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There's only one effective way to defeat a popular populist personality, and that is to beat her in the only legitimate arena for resolving political conflict in a democracy: the electoral arena. No short cuts.
Had I been qualified to vote at the House of Representatives’ impeachment proceedings on Vice President Sara Duterte, I would have abstained in the voting.
But first, let me be clear: Sara deserved to be impeached. She committed impeachable offenses. She stole public funds. She made a false declaration of her and her husband’s assets. She bribed public officials.
But there is impeachment and impeachment.
Impeachment does not take place in a vacuum. Context is a critical consideration, and the context for last week’s impeachment vote is the vicious power struggle between two corrupt and bankrupt dynasties. It was essentially an effort by one dynasty to behead the other dynasty, deploying a much-abused constitutional provision and mustering all the political and financial capital it could muster.
The absence of any parallel effort to impeach or hold accountable the reigning dynasty for the trillions of pesos that have been stolen from flood control projects makes starkly clear the character of the impeachment exercise. It was a personalistic, dynastic, and partisan effort to destroy a rival. The only people who were taken in by the lofty language with which the affirmative votes were justified were the very people deploying that discourse in the echo chamber that is the Batasan.
As for the people, they were not fooled. Indeed, we would be utterly naïve to think the Filipino people did not recognize that the battle was a zero-sum game to monopolize dynastic power in which they were relegated to the role of bystanders.
There were undoubtedly members of the House who voted for impeachment that were not in the pocket of the Marcoses and Romualdezes, who genuinely believed, as I do, that Sara was guilty of high crimes and misdemeanor, or felt that her coming to power in 2028 would result in a reign of revenge and terror that could even bring back the bad old days of extrajudicial killings.
Their decision was most likely based on the calculus that one had no choice but to take the side of the lesser evil. The only problem with this reasoning is that in allowing oneself to be manipulated into taking sides in a fight between thieves, one does not accomplish anything except maybe postpone the feared outcome and at the price of losing one’s credibility. You lose however noble your intentions are. As the saying goes, “If you lie down with dogs, you get up with fleas.”
But there are weightier considerations in this struggle between the Dutertes and the Marcoses that should strongly reinforce one’s decision not to take sides. Though the protagonists are thieves, this is not a simple struggle between thieves.
Ever since the beginning of the rift between the Marcos Jr and Sara, I have maintained that seeking to eliminate, via impeachment and other judicial means, a rival that represents a populist movement is a dangerous illusion.
No short cuts
The short-cut of impeachment and criminal prosecution may, in fact, have the opposite effect of legitimizing and popularizing the target. The precedents for eliminating populist rivals by judicial action are not encouraging. The two impeachment complaints and the 88 criminal charges against Donald Trump were converted by him into an asset that contributed to his decisive victory in the 2024 US presidential elections.
Hitler’s conviction and sentencing for high treason gave him the aura of being a martyr that he skillfully cultivated and launched him on the road to winning electoral power in Weimar Germany.
There is only one effective way to defeat a popular populist personality, and that is to beat her in the only legitimate arena for resolving political conflict in a democracy: the electoral arena. There are no short cuts.
Much as I loathe Sara Duterte’s opportunistic politics, corruption, and propensity for violent action, and much as I support the conviction of Rodrigo Duterte at the International Criminal Court and his sentencing to life without parole, I also recognize that Sara has come to personify a movement based on strong feelings of regional oppression and discrimination, one that has been able to harness the anti-elite resentments that lie just below the surface of Philippine politics. As analysts like Jojo Abinales have pointed out, whatever might be one’s opinion of this movement, it is not an ersatz movement; it is a real political force, especially in Mindanao and the Visayas, and, I would contend, in the poor and middle-class areas of the vast, vote-rich Metro-Manila.
Given this, would a successful impeachment and conviction by the Marcos bloc defuse the populist threat? Think again. The angry DDS mob that would consider the move an illegitimate, partisan act would likely storm the streets and destabilize the political process, even provoke an EDSA 4. And given the tenuous loyalty of the military and the police to the democratic order, the possibility of an extra-constitutional outcome is not far-fetched.
Instead of persisting in the illusion that impeachment or criminal prosecution is the solution, progressive and liberal forces should instead focus on the real solution, which is to offer a superior vision and program to that offered by the Dutertes, and to out-organize them electorally and in the streets.
This will not be easy. indeed, it will be a hell of a task. But, to repeat, there are no short cuts to defeating populists who stoke people’s justified resentments to ride to power except through an electoral contest.
Will there be blood if Sara Duterte comes to power in 2028? Yes, there will be blood, which makes it all the more imperative for progressive forces, such as those supporting the candidacy of Senator Risa Hontiveros, like yours truly, to waste no more time indulging the impeachment illusion and begin the tough work of formulating and offering an agenda for real transformative change, and forging a movement based on that agenda that can effectively expose the false solutions Sara offers for the problems of our country and beat her in 2028. – Rappler.com
Walden Bello served in the House of Representatives from 2009 to 2015, where he was chair of the Committee on Overseas Workers’ Affairs and a principal sponsor of the Reproductive Health Bill and other progressive legislation.
