The cost of the Philippines’ clan politics

Even for a country whose politics are as noisy and dramatic as the Philippines, the breakup and subsequent bitter feud between the Marcoses and the Dutertes has been a shocking affair, bringing to blows two of the country’s most powerful families. All eyes are currently on which dynasty will come out on top, and what this means for the future health of the Philippines’ democracy. More importantly, this clash of dynasties can be seen as emblematic of the continued dominance of the Philippines’ political families, one of the most striking characteristics of Asia’s oldest democracy.

The current intense rivalry between the Marcoses and the Dutertes is made all the more dramatic by the fact that both dynasties had previously been allied. In May 2022, Ferdinand ‘Bongbong’ Marcos Jr, the son and namesake of the former dictator Ferdinand Marcos, had secured the Philippines’ presidency with a landslide victory, securing 58.8 per cent of the vote. Meanwhile, his running mate Sara Duterte-Carpio, daughter of the strongman former president Rodrigo Duterte, had secured the vice-presidency with 61.5 per cent of the vote (in the Philippines, vice-presidents are elected separately).

The victory of Marcos Jr in the 2022 presidential election capped a remarkable comeback for the his family, who had been forced to flee the country ignominiously during the 1986 ‘People Power’ revolution following a 14-year dictatorship under Marcos Sr. Under the latter’s ‘New Society’ regime, political opponents had been jailed and civil society suppressed, with an estimated 3,257 extrajudicial killings, 35,000 individual cases of torture and 70,000 politically connected incarcerations believed to have taken place throughout the entire dictatorship. The violent suppression of dissent by regime-aligned thugs would be euphemistically termed as ‘salvaging’. The ‘New Society’ was also defined by spectacular levels of corruption and cronyism: Marcos, his shoe-loving wife Imelda, and his cronies are believed to have looted up to US$ 10 billion from the country by the time the Marcoses had fled to Hawaii in 1986.

In their return to power, the Marcoses owed much to their strategic alliance with the Duterte clan, namely Marcos Jr’s choice of Sara Duterte-Carpio as running mate. Sara’s father, Rodrigo Duterte, had been elected to the presidency in 2016, building upon a tough-on-crime persona developed while serving as mayor of the southern city of Davao (where he earned the moniker ‘the Punisher’).

As president, Duterte would become infamous for his ‘war on drugs’, during which he encouraged the police to gun down suspected drug dealers and users in a manner eerily resembling the ‘salvaging’ operations under Marcos Sr. It is believed his war on drugs resulted in the deaths of at least 5,000 and perhaps as many as 27,000 people, with many alleged to be small-time pushers from the urban poor. Despite this, Rodrigo Duterte left office hugely popular, in part reflecting his political outsider status in contrast to the traditional ruling elite of ‘Imperial Manila’.

The ultimate victory of the Marcos-Duterte ‘UniTeam’ in 2022 can be attributed therefore to the consolidation of support for two of the most powerful families in the Philippines. The alliance would not last, however. Relations between ‘Bongbong’ Marcos and Sara Duterte would deteriorate, at first over Sara being granted the education ministry instead of the more powerful defence ministry. Tensions also developed between both clans over policy, the Marcos administration’s greater alignment with the US (compared to the anti-Western stance of Duterte), investigations into Rodrigo Duterte’s ‘war on drugs’, and scandals implicating Duterte associates.

After Sara Duterte resigned as Education Secretary and subsequently from the cabinet in July 2024, she faced a congressional probe related to her alleged misuse of confidential intelligence funds. She courted further controversy in November 2024 when she stated that she had ordered a hit against Marcos Jr, his wife and the then-speaker of the House should anything befall her.

Amid this breakdown in relations, in March 2025 the elder Duterte was suddenly arrested and extradited to The Hague to stand trial before the International Criminal Court (ICC) for alleged crimes against humanity. The ICC had launched a formal investigation into Duterte’s ‘war on drugs’ in 2021, despite him having withdrawn the Philippines from the jurisdiction of the ICC two years before. The 81-year-old Duterte is currently in custody in The Hague, with his trial set to begin on 30 November. He faces charges of crimes against humanity in the forms of murder, torture and rape carried out during his anti-drugs campaign, with the crimes allegedly committed during both his time as mayor of Davao as well as his presidency.

Matters escalated further in May this year when the Philippines’ House of Representatives, the lower chamber of the legislature, voted by an overwhelming majority to impeach Sara Duterte. The impeachment complaints are based on allegations of misused confidential funds during her time as education secretary, unexplained wealth and making grave threats against President Marcos Jr and other public figures. Similar to the American system (the Philippines was a US colony from 1898 until 1946), once a public figure is impeached, it is up to the Philippines’ Senate to conduct an actual trial of Duterte. Should Sara be convicted by the Senate, she would be barred from holding political office for life. This would be a huge blow to her stated goal of running for president in 2028 (Bongbong will not be able to run, since presidents are limited to a single six-year term). In almost all pre-election surveys carried out so far, Sara remains the clear favourite to become the next president.

With Sara Duterte’s political future now in the hands of the Senate, a recent tussle over leadership of the 24-member upper house has been widely viewed as a proxy war between those aligned with either the Marcoses or Dutertes. Those aligned with the Dutertes briefly seized control of the Senate presidency on 11 May, when Senator Alan Peter Cayetano, Rodrigo Duterte’s former foreign minister and vice-presidential running mate, was voted in as the Senate’s president by a slim majority of 13.

They have achieved this in part by the sudden and dramatic reappearance of Senator Ronald dela Rosa, a key ally of the Dutertes, who had been in hiding for months. Formerly the head of the national police under the Duterte presidency, dela Rosa was the chief enforcer of Duterte’s bloody war on drugs. The ICC would issue an arrest warrant for dela Rosa, first issued confidentially in November 2025 but later unsealed in May of this year. Dela Rosa was accused by the ICC of ‘encouraging the police to legitimise killings through fictitious self-defence scenarios, and promising impunity’ and ‘ordering the police to kill specific targets and planning killing operations’.

Dela Rosa has denied any wrongdoing, and since November of last year had been in hiding. His sudden reappearance in the Senate on 11 May tipped the balance of power in the chamber, thereby allowing Cayetano to be elected as Senate president. On the same day, the House of Representatives had voted to impeach the vice-president. Dramatic CCTV footage from that day showed dela Rosa fleeing from pursuing government agents seeking his arrest through the hallways and staircases of the Senate. Dela Rosa managed to evade his pursuers and was offered protective custody by the newly elected Cayetano (a concept deemed by some as legally dubious). A tense stand-off ensued, with dela Rosa hiding inside the Senate for three days.

On the night of 14 July, things escalated dramatically when shots were fired inside the building, causing it to be locked down. Armed troops surrounded the premises. According to Senate security, a stand-off between them and personnel of the National Bureau of Investigation (the Filipino equivalent of the FBI) resulted in both sides firing warning shots (miraculously, no one was injured). Marcos’ office disputed their account, arguing that the NBI had not carried out an assault on the Senate, nor that they had any plans to arrest dela Rosa. Amid the confusion, the fugitive senator had somehow fled the building. Rumours arose that the shooting incident was a distraction to allow dela Rosa to escape. Following his escape, the justice secretary said that law enforcement had been ordered to apprehend him, after the Philippines’ supreme court rejected the senator’s attempts to block his arrest. At the time of writing, he remains in hiding.

The senate coup carried out by the Duterte camp proved fleeting, with those aligned with the Marcoses seemingly able to claw back control of the chamber in the lead-up to the impeachment trial. On 17 June, a senator aligned with Marcos was able to oust Cayetano as Senate president, aided by the defection of another senator. This was also made possible by the fact that two senators aligned with Duterte were unable to vote in person, with dela Rosa in hiding and another arrested on 1 June. They were indicted on a plunder charge, having been accused of receiving kickbacks in relation to a bogus flood-control project.

The Dutertes’ position was further weakened on the day of the trial when another allied senator was arrested on plunder charges. Sarah Duterte has now lost three supposedly friendly senator-judges to preside over her impeachment trial. Whether this will have any bearing on its outcome remains a matter to be seen. While the constitution states that a conviction requires votes from ‘two-thirds of all the members’, the prosecution has argued that the threshold should only include senators who can actively take part in the trial.

How will the ‘trial of the century’ influence the 2028 presidential election? The bitter clash between two of the most powerful dynastic scions in the country is emblematic of the continued iron rule of the Philippines’ political families. While political dynasties are a common phenomenon in most democracies, the numbers for the Philippines are striking. According to one count, 83 per cent of current senators and 76 per cent of members of the House of Representatives belong to dynasties. The numbers are more stark at the level of local government, with 9,852 out of 17,983 local elective posts being dynastic, accounting for 54 per cent of the total.

Many of these dynastic families hail from the powerful mestizo landholders of the late Spanish colonial period, as common land was transformed into private property and parcelled out to local elites. Political dynasties are more entrenched at the local level, reflecting in part the Philippines’ regional and linguistic variations. Their continued rule also draws roots from the Philippines’ precolonial culture of indigenous tribal clan structures.

Many political families are identified with their respective bailiwicks, with local politics treated as a family affair. Even in competitive elections, the contests are often between family members vying for the same seats. In some sense, the rivalry between the Marcoses and the Dutertes perfectly aligns with the archipelago’s north-south geography – while the Marcoses’ power base is the far north of Luzon island (with its voting bloc commonly referred to as the Solid North), the Dutertes enjoy extensive support on the southern island of Mindanao (now known as the Solid South), an area notorious for its Muslim separatists and culture of blood feuds.

Research has found that districts dominated by political dynasties are characterised by higher incidences of poverty and inequality as well as lower living standards than those with non-dynastic representatives. The presence of dynasties often serves to deter businesses and foreign investors, with dynasts and economic elites often colluding to block outside competition while capturing extractive industries like mining, agriculture and forestry. Often, the need to establish connections with the right families in order to acquire permits and contracts serves as a major transaction cost for businesses.

The realities of governing the Philippines require extensive bargaining with the country’s myriad political dynasties, with ‘pork barrel politics’ often the most important tool in the hands of the executive in pushing through their legislative agenda. The distribution of funds from the national budget for projects targeting specific districts has long been criticised as being a vehicle for corruption and patronage politics. The most recent and egregious iteration of pork barrel politics has been the scandal over flood-control projects, described as the largest corruption scandal in recent Filipino memory.

Last year, an investigation revealed that lawmakers, public works officials and private sector contractors had collaborated to secure kickbacks from government-funded flood infrastructure projects. Many of the resultant projects were built with substandard materials or designs. Some were simply not built at all, despite funds having been disbursed. The amounts involved are staggering, with losses possibly exceeding a trillion pesos (around £12 billion). By one estimate, at least 25 per cent of each flood-control project’s budget was routinely skimmed off as kickbacks. The scandal sparked outrage in a country that experiences close to 20 tropical cyclones a year. Among those charged in court are two members of Congress, while three senators and eight congresspersons are currently being investigated (including the president’s cousin and former House Speaker Martin Romualdez).

The results of Sara Duterte’s ongoing impeachment trial – and whether the Marcoses or the Dutertes will emerge on top – will be indicative of the future alignment of the Philippines’ political families as they seek to preserve their wealth and interests. For those senator-judges concerned about their future political career, a wary eye will be cast on Duterte’s continued public popularity. However, the offer of the vice-presidential position by Marcos post-conviction also serves as an incentive for certain senators to vote for conviction. Overwhelming evidence of Sara’s alleged corruption and abuse of power as the trial progresses may also be enough to sway the voting intentions of certain senators towards conviction, as well as erode the Duterte brand among voters.

Regardless of which family comes out on top, the corrosive dominance of the political dynasties in the Philippines’ politics remains set to continue for the foreseeable future.