Hundreds of supporters gathered outside Marcos’s campaign headquarters on Epifanio de los Santos Avenue in central Manila on Tuesday to celebrate his victory. With more than 98% of votes counted, Marcos led main rival Vice-President Leni Robredo by over 30 percentage points.
Marcos — the son of Ferdinand Marcos, the late dictator who ruled the Philippines for two decades between the 1960s and 1980s — acknowledged the controversy surrounding his background in a statement by spokesman Vic Rodriguez, cited by Reuters and other media.
“To the world, he says: Judge me not by my ancestors, but by my actions,” Rodriguez said. “To those who voted for Bongbong, and those who did not, it is his promise to be a president for all Filipinos, to seek common ground across political divides and to work together to unite the nation.”
Robredo gave what amounted to a concession speech early Tuesday morning, stressing that “we did not fail, nothing was wasted”.
During the campaign, Marcos declined to participate in most public debates, avoiding exposing himself to critiques from other candidates. This has made it difficult to assess his overarching policy platform.
But his past statements, which include calling Duterte’s engagement with China “really our only option”, suggest he will carry on the current administration’s foreign policy. Marcos visited the Chinese Embassy in October and spoke with Ambassador Huang Xilian.
The Philippines sits on the front lines of US-China tensions and is entangled in a territorial dispute with Beijing in the South China Sea.
An international arbitration tribunal ruled in 2016 that China’s broad claims in the sea had “no legal basis”, but Beijing has continued to build its military presence in the area to strengthen its effective control.
Yet Duterte has consistently sought rapprochement with China, prioritising economic cooperation over the territorial row.
Direct investment from China between 2016 and 2021, during Duterte’s tenure, swelled by a factor of 12 compared with the total for the prior six years under predecessor Benigno Aquino. Infrastructure, including a recently opened China-funded bridge in Manila, has been central to this cooperation.
How a Marcos-led government will deal with the US is less clear.
The Philippines, once ruled by the US, is now one of Washington’s few Asian treaty allies, along with Japan and South Korea. While American military facilities in the country have long been closed, US troops rotate in and out for drills under the allies’ Visiting Forces Agreement.
These ties were shaky at times under Duterte, with the president at one point deciding to terminate the VFA before later reversing course. If Marcos relies heavily on China to help the Philippine economy recover from the coronavirus pandemic, Washington could find its Asia-Pacific strategy constrained.
Marcos will be joined at the helm by a fellow political scion: Davao Mayor Sara Duterte, the current president’s daughter, who won the vice-presidency handily. The younger Duterte had been seen as the top candidate to succeed her father but ended up throwing her support behind Marcos.
At a rally Saturday in Manila to wrap up the campaign, Sara Duterte’s call for unity raised enthusiastic cheers from the crowd. After Marcos began his speech, some attendees left the venue.
Marcos’s father has loomed large in the background of the campaign. The strongman maintained his grip on power by revising the constitution and imposing years of martial law. Activists and political opponents were jailed and tortured.
The regime killed more than 3,000 people, and the Marcos family amassed an estimated US$10 billion in ill-gotten wealth.
Despite all this, the younger Marcos steadily built the foundation for a political comeback, with stints as governor of the family’s home turf of Ilocos Norte and in both chambers of the national legislature.
He used social media to soften his father’s negative image during the campaign, and critics fear that he will try to rewrite the history of Marcos Sr’s rule after he takes office.
Nobel Prize-winning Philippine journalist Maria Ressa questioned how people can vote rationally when their emotions are being manipulated via social media, and human rights groups have warned of the potential consequences of a dictator’s son holding power.