Vice President Sara Duterte, Facing Impeachment Trial in the Philippines Senate, Eyes the Presidency

Call it the Philippines’ father-daughter act. Leaders of a political dynasty at the country’s second largest city, Davao — the former president of the Philippines, Rodrigo Duterte, and his daughter, Sara, the current vice president — face trials 6,500 miles apart on charges reflecting the corruption and violence pervasive in Philippine society.The charges against Mr. Duterte, arrested at Manila in March 2025 and deported to the Hague, focus exclusively on the slaughter of thousands of people in his war on drugs while serving as president from 2016 to 2022. He goes on trial in November.Long before then, the Philippine Senate is expected to decide whether to oust Ms. Duterte as vice president. The lower House of the Philippines Congress has already impeached her — the equivalent of an indictment. Next week, she goes to trial before the 24 members of the Senate. Wearing bright crimson robes befitting their roles as judges, they will consider the evidence, question witnesses, and decide on the fate of the heiress to the Duterte dynasty.The trial promises to be a great show filled with charges, countercharges, insults, and brawling. Gunshots were already heard as one of the senators, wanted as a conspirator with Sara’s father, slipped into hiding. Another senator is claiming the process is illegal since he’s the rightful Senate president, not the man who’s replaced him as Senate president pro tempore.Through it all, Ms. Duterte, like her father, a former mayor of Davao, remains the leading candidate to succeed her arch enemy, the current president, Ferdinand Bongbong Marcos Jr.. Mr. Marcos cannot run for a second term under the constitution adopted after the downfall of his long-ruling father, Ferdinand, accused with his wife, Imelda, of massive corruption charges in the People Power Revolution of 1986.Not to worry. A survey conducted by a Philippine pollster, Pulse Asia, shows Ms. Duterte leading her closest rival by 10 percent of the vote “It took me 47 years to understand that my life was never meant to be only mine,” the youngest ever vice president, Ms. Duterte, now 48, said when she announced her candidacy in February. “Unlike others, I may not have been born just to chase happiness.”Mr. Marcos and Ms. Duterte, running mates in 2022 but elected on separate ballots, fell out as the charges against Ms. Duterte piled up. Most seriously, perhaps, she’s accused of having made a death threat against him, saying she had hired someone to kill him if “something bad happened to her,” according to the website Rappler. No, she was “not joking,” she assured those who might wonder if she was just sounding off for dramatic effect.As Davao mayor, Ms. Duterte was also said to have been a willing co-conspirator in her father’s campaign against drug sellers and users. A former death squad assassin, now a witness in the International Criminal Court case against her father at the Hague, has “implicated her in the extrajudicial killings in her hometown,” said Rappler. The witness reportedly said that she had “green-lit the continuation of the killings during her time as mayor.”Corruption, though, appears to have been the major consideration of the members of the Philippine Congress who voted to impeach her. She’s alleged to have pilfered, through false names and other gimmicks, at least $100 million in “confidential funds” from government coffers in her first 18 months as vice president while also serving, concurrently, as secretary of education. A former aide remembered transferring “large sums of money to several persons.”None of which dims her chances of campaigning for president if she can just get the Senate to find her not guilty of the charges for which the lower House has voted to impeach her. Although she might not go to jail, if ousted by the Senate she would not be eligible to run for office.Ms. Duterte, though, is nothing if not a survivor. She and her husband, her father’s law partner, adopted a daughter after she had a miscarriage. They then had three of their own, all now school age. She survived an attempt at ousting her two years ago when the Supreme Court found technical errors in the House impeachment. She’s the first vice president to be impeached and the first president or vice president to be impeached twice.After visiting her father in the Hague last year, Ms. Duterte said he told her: “Do not leave the country, do not leave the Philippines.” She’s not going anywhere but prefers to ignore his corollary advice: “Get out of politics.”

Vice President Sara Duterte, Facing Impeachment Trial in the Philippines Senate, Eyes the Presidency

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