Marcos win confirms return of ‘disciplinary state’ to South-East Asia
Election results in South-East Asia’s big three electoral regimes suggest that the benign technocracy of a previous generation of leaders has fallen out of fashion.
The last time a Marcos claimed victory in a Philippine presidential election, it was on the back of a victory so tainted by fraud it sparked a democratic revolution.
Thirty-six years later, voters in South-East Asia’s second-biggest democracy have delivered Ferdinand Marcos jnr to the presidential palace from which he fled along with his father into exile. Those who fought for democracy in the 1986 “people power” revolution, and who fought to protect the achievements of the movement since then, are understandably shell-shocked.
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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.
