![]() ![]() ![]() government would doubtless have found it easier to work with Marcos’s leading opponent, Vice President Leni Robredo. But barely a year out from the Capitol insurrection and with a twice-impeached former president angling for a return to power in 2024, the United States would be better served by engagement rather than criticism of the democratic headwinds buffeting the Philippines. The country’s democratic institutions have already been battered by six years of the Duterte presidency and the rise of online disinformation, alongside the decades-long corrosives of oligarchy, graft, and poor governance. This is not the end of Philippine democracy, though it may accelerate its decay. Like his father at the start, he will soon be the duly elected president. The passage of time, the failure of the post-Marcos political establishment to deliver for many Filipinos, and of course, the echo chambers of social media, created a ready audience for that historical fiction.īongbong Marcos’s margin of victory is too wide for argument. Their power and wealth have allowed them to rewrite the family’s story as one of persecution and recast the dictatorship as a time of relative peace and prosperity. And yet, within a system built in symbolic opposition to them, the Marcoses have thrived. The post-1986 political order in the Philippines was self-consciously framed as one of national revitalization after the dark years of martial law. The congressional seats and governorships of the Marcos’s native Ilocos Norte continue to rotate among the family. Both children would later win nationwide races for Senate. Imelda won her own seat in 1995, as did her daughter Imee in 1998. ![]() Less than a year later, Imelda unsuccessfully ran for president, but Bongbong secured a seat in the House of Representatives. It started with the family’s 1991 return to the Philippines to face charges of corruption (the elder Marcos died in 1989). The election doesn’t change that any more than those of Rodrigo Duterte or Donald Trump did.īongbong’s rise to the presidency has been decades in the making. But the U.S.-Philippines alliance is vital to both nations’ security and prosperity, especially in the new era of competition with China. government, will greet the news of Ferdinand “Bongbong” Marcos Jr.’s victory with private chagrin. Many Americans, including inside the U.S. Thirty-six years later, they have elected the dictator’s son president. When the family fled to exile in Hawaii, millions of Filipinos rejoiced. In between, the Marcos dictatorship imprisoned, tortured, and killed thousands, sent the economy into a tailspin, and oversaw a kleptocracy famously epitomized by First Lady Imelda’s collection of 3,000 pairs of shoes. He declared martial law in 1972 and was finally toppled by the People Power Revolution of 1986. Meanwhile, Ukraine and its Western allies have denounced Russia’s attempt to formally claim the regions as a meaningless war tactic.Ferdinand Marcos was first elected president of the Philippines in 1965. Ukrainian gains have forced Putin into a series of escalating steps within the past month: the unpopular call-up of hundreds of thousands of extra troops, the unilateral annexation of the four Ukrainian regions, and a threat to resort to nuclear weapons to defend what Russia sees as its own lands. “It will mean the military and local administrations will have the right to do what they want in terms of how people move around or restrict them from gathering,” Vall said.Īccording to him, the mobilisation in the “annexed” regions will now be “a total mobilisation instead of partial mobilisation”, which has taken place across Russia. Local officials said they were planning to move up to 60,000 civilians from Kherson across a period of approximately six days.Īl Jazeera’s Mohammed Vall, reporting from Moscow, said the new measures will mean “more restrictions on the movement of people”. Putin’s order came on the day that Russian-installed officials in Kherson told civilians to leave some areas as soon as possible in anticipation of an imminent Ukrainian attack. It remained unclear how fast or how effectively the new measures might bolster Russia’s military position on the ground, and what effect they would have on public opinion. The published Kremlin decree ordered an “economic mobilisation” in eight regions adjoining Ukraine, including occupied Crimea, which Russia invaded and annexed in 2014.Ī Kyiv official said the decree would change nothing. Putin also instructed the government to set up a special coordinating council under Prime Minister Mikhail Mishustin to work with the “annexed” regions to boost Moscow’s war effort in Ukraine. ![]()
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