"Perhaps this is coming from a small but noisy group of enablers."
The President and those egging him to stay in office beyond his term insist that they are doing this to heed “the public clamor” for him to once again seek a national post after his presidency ends in 2022.
In a virtual conference in June, his mouthpiece at the Palace said the unsolved drug problem and corruption in government were among the reasons that might convince Mr. Duterte to “heed the public clamor” and to take care of “unfinished business.”
Let us forget for the moment that these were problems Mr. Duterte promised he would eradicate during the first six months of his term back in 2016. We can even gloss over, for the moment, the fact that this President and his spokesman have ignored compelling evidence of wrongdoing in the procurement of emergency medical supplies and have chosen instead to attack the lawmakers who are exposing government corruption.
Mr. Duterte’s ticket back to the Palace—or so he hopes—is to run for the vice presidency, a cynical sidestep to the constitutional bar on a second presidential term. Once he is back in the Palace, he can assert his influence on the new president, or simply replace that president if he or she steps down for any reason.
In August, a faction of the ruling PDP-Laban that supports Duterte said the President would make “the sacrifice and heed the clamor of the people” and run for vice president. He later said he would accept his party’s nomination to “continue the crusade” against drugs, the insurgency and criminality. Oddly enough, this time around, he did not mention government corruption.
But if Mr. Duterte and his enablers are so keen on heeding the public clamor, they surely cannot ignore the recent Social Weather Stations (SWS) survey showing that six out of 10 Filipinos believe that a vice presidential run by the President is unconstitutional.
The survey, conducted from June 23 to 26 through face-to-face interviews with 1,200 adult Filipinos nationwide, has a margin of error of ±3 percent for national percentages, and ±6 percent for regional percentages.
The survey found that 60 percent of the respondents agreed with the sentence, “The proposal that President Rodrigo Duterte should run for Vice-President in the 2022 election violates the intention of the Constitution, which should first be amended before he may run for office again.”
Only 39 percent of respondents agreed with the sentence, “President Rodrigo Duterte should run for Vice-President in the 2022 election, because I would like his management of the government to continue.” In fact, across all regions and levels of educational attainment, a majority think Duterte running for vice president violates the Constitution.
Those are sobering numbers that suggest that perhaps “the clamor” for Mr. Duterte to run for vice president next year is really coming from a small but noisy group of enablers who have tied their fortunes to an aging president who failed to deliver on his promises in six years, and whose time in office is coming to an end.