A Corrupt Political Class Is Ransacking the Philippines
Filipinos have been protesting against the theft of public funds for flood defenses by corrupt politicians. The protesters face a political class whose leading figures, President Bongbong Marcos and Vice President Sara Duterte, are now bitter enemies.
After storms Bualoi and Ragasa hit the Philippines, people took to the streets to give voice to their anger at government officials. (Daniel Ceng / Anadolu via Getty Images)
Sitting on the boundary of the Pacific’s Ring of Fire, the Philippines is particularly vulnerable to natural disasters. Volcanic activity, earthquakes, and tsunamis are all real and present risks across the vast island chain.
Typhoons, on average, batter the country more than twenty times a year. Though they are comparatively easy to predict, the regularity and ferocity of these storms call for extensive planning and an understanding across Filipino society that when the typhoon hits, you batten down the hatches and stay inside.
In September came tropical storm Bualoi, followed almost immediately by super typhoon Ragasa, which killed more than a dozen people. Ragasa forced hundreds of thousands more to evacuate and destroyed critical infrastructure across enormous areas before moving northwest toward Taiwan, Hong Kong, and southern China.
In the aftermath of the storm, people took to the streets. The timing of Bualoi and Ragasa could hardly have been worse. They struck with the country reeling from a scandal, an act of betrayal by those responsible for protecting the welfare and livelihoods of Filipinos.
Politicians had been lining their pockets with public funds, money that was supposed to have been spent on flood defense projects, to mitigate against and lessen the impact of deadly climactic events — the very kind of disaster they had just seen.
Ghost Projects
The plot, details of which first emerged in July, implicates lawmakers in siphoning off huge sums of taxpayers’ money. According to government officials, between 2023 and 2025 as much as 70 percent of the flood control budget was lost, amounting to 118.5 billion pesos ($2 billion).
Many so-called “ghost projects” only existed on paper. Others were of substandard quality, with money skimmed off by contractors and administrators.
The fury that Filipinos feel at this scandal is intensified by the wider inequities of their society. The relative lack of domestic opportunities means that the country continues to hemorrhage young people to work and study abroad. Income inequality is high, with a Gini coefficient score of 39.3, significantly worse than neighboring countries like China and Indonesia.
In 2024, per capita GDP stood at just under $4,000, a lower figure than Indonesia’s and significantly lower than those of Malaysia, China, and Taiwan. The country cannot easily deal with an economic loss of this magnitude.
There is a long history of governmental corruption and criminality. The former autocrat Ferdinand Marcos Sr, father of current president Ferdinand “Bongbong” Marcos Jr, is alleged to have stolen $10 billion of public money during his dictatorship.
The president who served before Marcos Jr, Rodrigo Duterte, leads the other powerful political clan in the country. Duterte is currently awaiting trial at the International Criminal Court, having been charged with crimes against humanity, including forced disappearances and targeted killings during his bloody “war on drugs.” His daughter Sara is Bongbong’s vice president (though they have fallen out spectacularly). She is also the subject of significant corruption allegations.
Marcos and Duterte
After Bualoi and Ragasa, people took to the streets. Loosely organized demonstrations made up of various political factions — church groups, universities, and other institutions — gave voice to their anger at government officials. A huge rally in Manila took place on September 21, the anniversary of the imposition of martial law by Marcos Sr in 1972. Demonstrators chanted: “Marcos, Duterte, walang pinag-iba! Parehong tuta, diktador pasista!” (Marcos, Duterte, they’re no different. Both are puppets, dictators, fascists!).
Jinggoy Estrada, the president of the Senate, and Martin Romualdez, the House speaker and a cousin of the president, both stepped down following the scandal.
For his part, President Marcos announced the creation of a commission to investigate corruption in infrastructure projects, seeking to associate himself with the ire of the protesters: “Do you blame them for going out on the streets? If I weren’t president, I might be out in the streets with them.”
The attempts to assuage the public do not represent a sign of desperation from an unpopular incumbent. In poll after poll, the president and his vice president both receive high ratings.
Duterte Sr also remains a popular figure. During a presidency characterized by capricious, mafioso-like rhetoric, and flagrant authoritarianism, his war on drugs incited a wave of extrajudicial killings, with overall estimates of those dead anywhere between 12,000 and 30,000 people. Yet by the end of his term, Duterte Sr remained the most popular president since the 1986 People Power Revolution.
Rebranding
How can we account for the enduring popularity of figures like Marcos and Duterte? Teddy Casiño is a former member of the Philippines Parliament and the chair of Bagong Alyansang Makabayan, a left-wing alliance of various organizations from across Filipino society. He sees Duterte’s antiestablishment image as the basis for his continuing support. Bongbong Marcos, on the other hand, required a careful process of rebranding:
After the Marcoses were kicked out in 1986, there was a lot of hope that things would change for the better. But after several years, not much changed. The Marcoses exploited people’s disillusionment with the post-dictatorship period by reinventing themselves, and people were receptive to it, believing that things had been better during the dictatorship, that corruption had been more controlled, that the economy was better. Many young people were unaware or oblivious, vulnerable to the sophisticated messaging of the Marcoses.
The two dynasties cast a long shadow over Filipino politics: the Dutertes have their power base in the southern island of Mindanao, while the Marcos clan comes from Luzon in the north.
Duterte’s Partido Demokratiko Pilipino (PDP) is nominally a center-left force. Today its real political basis is broadly populist and authoritarian, with a set of shifting ideological positions incoherently grouped under the rubric of “Dutertism.” During his presidency, the political program itself seemed of secondary importance in comparison to his charismatic leadership style.
Rodrigo’s daughter Sara formed her own vehicle, Hugpong ng Pagbabago (“Alliance of Change”), in 2018 and allied with the PDP. When her father left office in 2022, he had originally planned to run for vice president, but opted to stand aside, clearing the way for Sara to run for the top job.
However, the younger Duterte opted to run for vice president instead, lending her support to Marcos as the country’s head of state. The partnership severed the link between the PDP and its political origins as a party forged in opposition to the very autocracy embodied by Bongbong’s father.
The Marcos–Duterte pact ended up souring spectacularly. In February of this year, the lower house of parliament impeached Sara Duterte for making threats to kill Marcos. The supreme court later struck the move against Duterte down in July. The pair remain at loggerheads, with a general expectation that Duterte will seek the presidency for herself in 2028.
Island Chain
Although the PDP can claim something of a social democratic history, and under Duterte flirted rhetorically with a more radical left-wing posture, it is now far from being a party of the Left. The other parties, of which there are many, espouse marginally divergent brands of federalism, timid liberalism, authoritarianism, and religiously inflected nationalism, putting forward policies that are designed in large part as sops to socially conservative Christian or Muslim voters.
This narrow band of political choices partly reflects the general decay of capitalist democracy that we can see at work in many other countries. But the shamelessly venal nature of the Filipino political system is in large part due to its specific position as a US client state and a key location in Washington’s “island chain” strategy.
Dwight Eisenhower’s secretary of state, John Foster Dulles, conceived this strategy in the 1950s, envisaging a union of Asian nations friendly to the United States that would play a key maritime role. At the time, this was a matter of containing the Soviet Union and its new ally, the People’s Republic of China. Today the Soviet Union is gone, but the United States still has a strong interest in arresting the rise of China and its claims to regional hegemony.
The subject of colonialism was largely absent from Filipino textbooks until a wave of nationalism swept through the country in the 1960s. The Spanish ruled the islands for over three hundred years, leaving a deeply Catholic imprint. In 1898, the United States ejected Spain, ignoring a declaration of Filipino independence and continuing to preside over Filipino affairs (aside from a brief Japanese interregnum) until after World War II.
Although the United States finally acknowledged the country’s independence in 1946, the Philippines has remained a peripheral tributary to the imperial core, reliant on US foreign direct investment and military support while exporting in return its labor for cheap employment in the West. The Philippines is the largest recipient of US military assistance in the East Asia–Pacific region, receiving $40 million in 2024.
Counterinsurgency and Repression
US forces regularly conduct joint military exercises with their Filipino counterparts. One such drill earlier this year involved 14,000 participants, mainly US and Filipino soldiers. US troops have access to nine military bases throughout the country.
Manila is also a major purchaser of US-made weapons systems, which it has used in campaigns against Islamist groups and the New People’s Army (NPA), the armed wing of the Maoist Communist Party of the Philippines (CPP). The NPA has waged one of the world’s longest-running communist insurgencies but is now a greatly weakened force, having been reduced to a fraction of its former size. Its remaining fighters are now confined mainly to intermittent confrontations with state security forces in remote areas.
The state has long directed repression against the entire Philippine left, not merely the NPA/CPP, vilifying its activists as terrorists and targeting them with forced disappearances and extrajudicial killings. The work of organization and mobilization under such conditions has been dangerous and difficult.
Yet there is still a living memory of a street movement that became strong enough to topple the Marcos dictatorship. Casiño suggests that the recent protests offer an opportunity to rebuild the influence of the Left:
We have to link the issue of corruption to broader issues of colonialism, imperialism, and the failures of neoliberal capitalism. It has been a difficult few years. But this upsurge in the protest movement on the issue of corruption gives us hope that we will be able to revive the strength of the Left and provide a framework to engage in politics and in militant action. There are a lot of challenges but also a lot of potential.