Ferdinand 'Bongbong' Marcos Jr after voting on May 9 (Image: AP/Kyodo)

Ferdinand “Bongbong” Marcos Jr is on the cusp of becoming president of the Philippines, South-East Asia’s oldest democracy, in a remarkable reversal of fortune for the family that was run out of the country in 1986 following his father’s corrupt dictatorship.

Marcos Jr, 64, received almost 30 million votes in the May 9 election, more than double those of his closest rival after more than 90% of votes were tallied last night. His father ruled the country from 1965 to 1986, and with his high-living wife Imelda they stole billions of dollars from the country and had countless thousands of those who opposed or stood in his way killed before he was exiled. He died in Hawaii in 1989.

Marcos defeated Vice-President Leni Robredo, a human rights lawyer and advocate for the poor, in a triumph of populism and defeat for liberal democracy in a campaign marred by industrial-strength misinformation on social media. Blanket coverage on Facebook, YouTube and TikTok has peddled a rose-tinted version of the family’s history, describing the Marcos years that included martial law as “the golden years” and positioning his son as the rightful heir who would restore the country to glory.

Marcos Jr has already served as governor, congressman and senator; his sister Imee is a senator, and his mother served four terms as a congresswoman.

“We’re seeing the impact of digital disinformation campaigns that don’t just happen during election periods,” Jason Vincent Cabanes, a professor and researcher at the communication department of De La Salle University in Manila, told Channel News Asia. “It’s a sustained kind of campaign over many years to try to burnish the reputation of a particular politician or make people more open to particular policies.”

Robredo emerged as his main challenger in a crowded 10-person field that included former boxing champion Senator Manny Pacquiao. In 2016 she narrowly defeated Marcos Jr in a system where the vice-president is elected separately. 

The prime regional implication of a Marcos win are fears he will draw the country closer to China. This happened in fits and starts under the outgoing president Rodrigo Duterte despite being armed with an international court of arbitration win over China regarding disputed waters.

Like six other of its neighbours, the Philippines is in dispute with China over its encroachment into the South China Sea — all of which it claims under its notorious nine-dash line. There has been a series of maritime standoffs with Chinese vessels occupying Philippines shoals.

Duterte had commenced his term vowing to to shift the Philippines’ foreign policy from long-standing treaty ally the United States to China and Russia. Yet his efforts to cosy up to Beijing had appeared to fail, and instead of ending the visiting forces agreement with the US — which had been frozen during some of his term — it was restored last July.

The US has five military bases in the Philippines that it considers strategically essential. Duterte was also the first South-East Asian leader to recognise the AUKUS agreement that caused considerable consternation in the region.

Over the past year Marcos has become friendly with the Chinese ambassador, and critics note a distinct absence of any foreign policy detail in his platform, claiming that he may use Chinese investment and favours to reward his major supporters.

Marco’s running mate, Sara Duterte, daughter of the incumbent president, is also poised to be elected. She has pushed for Manila to deal with Beijing bilaterally rather than unilaterally, as Robredo would have preferred. Still, further rapprochement with Beijing will need to be finely balanced as the general population and the country’s powerful military are very wary of China.

The success of Marcos and Duterte juniors will shore up the destructive forces of Duterteism that have seen the past six years — the length of the country’s single-term presidencies — characterised as a “strong man” administration. 

Duterte, previously mayor of the southern Davao City, had scant regard for the law, instituting a war on drugs in which extrajudicial vigilante gangs — often comprising off-duty police — began a killing spree that targeted drug users as well as dealers.

He attacked and stacked the judiciary, had some opponents jailed, and went to war with the media, eventually cancelling the TV licence of leading outlet ABS-CBN in 2020 — although it continues to stream on the internet.

The veteran journalist and CEO of online newsite Rappler, Maria Ressa, was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for her efforts to support press freedom in the country. (Russian journalist Dmitry Muratov shared the prize.) In her acceptance speech she said at least 16 journalists had been killed since Duterte came to power in 2016.

“In less than two years, the Philippine government filed 10 arrest warrants against me,” she said. “I’ve had to post bail 10 times just to do my job.”

“Last year, I and a former colleague were convicted of cyber libel for a story we published eight years earlier, at a time the law we allegedly violated didn’t even exist. All told, the charges I face could send me to jail for about 100 years.“

Violence and accusations of vote buying

As well as his well-funded social media campaign, a remarkable avoidance of reporters and a refusal to attend candidates forums during his entire campaign has had Marcos Jr pull off a remarkable, if dispiriting, victory.

Polling day was marred by violence as well as complaints about the vote-counting machines that voters fed their ballots into, oppressively long voter queues that may have disenfranchised significant numbers of people who could not cast their ballot in time, and accusations of open vote buying.

On a US-style election day, 18,000 government posts have also been contested, including half of the 24-person Senate, more than 300 seats in the House of Representatives, and provincial and local offices.

Dynastic politics is all too common in Asia and continues to tarnish many democracies with a range of nations — including India, Sri Lanka, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Myanmar, Singapore and South Korea — throwing up leaders whose parents have gone before them. Indeed the situation in the Philippines most resembles South Korea where Park Geun-hye, daughter of former military dictator Park Chung-hee, was elected president in 2012 before being toppled by a corruption scandal five years later.

When Marcos almost certainly takes power on June 30, he will have to deal with a battered economy, a failure to deal with the pandemic, relentless poverty and escalating corruption that are the legacy of Duterte.