Germany's biggest national newspaper has published an article on the election. It's a brutal deconstruction of Bongbong Marcos's throne of lies - and a population that has failed itself.
(Translated from German)
A ghost has been elected in the Philippines. The next president is Ferdinand Marcos, and well over 50 percent of voters have voted for him. For those now wondering, Ferdinand Marcos, where have I heard that name before?: The young Ferdinand "Bongbong" Marcos, who is already 64 years old himself, is the son of Imelda and Ferdinand Marcos senior. She's the wannabe royal with the world's largest shoe collection, he once led the country into martial law and quickly transformed himself from democratic president to brutal dictator, killing and torturing tens of thousands.
To this day, a commission is searching for the approximately more than ten billion US dollars that the Marcos clan managed to get out of the country before they themselves fled last-minute (literally) by helicopter into the safety of exile in Honolulu, where the corrupt despot died in 1989. It has long been an open secret to many observers that Marcos Jr. likely funded his campaign with money his parents plundered from their own country, just like the rest of his entire life.
But that's just one of the many bizarre aspects of this election. Another is that during the campaign, Marcos Jr. refused to go into direct confrontation with any of his competitors, and refused to answer tough questions from journalists - presumably because he had nothing of value to say whatsoever, and because his team was concerned that onstage, in the thick of the fight, faced with a duty to present coherent sentences, he would quickly paint himself as utterly cringeworthy and painfully inferior to the much more competent Leni Robredo.
Yet despite his ghostly demeanor, Ferdinand Marcos Jr. has now garnered more than 31 million votes. Twice as many as Robredo, his biggest and most successful rival, who garnered just under 15 million votes. The other candidates, all more capable than Bongbong by a long shot, ended up far behind. The results have not yet been fully counted, but the official bodies already consider the election to be legitimate, and Robredo's team has not contested it so far.
Since her very quiet return to the Philippines in 1991, Imelda Marcos, now 92, has fought numerous lawsuits regarding the return of hundreds of millions of dollars - and the family's reputation. Bongbong's older sister Imee somehow became a senator. Ferdinand Marcos Jr. himself has also been involved in politics for a long time. In the last elections, he lost to Leni Robredo, who took the seat of vice president under Rodrigo Duterte. This time he allied himself with Duterte's daughter, 43-year-old Sara Duterte-Carpio, running alongside Marcos for vice president. That, too, gave him a boost from the voters.
The election of President and Vice President is done separately in the Philippines. But Marco's son and Duterte's daughter organized the election campaign together as a so-called Uniteam. Anyone who attended one of their rallies, which are part of everyday political life in the country, could hear their slogans being drummed into the crowd to the tune of "We will rock you".
Yet Ferdinand Marcos Jr. never even presented a real program, and perhaps never even bothered to try. He simply wiggled his way through the months leading up to the election on a day by day basis, depending solely on empty slogans.
Sara Duterte-Carpio, on the other hand, at least seemed to somewhat understand the importance of addressing individual groups with a program tailored to them. Duterte-Carpio campaigned for the rights of gay, lesbian and transgender people. The Filipino LGBTQ community was always represented at her events, sometimes even creating a good atmosphere wearing drag outfits.
These groups, and effectively their families, had turned their backs on Manny Pacquiao last year. The ex-world boxing champion came in third in this presidential race, because he gravely underestimated the repercussions of his all-too biblical condemnations of same-*** love.
Rodrigo Duterte had followed a pattern similar to that of his daughter before he was elected president in 2016. Back then he recruited many of the approximately ten million "Overseas Filipino Workers" (OFWs) who work worldwide on container ships, as maids and valets, teachers and contractors, in fishing, gastronomy and the hotel industry.
If one visits these workers in their humble dwellings in Manila today, they say that Duterte really worked for their well-being during his presidency. Duterte, a brutish, unpleasant goon from the nation's south, has repeatedly voiced his murderous disdain for the country's poor. Not many OFWs seem to feel sorry for the thousands of victims of his merciless, bloody war on drugs.
The most important communication channel of the OFWs, who probably also voted for Marcos Jr. and Duterte-Carpio this time: the smartphone. The election campaign was decided there much sooner than on the stages and debates ignored by the dictator's son. A completely different election campaign raged on Facebook, YøùTùbé and TikTok prior to the elections.
On social media, where many Filipinos spend more than four hours of their daily screen time, Leni Robredo was portrayed and ridiculed as overwhelmed and lazy by professional trolls-for-hire without a conscience. Meanwhile, the Marcos clan used every warped opportunity to present itself as the tragic-but-enduring, misunderstood benefactor of the Philippines.
One factor played into this historical obliviousness decisively: The population of the Philippines has more than quadrupled in the last 50 years - from only about 26 million in 1960 to 110 million today. More than half of all voters are between 18 and 40 years old - too young to remember the dark days of the old Marcos regime.
Human rights violations and never-before-nor-since-seen corruption during the Marcos dictatorship were consistently downplayed in the Uniteam's social media campaign. Instead, they painted the tyranny of Marcos Sr. as a "golden age" of economic prosperity and infrastructural development.
Now, after the election, it is evident that many young voters, blinded by an addiction to the short-lived world of hype and entertainment on social media, swallowed this fairy tale hook, line and sinker. A romantic story of "the better days" when the economy was still strong and discipline and order still prevailed, both in public and in private. Outside of Manila, most of the country is poor, there are hardly any prospects, the population has experienced a whole series of corrupt governments.
The Filipinos didn't just vote for the new Marcos - but also a bit for the old. They have been fooled into voting for the ghost of a past they don't even remember - a past that, they think, was better than their present.
credit to translator of this article
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