Politics
An Impeachment Fast Break in Manila
The hallmark of a Marcos maneuver is strategic patience
Feb 06, 2025
By: Manuel L. Quezon III
After months of behind-the-scenes maneuvering to attempt to stop it, Vice President Sara Duterte, who from inauguration day in 2022 was determined to follow her father into the presidency in 2028, has been impeached for allegedly plotting to assassinate President Ferdinand Marcos Jr, and amassing “hidden wealth,” which could admittedly be laid against most of the members of Congress.
In their defense, from the time relations with the Marcoses began to sour, the Dutertes pulled out all the stops: the former president appealed to the military to intervene, politically, to his loyalists to protest in the streets; he invoked Divine Protection from his closest allies, the disgraced pastor Apollo Quiboloy and the Iglesia ni Cristo church which has been a formidable political player for generations.
But in the end, the person does not seem to have translated into the political enough: the military, one of the two institutions (the diplomatic service being the other) that blunted Duterte’s pro-China policy during his presidency, held firm by declining to enter the fray, fond of him as it might still be. Pocket protests never reached critical mass, while the public’s opinion of his daughter fell more drastically than it did for her rival and antagonist, the president. Quiboloy, the pastor of the Kingdom of Jesus Christ, is in jail on charges of human and sex trafficking, money laundering, immigration fraud, and other offenses (though still running for office in a society where election is tantamount to absolution), and the Iglesia ni Cristo was able to mobilize but seems stymied on what to do next, short of outright rebellion, and thus, has revealed its limitations.
Add to this the at-times slow, at other times swift, but overall, relentless reduction in the political ranks of the Dutertes: from the start of the Marcos term in 2024, when the party Duterte Senior headed dwarfed Marcos Junior’s own nominal party, his party’s share in the House dwindled from 39 to 10 representatives, while Marcos’s grew from one to 13; at the same time, his first cousin (and Speaker of the House) wrested control of the durable Lakas-CMD party from former president (and former speaker) Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo and grew its ranks from 67 to over 100. And all other major parties are in the administration coalition.
A society with a weakened Catholic Church (which once upon a time could confer, or deny, the mandate of heaven, that is, moral legitimacy, on a government), mass media (which could make or break reputations by covering investigations in Congress) and Civil Society (which had expertise in organizing protests), the other three pillars (the military being the fourth) of the post-1986 Edsa Revolution political establishment, is one where political contests will be fought out within the confines of official institutions and the electoral arena. In other words, where patronage is the key to political success.
Here, a public that may be increasingly disenchanted with all leaders, but uninclined to adventurism in the streets, which has tuned out from a fragmented and thus no longer, mass media, and where adventurism no longer permeates the barracks or bishoprics, will take a spectator’s –or a mendicant’s—approach to any contest. If purely a spectator sport, then Filipinos respect a winner and despise a loser and whoever wields the levers of power more effectively, wins and is admired for it; if from the perspective of handouts, then whoever has the cash, wins.
Marcos: Dad knew how to play it. Photo from CNN
The hallmark of the second generation of Marcoses has been their ability to bide their time politically. This strategic patience was inherited from Marcos Senior who was known, in his time, for his “jujitsu,” meaning his ability to suddenly take everyone by surprise. Young or old, the Marcoses too are adept at disbursing government largesse: in fact, the remnants of civil society have railed, in recent months, over the manner in which the national budget was stuffed with provisions for cash grants directly disbursed by legislators to their constituents at the expense of programmed expenses for social programs administered on a more rationally and thus less politically helpful manner.
The government took a hit, went ahead anyway, the president piously protested, the speaker took the blame, just as he continued investigating the vice president while the president studiously distanced himself from the enterprise during the Christmas holidays, when no one wants any friction.
Then the House of Representatives, in the guise of attending a funeral service for a recently deceased former congressman on February 5, showed up in full force and was reported to be engaged in a secret caucus, sending tongues wagging. It rapidly leaked that impeachment was finally afoot in what can only be called a congressional fast break – it was to be the last session day of Congress before it formally adjourned in anticipation of this year’s midterm election, which traditionally serves as a referendum on the incumbent administration.
Impeachment complaints, which under the Philippine system can originate from the public (if endorsed by a member of the House) or the House itself, require a low threshold to result in an impeachment: only one third of the House needs to endorse it, superseding slow committee-level deliberations and voting, and instead automatically transmitting the complaints as articles of impeachment to the Senate for trial.
The spadework had been done in a series of amazingly disciplined and tightly-orchestrated hearings which still eked out results despite revealing that mass media has lost much of its amplifying power: most recently, despite a large percentage of Filipinos remaining ignorant of the charges (or the impeachment effort itself) a plurality favors impeachment anyway, a politically-strong starting point for a big push.
The remnants of the old anti-Marcos and Center-Left coalition beat everyone to the gun when an impeachment complaint was filed last December; disgruntled radical leftists in alliance with the speaker’s coalition, sheepishly filed theirs while grumbling their thunder had been stolen by their mortal enemies; but it was a fourth complaint, that revealed the true lay of the land. It was this complaint that the President’s own son, Ferdinand Alexander Marcos III, signed onto – the significance of his being the first signature in the list of endorsers was manifestly clear to all observers. He had, after all, reacted with outrage to the Vice President’s declaration she’d hired an assassin to bump off the President and others should that fate befall her.
There are seven charges to be prosecuted by House managers, who themselves can be said to have rehearsed the cases they will make during the devastating congressional hearings that the vice president at first tried to brush off, but ended up having to attend. The Senate, for its part, received the articles of impeachment but promptly went into recess without attending further to the task now in its lap. Would the Senate thus leave itself the option of convening as an impeachment court? It would do so in the twilight period after the midterms, but before the formal adjournment of the present Congress, beginning a task that will have to be completed when the new Congress convenes, with half of the Senate’s membership having been changed. To be acquitted, the Vice-President needs five senate votes; this narrows down the administration’s goal to preventing that number of pro-Duterte allies eking out a Senate win.
On February 6, the Senate president weighed in and said the Senate can start tackling impeachment on June 2 when it returns for the lame duck period for the current Congress. But it will mainly be the incoming 20th Congress which convenes on June 30, that will conduct the trial. And so, how much the political math will have changed by then depends on the outcome of the midterms, where the ability of a president to get his candidates elected to the upper house determines if the administration is perceived to have won or lost a national vote of confidence. An interesting sidenote in all this is that the president’s own elder sister, Imee Marcos, whose love-hate relationship with her brother has been immortalized in films she herself produced, has nailed her political colors to the mast: vowing to be eternally loyal to the vice president.
