Marcos after midterms: Counting down the days till the end of his term

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The Philippine president, in the aftermath of a Senate race that saw less than half of his 11-person slate win, says he considers politics a ‘distraction’

At a get-together with drinks called “Forward Together” and “All The Way, Alyansa” — cocktails with references to the admin’s Alyansa para sa Bagong Pilipinas — President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. told reporters who’d been following the campaign trail that he was “counting down the days until the end of his term” as he asked them for “help” in “[letting] people know what [his administration is] doing.”

Dressed in a button-down shirt and wearing his new go-to pair of glasses, Marcos, who himself campaigned for the 11- (or 10-?) person slate, asked for the media’s help to promote his administration’s work, even as he bemoaned politics as a “distraction.”

“Let’s keep it up. Let’s keep it up. Let’s let people know what we are doing. Let’s let people know that we are going to continue to work hard now and put the, as I said, politics aside…it’s a…consider it a distraction for now,” said Marcos on Saturday, May 17, at the Bagong Pilipinas headquarters in Mandaluyong City.

It’s the same building that once hosted the “Uniteam” headquarters in the 2022 polls — but we’ll talk about that ill-fated coalition later.

“Put the politics aside and get on with the work of nation building,” added Marcos.

The President’s message now is a stark contrast to his rhetoric early on in the campaign trail, when he drew comparisons between his administration and that of his predecessor, Rodrigo Duterte. From the beginning and all the way up to the end of the campaign, Marcos said the Philippines could no longer go back to a past that he described as pro-China, marred with corruption, and filled with violence in the name of Duterte’s drug war.

In pitching his slate, Marcos made it a point to emphasize his candidates’ supposed experience (most of them were reelectionists or former senators, and the few who weren’t, served in the House or were once local chief executives, or had once served in his Cabinet — in contrast to their rivals, ostensibly referring to Duterte’s anointed bets, whom the President said had not much experience to speak of.

But towards the very end of the campaign, Marcos added a new message — reviving his 2022 campaign promises of unity and bringing the price of rice down to P20 per kilo.

A Cabinet official whom Rappler spoke with after election day earlier said that in their meeting with the President, Marcos asked them to focus on delivering on pending projects and past promises.

Absent from those discussions was the very politics Marcos now calls a “distraction” — at least according to that same official.

Because what exactly is to come in the next few weeks? Just the biggest political event in the Philippines under Marcos — bigger even than the midterms: a possible impeachment trial versus Vice President Sara Duterte, with whom Marcos was once allied under the Uniteam.

The impeachment of Duterte, by a House whose majority is allied with Marcos, was the event that opened and — to the apparent chagrin of the administration’s 2025 slate — helped frame the national campaign period.

Alyansa’s candidates early in the campaign tried to dodge questions about the impeachment. After all, it was in their interest to court both the Marcos and Duterte base — a Herculean task that became even more daunting in the domestic backlash that followed the Marcos administration’s decision to arrest and send former president Duterte to The Hague.

Just days after the election, Marcos officials had already floated the possibility of skipping an impeach trial altogether. Another Marcos relative, Alyansa campaign manager Navotas Representative Toby Tiangco, has openly blamed the impeachment for the slate’s dismal performance in the 2025 polls.

Of the 11 persons that Marcos endorsed from beginning until the very end, only five candidates made it — Senators-elect Erwin Tulfo, Ping Lacson, Tito Sotto, and reelection winners Senators Pia Cayetano, and Lito Lapid.

Senator-elect House Deputy Speaker Camille Villar, while officially on the Alyansa slate, had an up-and-down relationship with the administration — Marcos omitted mention of her name in a couple of major rallies, after ordering a probe into the Villar-owned PrimeWater.

Villar had also clinched the endorsement of Vice President Duterte — just like Marcos’ older sister, reelection winner Senator Imee Marcos. Unlike Villar, however, Senator Marcos’ split from Alyansa was explicit and formal.

Now, back to the Bagong Pilipinas headquarters.

“We all wish we had better results, but we live to fight another day. Now it’s time, I think, to put all the politics aside. It’s time to put all of the issues that were raised during the election and only talk about not political issues, but developmental issues, healthcare issues, education issues, agricultural issues, food supply issues, all of these things,” said Marcos.

Above the media gathering was another party with campaign staff and aides — with only Lapid as the lone Alyansa bet in attendance, at least when Rappler dropped by.

Did the President bring up the impeachment at the Bagong Pilipinas headquarters, whether to the sole Alyansa winner in the party or to the admin’s chief aides?

And by counting down until the end of his term, does the President mean he’ll be going through the motions of the presidency and governance, and slip into the lame duck that analysts and pundits expect him to become? Or will his foreign policy views — against Asian countries being “bystanders to unfolding world events” — apply to domestic politics, too? – Rapper.com