lessons from the Twitter fiasco: Billionaires make up, and bankers believe, all kinds of bullshit. Published in Rappler on November 25, 2022.
To buy Twitter, Elon Musk had to pay not only the $44-billion acquisition price but also what are called closing costs. The total amount was substantially higher: $46.5 billion. A consortium of major banks, including Morgan Stanley, Barclays, and Bank of America, provided Musk with almost $13 billion in debt financing. In other words, aside from putting up his own money (largely by selling Tesla stock) and convincing investment funds to take a stake, Musk had to take out a loan.
At around the time the acquisition was completed, at the end of October, the banks were already looking at a potential loss of half a billion dollars if they had sold their debt then. Now, according to a Reuters report based on a Financial Times story, the banks are looking to hold on to their debt (that is, not sell them off), having “conceded they will be stuck holding the debt on their books for months or even longer and will probably end up incurring huge losses on the financing package.”
Question: How was it possible that ostensibly responsible bankers approved a multi-billion-dollar loan that started losing value the moment the loan was cleared?
The origin story of the Filipino strongman comes with a companion, and now appears with a twist. Published in Rappler on October 12, 2022.
I was asked to reflect on the Philippine experience with political strongmen. Well, I have four points to make, and one image to share.
First point. If the conference theme, the return of political strongmen, resonates with us in the Philippines, it is only secondarily because the son and namesake of the dictator Ferdinand Marcos is now the president. It is primarily because the brutal, foul-mouthed, chaotic Rodrigo Duterte paved the way for the return of the Marcoses.
President Duterte figures in the rogues’ gallery in Ruth Ben-Guiat’s Strongmen: Mussolini to the Present, the book that helped redirect the spotlight to the term. Ben-Ghiat’s book has many arresting anecdotes but suffers (I must agree with Francis Fukuyama, in his New York Times review) from the lack of a conceptual framework. Whichever way you define “strongman,” however, you can argue that Duterte meets the broad definition: illiberal, populist, violent, authoritarian, the evangelist of the macho gospel. Duterte created the conditions that ultimately allowed Ferdinand Marcos Jr. to become president.
"exposing false appearances of his own society and pointing at the systematic abuse of power; giving expression to his people’s deepest sense of how they ought to live, using the common language which he raises to a new pitch of intensity and argumentative power; reiterating the regulative principles by which one might set things right; and insisting that there are other forms of falseness and other, equally legitimate, hopes and aspirations. Such a critic is bound but never wholly bound to the life he shares with others. He is never uncritical of those in power or of his allies whose similar complaints he often regards as wrongly directed or incompletely stated. He is at once inside and outside, a member apart, a critical patriot, civilly disobedient, committed to a democratic politics that is never democratic enough." - J. Peter Euben
![[Newsstand] What’s next for VP Sara: Go Macapagal or go Arroyo?](https://www.rappler.com/tachyon/2024/06/tl-vp-sara-duterte-go-macapagal-go-arroyo-1.jpg)
![[Newsstand] Time to negotiate peace again with the CPP-NPA](https://www.rappler.com/tachyon/2024/05/negotiate-peace-again-may-10-2024.jpg)
![[Newsstand] ‘Sing. Remember. Resist.’](https://www.rappler.com/tachyon/2024/04/floy-quintos-april-30-2024.jpg)
![[Newsstand] Pope Francis’ advice to journalists](https://www.rappler.com/tachyon/2025/05/Pope-Francis-advice-to-journalists-1.jpg)
![[Newsstand] Misremembering Duterte’s war on drugs](https://www.rappler.com/tachyon/2025/03/MISREMEMBERING-WAR-ON-DRUGS-3-26-25.jpg)
![[Newsstand] Three mistakes that trapped Duterte](https://www.rappler.com/tachyon/2025/03/Duterte-Mistake-March-12-2025-copy.jpg)
![[Newsstand] What do we do about Alice Guo?](https://www.rappler.com/tachyon/2024/05/What-do-we-do-about-Alice-Guo.jpg)
Ed Yong
John Nery | Newsstand
You must be logged in to post a comment.