Does Marcos Win Set Stage for Philippines Return to Bad Old Days?

MANILA — The saga of the Marcos dynasty has turned 360 degrees since I heard the helicopters flying the family out of Malacañang Palace in February 1986, in the closing act of what everyone called “the People Power Revolution.”More than 35 years later, Ferdinand “Bongbong” Marcos Jr., son of the late president, is now set to reconquer the palace — presumably with his mother, the widow Imelda, she of the 1,800 shoes and hundreds of bras and girdles, bags full of jewelry, and $10 billion or so tucked away in Swiss bank accounts.Sitting in the coffee shop of the old Manila Hilton on UN Avenue on that evening in 1986, I shared the sense that democracy had triumphed, that wrong had been righted, and that the Philippines was on the right side of history. Grabbing a cab to Malacañang Palace, I joined hundreds of others looking over what the Marcos clan had left behind. Food was still on the table, and Marcos’s phony medals, which he said he had garnered while serving in American forces against the Japanese, hung on the walls.The Philippines had entered a new era under the late Corazon Aquino, elected as president in a “snap election” that Marcos had called in a last-minute bid to salvage his dying rule. Aquino, of course, was revered as the noble widow whose husband, Benigno Aquino Jr., had been killed as he walked down the steps of a plane carrying him back from exile in the United States, where he had been lionized by academic taste-makers at Havard.The comeback of the Marcos name has to go down in history as a miracle of a family’s undying drive, a commentary on the power of social media, a reversion to the bad old days, and an embarrassment for a nation that had thoroughly rejected the elder Marcos for his record of pervasive, profligate corruption on top of harsh dictatorship.Then was then. Now the younger Mr. Marcos, 64, appears as a hero to the vast majority who view this scion of one of the country’s richest families as the hope for relief from poverty and arrogance at the hands of all those folks with more money, schooling, and breeding. It’s all very puzzling to people trying to figure out how Mr. Marcos could have gained such credibility six years after he lost an election for vice president to Leni Robredo, the woman whom he soundly thrashed at the polls on Monday.“Bongbong is the son of a former dictator,” a young man who identified himself only as Christian said while watching the returns. “That should be enough to disqualify him.” He asked: Would people “willingly vote” for the Castro regime in Cuba or a son of Vladimir Putin?Proponents of Ms. Robredo felt she offered a certain aspirational hope, aiming to pull the mass of Filipinos out of poverty while combating the human rights abuses that characterized the rule of the outgoing president, Rodrigo Duterte. “Her platform is focused on helping the underserved communities,” a woman who said her name was Francesca said. “She has shown this during the pandemic. She has no record of corruption, which speaks to a lot of Filipinos.”Academic observers, however, see almost a social awakening in the renaissance of the Marcos family.Mr. Marcos “enjoys a tough-to-beat combination of clan bailiwicks from north to south,” scholar Paul Hutchcroft of Australia National University told me, citing his support from Mr. Marcos’s stronghold in Ilocos Norte province far north of Manila and the adoration of Imelda in her native Leyte Province to the south. Also, Mr. Hutchcroft, who was visiting the central city of Cebu, said there’s the power of the outgoing president, whose daughter, Sara, allied with Mr. Marcos in a separate election for vice president. Thumping her rival by a three-to-one margin, Sara Duterte guarantees her father’s influence and power as the dominant leader of the large southern port city of Davao long after he’s no longer president.Lest we forget the billions of dollars that Ferdinand and Imelda Marcos purloined from the state, Mr. Hutchcroft notes that Mr. Marcos “has enormous financial resources, critical in this patronage-oriented polity.” All that, he said, enhances “a very well-tuned social media effort that has already won over many voters with its clever narrative of historical revisionism.”Don’t even think about persuading adherents of Mr. Marcos that his father and mother were enormous crooks. Those to whom I spoke either knew nothing about their lurid past or said they did not believe what they had heard.A vacationing Canadian, Mark Dake, could not believe what he was hearing.“I talked to taxi drivers and locals,” he told me via email. “They praised him. They were convinced Mr. Marcos Sr. hadn’t stolen a penny, but invested the billions in roads, schools and hospitals.”Mr. Dake sees the Philippines’ supine media as partly to blame. Mr. Marcos “has the Philippines’ TV stations, newspapers, radio stations and internet in his pocket,” he told me. “How else can you explain the public buying such hogwash that Marcos Sr. was an angel. I think Marcos Jr. has got millions of dollars and bought the media for the election. The tiny elite in the Philippines run the country.”Under the rule of the elder Marcos, only one or two government-dominated newspapers were published; after he was thrown out, the media rose again, lustily denouncing the evils of his rule. Columnists still dare to criticize Mr. Marcos Jr., but one has to wonder how long they’ll be able to do so before silence again falls over a country once hailed for the rise of true democracy against the evils of dictatorial rule as practiced by Ferdinand Marcos Sr.

Does Marcos Win Set Stage for Philippines Return to Bad Old Days?

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