Administration officials like to point to the strong mandate that President Rodrigo Duterte won in the last election as a way of claiming that most Filipinos support his advocacies—such as his tough stance on crime and his support for a federal system of government.
There are several pitfalls in associating Mr. Duterte’s election win in 2016 and his policies, of course.
First, despite his landslide victory, Mr. Duterte was not a majority president by a long shot, winning only 39 percent of the vote. This means that while a large plurality supported the causes he promoted during the presidential campaign, by no means did a majority support him or those advocacies.
Second, not all of his policies today were clearly spelled out during the campaign.
For example, Mr. Duterte famously said during his campaign that he would take a jetski to the Spratly islands that China now occupies and plant the Filipino flag and tell the Chinese to choose between fisticuffs and guns.
Even then, candidate Duterte rejected war against China as suicide. “What am I, stupid? We’d all get killed,” he said at the time in Filipino. But he was clearly portraying himself as being more assertive against China’s claims.
In April 2016, he said if he were elected president, he’d make sure the UN arbitral tribunal votes in favor of the Philippine claim on the Spratlys, and refuse to honor any adverse decision.
A bare few months later, as President, Mr. Duterte did the very opposite of what he said and refused to use the tribunal’s favorable decision as leverage against Beijing.
Instead, he launched a policy of appeasement with the Chinese in the hopes of garnering increased investments and loans and relegated more contentious issues such as Philippine sovereignty to bilateral talks that have been long on platitudes and short on results.
Worse, in the face of continued Chinese militarization, Mr. Duterte’s spokesman became an apologist for the Chinese, defending the Chinese Coast Guard for confiscating the catch of Filipino fishermen near the Scarborough Shoal, a territory that is well within the Philippines exclusive economic zone.
Now the chickens have come home to roost.
The latest Social Weather Stations survey show that eight out of 10 Filipinos disapprove of the way Mr. Duterte’s administration is managing the country’s territorial dispute with China over the West Philippine Sea.
The survey of 1,200 adults interviewed from June 27 to 30 showed that 81 percent said it was not right for the administration “to leave China alone with its infrastructure and military presence in the claimed territories.”
Eighty percent also believed the country should improve its defense in the disputed territories and strengthen its military capabilities, particularly in the Navy.
The results of the SWS survey came days after the proliferation of satirical banners in parts of Metro Manila, implying the Philippines has become a province of China, a harsh indictment indeed of a policy Mr. Duterte never articulated when he was running for office.
We have no issue with pursuing amicable ties with the Chinese, as long as we do so as true friends and equals. We have no problem with rapprochement—but we certainly do not want to pursue this from a prone position.
Mr. Duterte must have read this correctly when he was still a candidate, and should begin acting like he still does now that he is President. To paraphrase one articulate world leader, Filipinos may be polite and reasonable, but we will not be pushed around.