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stephenthinkpad
Jan 2, 2020
What happened? Explain to a lurker like I am 5?

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gradenko_2000
Oct 5, 2010

HELL SERPENT
Lipstick Apathy
the first sigh was when the news all broke out from yesterday:

gradenko_2000 posted:

Philippine elections update:

If you recall, back in September there was a lot of scuttlebutt over the possibility of Rodrigo Duterte running for Vice President, in order to continue to hold some semblance of power/executive privilege even if he can't be President anymore.

Then, during the official filing of candidacies in early October:

* Rodrigo Duterte did not file anything and people kinda forgot about the possibility of him running for VP
* Bong Go, his right-hand man, did file to run for VP, but with no running mate
* Bato Dela Rosa, his... other right-hand man, filed to run for President, but everyone expected that this was a sham candidacy and he'd pull out and be substituted-for later
* Sara Duterte, Rodrigo's daughter, did NOT file for either President nor VP. Everyone expected that this was also just a ruse and she would be the one to pull a last-minute entry into the race

November 15, 2021 is the last day for substitutions, and so there was a LOT of news that came up during the preceding week, and specifically within the last 48 hours.

Most of the liberal commentariat expected that Sara Duterte would run as Vice President, as the running mate of Ferdinand Marcos Jr., to form some kind of unstoppable right-wing force.

I had a different take - I fully expected that Sara Duterte would run for President all her own, even if it meant that she and Marcos would compete for votes among the same base, because the right is just as prone to internecine warfare as anyone else, and there's no reason for the Duterte Faction and the Marcos Faction to play nice when only one of them gets to be President and the VP holds zero real political power.

It turns out I may have been both right and wrong:

* Sara Duterte did file a last-minute candidacy for Vice President, and almost immediately afterwards Marcos declares that they're running mates
* and then Bato Dela Rosa withdraws his candidacy for President (no surprise there)
* but then Bong Go withdraws his candidacy for VP, and re-files this time to run for President
* and then Rodrigo Duterte announces that he's going to file a candidacy for VP, with Bong Go as his running mate, on Monday


So there is enough of a factional dispute among the right that a Duterte is running against Marcos (technically Bong Go as a proxy for Rodrigo), I just had the specific candidates wrong.

Indeed, Rodrigo Duterte has already gone on the attack against Ferdinand Marcos just today, derogatorily accusing both Marcos and Leni Robredo of the Liberal Party of being communist collaborators.

We still don't have any firm polling data to see how this shakes up the race, but the basic principle that this is potentially good news for the liberals due to the right-wing vote being split should still hold, even if Bong Go is probably not nearly as strong a candidate as Sara Duterte. The real question is whether any of the rest (Robredo, Isko Moreno, Manny Pacquiao) are strong enough candidates to be able to eke out something like a 25-30% plurality.

the second sigh was from this afternoon, when Rodrigo Duterte changes his mind (again) at the last minute, and files to run as a Senator, instead of for Vice President

and so while Marcos still does have some competition from the Duterte faction in the form of Bong Go, Sara Duterte isn't going to be competing directly against her father.

there's also SOME polling data that's out now:



I could load this up with a bunch of caveats (candidate list is still wrong because of this weekend's chaos, it's a commissioned poll), but that would just be trying to "unskew the polls" and inhaling copium, so let's not do that. It's a huge uphill climb to beat these numbers. It's not impossible, but it's going to be very difficult to shift.

[There's also some Senate and VP polling out, but that can wait for another post]

stephenthinkpad
Jan 2, 2020
drat that's a lot of drama.

Is Bongbong really a favorite? His face has failson written all over him. How come the poll doesn't have Bongo?

What's BB's China policy?

Philippine only elect 12 senators at a time right? So a senator is still a very juicy job. Is Duterte going to take the senator seat from a pro-Duterte faction or anti-Duterte faction?

stephenthinkpad fucked around with this message at 15:22 on Nov 15, 2021

gradenko_2000
Oct 5, 2010

HELL SERPENT
Lipstick Apathy

stephenthinkpad posted:

drat that's a lot of drama.

Is Bongbong really a favorite? His face has failson written all over him. How come the poll doesn't have Bongo?

What's BB's China policy?

Philippine only elect 12 senators at a time right? So a senator is still a very juicy job. Is Duterte going to take the senator seat from a pro-Duterte faction or anti-Duterte faction?

1. Bongbong Marcos has a really strong social media/word-of-mouth presence, both intersecting with Duterte as a fellow right-wing demagogue, and also crafted from years of promoting revisionist history.

2. Poll doesn't have Bong Go because it was conducted in late October, before all this reshuffling went on.

3. The general consensus is that Marcos is going to be "friendly" towards China, and friendly in quotation marks as a reference to how R Duterte is perceived as having completely rolled over for, and is a lapdog of, Xi Jinping. Here's some cited examples as to why people would think this:

https://newsinfo.inquirer.net/1492366/bongbong-parrots-duterte-on-west-ph-sea-we-dont-stand-a-chance-vs-china
https://news.abs-cbn.com/news/10/20/21/chinese-envoy-fawns-over-marcos-jr

I personally can't find a way to weigh in on the subject because China is a completely poisoned well in Philippine discourse.

4. Yes, the Philippines has 24 Senators total, and each Senator serves for six years, and half the Senate is elected every three years, alternating between the general election (i.e. concurrent with the Presidential election) and the midterms. There's really only like three or four oppositionists in the Senate right now that are up for re-election, and only one of them is polling high enough to look like they'll win re-election, so while a Senator Duterte might bump off a fellow pro-Duterte candidate, the Senate is still probably going to be majority conservative regardless.

stephenthinkpad
Jan 2, 2020
Very informative, thank you.

Xelkelvos
Dec 19, 2012
My aunt has been exposed to some of that revisionism i think. At least in the vilification of Ninoy Aquino

Grouchio
Aug 31, 2014

How exactly did the US plant the seeds of political kleptocracy in the Philippines during occupation? I know virtually nothing about the period and don't know where to start that's more informative than wikipedia.

gradenko_2000
Oct 5, 2010

HELL SERPENT
Lipstick Apathy
this is going to be an awfully oversimplified analogy, but you can sort of think of the Philippines as a country where the Vietnam War was won (among others)

that is to say, the Hukbalahap, a guerrilla resistance force against the Japanese occupation, metamorphosed into the Huks, an orthodox M-L insurgency after 1945, and since the Philippines is an island chain and the Huks could not flee over the border into China to regroup the way the Viet Minh could, they were eventually crushed by succeeding Philippine presidents, with a final victory in 1954 lead by Ramon Magsaysay (with the usual vast amounts of US arms and CIA involvement, naturally)

to wit, Ferdinand Marcos Sr did not ascend to the presidency on the back of a coup, as so many dictators did, but rather, he was elected President twice under the constitutional process, and simply overturned the liberal status quo before his second term was up

that the Philippines is a "kleptocracy" has its roots in the extinguishing of the left and the restriction of the political spectrum to just conservatism and liberalism

if you dig a little deeper than that, Spanish colonialism imposed a feudal social order on the islands for centuries, followed by about five minutes of independence under a 19th century nationalist movement, followed by half-a-century of American colonialism that simply replaced the Spanish order with one that taught folks to speak English, three years of military occupation under Imperial Japan, and then finally an American-style constitution imposed on us by American "liberators"

there was never any real reckoning with the legacy of Spain, and the latent consequences of that are still felt today when one of the attack lines against the Liberal Party is the massacre of militant farmers at Hacienda Luisita - we still have haciendas in the Philippines!

Xelkelvos
Dec 19, 2012
Well another twist in the election: Duterte's Daughter and Bongbong have announced that they're running together

https://www.reuters.com/world/asia-pacific/duterte-daughter-joins-marcos-running-mate-philippines-presidential-election-2021-11-16/

gradenko_2000
Oct 5, 2010

HELL SERPENT
Lipstick Apathy
This week is the 17th anniversary of the Hacienda Luisita massacre, a strike action by peasant workers seeking for better working conditions from an oligarchical family that bought out a Spanish-era sugar plantation and then dodged agrarian reform and land redistribution efforts.

The police dispersal of the strike ended in bloodshed, and it remains one of the most important moments of modern labor history in the country.

Below is a short, 30-minute documentary about the event. Translated, the title reads, roughly, "In the Name of the Sugarcane". It's in Filipino, but with English subtitles.

https://cinemata.org/view?m=JNqzQioOt

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chird
Sep 26, 2004



...in face-to-face schooling.

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