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Philippines - Ferdinand Marcos Junior sworn in as President: From autocrat to autocrat

2022-06-30T16:46:42.218Z


The son of ex-dictator Marcos is sworn in as President of the Philippines. The clan's decades-long efforts to maintain a clean image have paid off: the family is back in power.


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Ferdinand Marcos Junior at his swearing-in ceremony in Manila on Thursday

Photo: Ezra Acayan/Getty Images

The old and new presidents, Rodrigo Duterte and Ferdinand Marcos Jr., met on stage a few weeks ago at the inauguration of Duterte's daughter Sara as the new vice president of the Philippines.

The new and the old, they "greeted each other cold-heartedly," said observers.

The two presidents, one reads, "were standing side by side, but they did not exchange a word."

Duterte, otherwise not at a loss for a word, didn't even have time for small talk with his successor.

On Thursday afternoon, Ferdinand "Bongbong" Marcos, 64, was sworn in as the new and 17th President of the Philippines.

He won the elections in May by a wide margin.

Now ex-President Duterte, known for his abuse and his brutal so-called “war on drugs” that claimed the lives of tens of thousands, is stepping down;

he had imagined the future political leadership of the Philippines differently.

Duterte wanted to see his daughter Sara Duterte as his successor.

During the election campaign, he described Marcos Junior as a "spoiled, weak leader."

The fact that Sara Duterte and "Bongbong" Marcos ultimately formed a team in the presidential elections and ran together, one as number two, the other as number one, Duterte is said to have accepted only with displeasure.

"He's coming home to the palace," the presenter said of Marcos Junior before his swearing-in;

It's the day the Marcos family has been waiting for, said mother Imelda Marcos, who many credit as the mastermind behind her son's presidency.

She was "very, very grateful for a second chance".

What she means by that: With his move into the Malacañang, Marcos Junior accomplished what his family had been preparing for decades.

The return of the Marcos clan to power and glory.

Marcos Sr. was overthrown in the 1986 People's Power Revolution and chased out of the country.

By the late 1980s, Filipinos were fed up with a President Marcos who ruled like a dictator under martial law, stealing billions from the treasury, driving the country into an economic crisis, violating human rights and extrajudicially killing thousands.

Critics fear that with the name Marcos, the autocracy that the outgoing Duterte had already diligently cultivated will fully return to Philippine politics.

The Marcos family then fled into exile in Hawaii, where Marcos Sr. died in 1989.

She returned to the Philippines in the early 1990s, humiliated but with a plan: to shed her reputation for being greedy and corrupt.

Downplaying the brutality under dictator Marcos.

30 years later, Ferdinand Marcos Junior is actually leading the family back to the walls of the Malacañang.

Inflation and rising food prices

Marcos said on election day in May that he didn't want to be measured by his father, but by his own actions.

However, he does not have to wait long for political challenges: The economy of the Philippines suffered massively in the corona crisis, millions have slipped into poverty.

Added to this are the effects of the war in Ukraine.

High energy and oil costs are driving up food prices.

Grocery prices, mainly fish, vegetables and meat, and non-alcoholic beverages rose by 4.9 percent year-on-year in May.

Marcos Junior has made fighting inflation, boosting the economy and increasing food production in the country his priority - proclaiming himself Minister of Agriculture to do so.

So far, he has not explained in more detail how he intends to tackle the problems that people in the Philippines are feeling so directly in their everyday life, at the supermarket checkout, when looking for a job.

For many who voted for Marcos in the election, his simple and populist promise was enough: "Make the Philippines great again."

»Friends for all, enemies for none«

As far as relations with China and the US are concerned, Marcos is likely to follow his predecessor's example, but not quite so much on one side.

Duterte had jeopardized historically close ties with the US and sought proximity to China in hopes of attracting investment from Beijing.

He partly overlooked the violent territorial disputes that have existed in the South China Sea for a long time;

in the sea area rich in fish and raw materials, parts of which all neighboring countries claim, including the Philippines – and which China claims almost entirely for itself.

Unlike Duterte, Marcos emphasized that he wanted to be a president of unity.

He will pursue a foreign policy along the lines of "friends for all, enemies for none," without describing exactly what that might mean.

Unlike Duterte, Marcos intends to at least uphold a ruling by the International Court of Arbitration in The Hague that rejected China's claims in 2016.

Marcos Junior, a former governor, congressman and senator in the northern Philippine province of Ilocos Norte, may do some work to erase his family's past crimes from the country's memory - and protect them from prosecution.

Critics fear that he could further push the image politics and reinterpret the history of the Philippines under his father.

That democratic institutions are being further eroded.

A government-appointed body charged with retrieving the missing billions from the Marcos era could be among the first casualties of his presidency.

Marcos announced he would protect his predecessor Duterte from an investigation by the International Criminal Court over his brutal drug war that has claimed tens of thousands of lives.

Which doesn't exactly suggest that the new president is keen to end authoritarianism in the Philippines.

Court reporting enters a new round

In line with this, the authorities announced last Wednesday, one day before the office was handed over, that they would close the online magazine "Rappler" by Nobel Prize winner Maria Ressa.

Ressa is one of Duterte's harshest critics and supported Marcos' opponent Leni Robredo in the election campaign.

The medium has appealed against the closure and can continue for the time being.

Observers describe the procedure as "politically motivated"; it is about shutting down a magazine critical of the government.

Marcos had avoided appearances and interviews in independent media during the election campaign.

Instead, he runs an aggressive campaign across social media platforms, most notably TikTok, YouTube and Facebook, where he reaches an audience of millions.

In highly professional videos, he spoofs history: the era under his father Marcos was a "golden age" for the Philippines.

Court reporting will continue.

At the end of July, a film will be released in cinemas around the world called »Maid in Malacañang«.

It is about the Marcos family's last 72 hours in the presidential palace before they were driven into exile.

The director is the man who has shot campaign videos for the Marcos family in the past.

This contribution is part of the Global Society project

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report on injustices in a globalized world, socio-political challenges and sustainable development.

The reports, analyses, photo series, videos and podcasts appear in a separate section in SPIEGEL's international section.

The project is long-term and is supported by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation (BMGF).

A detailed FAQ with questions and answers about the project can be found here.

AreaWhat does the funding look like in concrete terms?open

The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation (BMGF) has been supporting the project since 2019 for an initial period of three years with a total of around 2.3 million euros - around 760,000 euros per year.

In 2021, the project was extended by almost three and a half years until spring 2025 under the same conditions.

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The editorial content is created without the influence of the Gates Foundation.

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With the support of the Gates Foundation, major European media outlets such as The Guardian and El País have set up similar sections on their news sites with Global Development and Planeta Futuro respectively.

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In recent years, SPIEGEL has already implemented two projects with the European Journalism Center (EJC) and the support of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation: the "OverMorgen Expedition" on global sustainability goals and the journalistic refugee project "The New Arrivals ", within the framework of which several award-winning multimedia reports on the topics of migration and flight have been created.

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Source: spiegel

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