There was a time when the leading candidate of today, Ferdinand Marcos Jr., seemed a has-been. He had, after all, spent the entirety of President Duterte’s term steadily losing his election protest.
Around this time last year, the political momentum and the expectations of the ruling coalition were purely focused on Sara Duterte who, as late as June 2021, had nearly twice his percentage in voter preference surveys for the presidency. It even seemed for a time that the big players were treating him with barely-disguised condescension because his ambitions were an annoying distraction.
Marcos’ refusal to slide down and Inday Sara eventually sliding down to number two coated him with a veneer of toughness and finally lent him the air of being a winner; it also gave both him and her something they’d lacked thus far: the sense of being backed by a significant because durable coalition featuring former president and speaker Arroyo .
Only after that happened did all the previous investments in time, people, and machinery, particularly online and in media, come to be worth it as far as the Marcoses were concerned. I suppose the only question left is whether it was all inevitable.
It seems to be it took a while to broker a Marcos-Duterte ticket not least because the President’s true inclinations were hostile to the idea. But as with the ouster of Pantaleon Alvarez from the speakership, the President had to be saved from himself by a combination of his daughter and the political adults in the room.
Will it be any different now that the campaign has begun? Marcos Jr. has made Benhur Abalos his campaign manager. A promotion for the man who was his NCR campaign leader in 2016. But no one actually believes he’s really calling the shots: At most, he is a shield to keep Mrs. Marcos from being in the spotlight. This early, his campaign can claim the tantalizing possibility of the first majority presidency since either 1986 or 1969.
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