Opinion

Duterte moves to shore up his post-election influence

The Philippines’ populist leader is likely to pull out all the stops to aid the victory next year of a political ally, who would allow him to retain influence and protect him from accountability for his abuses of power.

Liam GammonContributor

Apr 25, 2021 – 4.27pm

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If you were to bin the Philippines’ political system and start from scratch, you would probably design something quite different from what exists now. One legacy of the country’s former status as a colony of the United States was an American-inspired political system grafted onto a society that had been shaped by centuries of quasi-feudalism under Spanish rule.

This incongruence of institutional design and socio-political reality has been one cause of the Philippines’ political challenges ever since its emergence as an independent democracy after the Second World War. A weak central state has played second fiddle in the lives of most citizens to local political machines controlled by wealthy clans who turned mayorships and congressional seats into personal fiefdoms.

Liam Gammon is a research fellow in the East Asian Bureau of Economic Research and an editor at East Asia Forum (www.eastasiaforum.org) in the Crawford School of Public Policy at the ANU’s College of Asia and the Pacific.