When Vice President Sara Duterte announced her resignation as Education Secretary, Harry Roque proclaimed her as the leader of the opposition.
Sara also announced that her father, former President Rodrigo Duterte, and her siblings Paolo and Sebastian, will run for the Senate in the May 2025 elections.
The Dutertes cannot qualify as the opposition. They are and should be considered competitors to the Marcos dynasty.
In politics, an opposition should have a distinct program and can offer alternatives. The Dutertes have none of these. They only aspire to regain political power to evade accountability, particularly from the crimes against humanity perpetrated by Rodrigo “Digong” Duterte under his so-called “war on drugs.” The International Criminal Court (ICC) is expected to issue a warrant of arrest against the former president, and Digong knows that his verbal antics against the ICC cannot absolve him.
The other party, the Marcoses, is far from being pristine. The two dynasties are competing against their track records in terms of corruption, human rights violations and subservience to foreign masters.
The Marcoses are refusing to return the wealth they amassed from public coffers during the Marcos dictatorship. The same ill-gotten wealth was used to wrest control of Malacañang. The Marcoses have reestablished and strengthened their political clout due to the failure of the post-Marcos Sr. regimes to hold the family accountable for their crimes against the Filipino people, among other factors.
In the same vein, the Dutertes also enriched themselves while in public office. A 2019 PCIJ report revealed that Digong, Sara and Paolo registered big spikes in their net worth since they assumed government posts until 2017. The Commission on Audit (COA) confirmed that Sara spent P125 million in confidential funds from December 13 to December 31, 2022, or in a span of only 19 days. Digong also spent billions in confidential and intelligence funds while he was in Malacañang, according to COA records.
Neither of them uplifted the conditions of the ordinary folk. Their populist slogans only stayed as slogans and reinforced the scourge of patronage politics. Their economic policies favored the rich, investing more on infrastructure rather than social services.
If Duterte’s anti-drug campaign killed over 20,000 victims, mostly poor, in the first 17 months of his administration, extrajudicial killings of drug suspects have continued under Marcos, with 524 victims from January 2023 until June 2024, according to independent monitor Dahas.
Under Duterte’s counterinsurgency campaign, human rights alliance Karapatan recorded 422 victims of extrajudicial killings, 21 enforced disappearances and 233 incidents of torture. In just a year and a half of the Marcos Jr. administration, Karapatan recorded 89 victims of extrajudicial killings, 13 enforced disappearances and 18 incidents of torture.
While Duterte enacted the Anti-Terror Law, Marcos is making full use of it to harass critics, activists and human rights advocates. The anti-terrorism rhetoric has been abused to justify all forms of state violence.
Both leaders are also subservient to their foreign masters. Duterte pretended at first to be anti-US intervention but eventually allowed combat exercises between the U.S. and Filipino troops to continue under the Visiting Forces Agreement. During Duterte’s presidency, the “security cooperation” between the two counties never stopped. In 2019 and in 2022, the Philippines signed contracts with a U.S. company for the purchase of combat helicopters worth $865 million. From 2019 until 2021, the U.S. has also authorized the permanent export of almost $171.3 million in defense articles to the Philippines. At the same time, Duterte forged closer ties with China, with Beijing claiming that Duterte agreed to China’s access to South China Sea islands. The “gentleman’s agreement” with China has been described by former Supreme Court Justice Antonio Carpio as “a disguised surrender of our rights over Ayungin shoal.”
Marcos, meanwhile, has made no effort in hiding his kowtowing to US interests. Marcos agreed to expand the sites of Enhanced Defense Cooperation Agreement (EDCA), which allows US military to access military bases and strategic sites, to nine locations from the original five. The additional EDCA sites are strategic for the United States’ safeguarding of its geopolitical and economic interests in the Asia Pacific region.
Marcos also signed a nuclear agreement with the US, known as the 123 agreement, which commenced early this month. The US State Department claims that the agreement provides a comprehensive framework for peaceful nuclear cooperation with the Philippines based on a mutual commitment to nuclear nonproliferation and will permit the transfer of nuclear material, equipment (including reactors), components, and information for nuclear research and civil nuclear energy production. Scientist group AGHAM criticized the agreement, saying that in the absence of Filipino experts in nuclear safety, the agreement means that the Philippines will have to “disproportionately rely on the US nuclear regulatory mechanism.”
Hence, the Dutertes and the Marcoses are essentially the same, and they best represent the rottenness of the system. The good thing is that the Filipino people need not choose between the two. We should reject their brand of “leadership” and look for genuine alternatives. 
