The ICC arrest of former Philippine president Rodrigo Duterte is a shocking blow for the Duterte clan, and the Marcos family isn’t letting up. Is this the political last stand for the Dutertes?
March 2025
On 12 May 2025, the Philippines will hold midterm elections. Up for grabs will be all 317 seats in the House of Representatives plus half the seats in the 24-member Senate as well as numerous provincial and local offices. On February 11, President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. kicked off the campaign season in style by lambasting the disastrous legacy of his predecessor, Rodrigo Duterte. “None of [my preferred candidates] are accomplices in pocketing sacks of money, exploiting the pandemic crisis and letting our countrymen get sick and die,” declared the usually soft-spoken Marcos in an attack on the corruption scandals that dotted Duterte’s six years in office from 2016 to 2022. “None of them acts like the acolyte of a false prophet who is languishing due to his defiling of our youth and women,” Marcos Jr added. This was an allusion to a key Duterte ally, Pastor Apollo Quiboloy. He was arrested at Davao, the Dutertes’ hometown on the island of Mindanao in the far-southern Philippines, in September 2024 and appears on the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation’s “most wanted list” of alleged human traffickers. Quiboloy faces charges in multiple Philippine courts as well as possible extradition to the United States.
This arrest, however, pales in significance to the one conducted at a Manila airport on March 11. The Marcos Jr. administration’s surprise decision to hand over Rodrigo Duterte to the International Criminal Court (ICC) on charges that he set in motion mass atrocities during his scorched-earth drug war has made clear that the Duterte political dynasty is now in an existential fight.
Perhaps presaging the bigger strike against Rodrigo Duterte’s clan, Marcos Jr.’s February stump speech marked a major departure from his typical conflict-averse approach. A few days before the fiery talk, three-quarters of the House of Representatives had voted to impeach Vice-President Sara Duterte (Rodrigo’s daughter). The bill of particulars includes charges that she threatened to arrange the murder of Marcos Jr. and was involved with her father’s extrajudicial “war on drugs” killing teams, as well as allegations of sedition and financial corruption.
Vice-President Duterte’s fate now rests with the Senate, which has so far dragged its feet in the matter of her trial, citing logistical concerns as election campaigning proceeds. Most senators — and especially those who must face the voters in May — seem unwilling to take a stand with either the Marcos camp or the Duterte camp, so they have delayed the trial until July at the earliest. Thus, the outcome of the simmering battle between the House of Marcos and House of Duterte will most likely be decided by how the twelve Senate races go.
If the constitutionally required sixteen or more senators vote to convict Sara Duterte, she will be barred from running for office again, and her family will be finished as a force in national politics. Her near-octogenarian father is too frail and her two brothers are too unpopular to stage any serious national campaign, which explains the Duterte family’s decision to reconsider having the three run for Senate seats. Indeed, all authoritative surveys, so far, suggest that the well-funded slate of the Marcos administration will dominate the elections and win most of the Senate contests. This year’s midterms, therefore, are not only a referendum on the incumbent but a likely political last stand for the Dutertes.
No Ordinary Race
In the Philippines, midterm elections have tended to favor the incumbents. Unlike most mature democracies, the Philippines has lax rules on campaign spending and allows officeholders to put state institutions and resources to work for preferred candidates. Add to this the phenomenon of “command votes,” whereby national leaders coax and cajole regional warlords and well-entrenched dynasties to mobilize mass voting blocs behind administration candidates, and it is no mystery why challengers have a hard time.
In 2019, then–President Rodrigo Duterte had gone farther by allegedly threatening regional officials that they would end up on his notorious “narcopoliticians” list — and possibly be extrajudicially killed — if they backed the wrong candidates. The upshot was not just an incumbent doing well but an incumbent running the table: For the first time in more than eight decades, not a single opposition candidate won a Senate seat.
On the surface, the 2025 midterms seem broadly conventional: Candidates who back the sitting president are doing well, which is normal. But Philippine democracy’s ability to endure a festering personal feud between rival dynasties is being put to the test. Thus, democratic resilience is on the ballot along with the more mundane matter of the incumbents’ performance in office.
Tellingly, the House impeachment drive was led by Representative Ferdinand Marcos III, known as “Sandro” and at 31 the current president’s eldest child. Sandro Marcos denounced the vice-president for openly threatening to assassinate his parents and his father’s first cousin, current House speaker Martin Romualdez, during a late-night press conference that she held via Zoom in November 2024. These remarks formed the basis for the first article of impeachment. The younger Marcos said that the vice-president’s statements “cannot be taken lightly, especially from someone in such a high position,” and avowed his eagerness to see her impeached. Once staunch allies, the Duterte and Marcos families have over the past year gone through an ugly political divorce against a background of power struggles and genuine policy differences.
Concerned with rehabilitating his family’s reputation, President Marcos has largely shunned his predecessor’s most controversial actions, including the en masse extrajudicial killings that Duterte justified as needed to fight the drug trade as well as his constant threats against media outlets and civil society groups. In stark contrast to his pro-Beijing predecessor, meanwhile, Marcos Jr. has doubled down on defense cooperation with traditional Western allies.
Most notably, the incumbent granted the U.S. military access to critical facilities near the geopolitical hotspots of Taiwan and the South China Sea. To Beijing’s chagrin, the Philippines has also decided to semi-permanently host the U.S Army’s mobile, state-of-the-art Typhon truck-launched missile system, which could hit military facilities across southern China in the event, say, of an attack on Taiwan.
Marcos Jr. has also signed an agreement with Japan that paves the way for expanded joint military exercises and defense cooperation. Similar pacts with Canada, France, and New Zealand are also in the works. The president staunchly supports U.S.-led “minilateral” defense blocs such as the AUKUS partnership that joins Australia with the United Kingdom and the United States, and whose first project is helping Australia to obtain eight nuclear-powered submarines deploying non-nuclear weapons. The Philippines itself is involved in the JAPHUS minilateral bloc with Japan and the United States.
The incumbent’s sharp tilt toward traditional alliances has come in for sharp criticism from the Dutertes, who have been the most prominent supporters of warmer Sino-Philippine ties over the past decade. The former president even personally visited Chinese leader Xi Jinping in 2023 to signify defiance of Marcos’s pivot back toward the West and reiterate the Dutertes’ belief in maintaining warm ties with Beijing. In the end, however, the Duterte family’s beef with Marcos and his relatives is less about ideological differences than sheer interest and personal pride.
The Dutertes have accused the incumbent of political betrayal, especially with Marcos Jr. refusing to hand key government agencies to pro-Duterte elements. Tensions reached a fever pitch when Congress, led by Marcos allies, began to withhold then, later, even investigate vice-president Sara Duterte’s discretionary funds. The inquiry extended to misdealings she allegedly committed during her 2023–24 stint chairing an umbrella group of Southeast Asia’s education ministers. Meanwhile, other members of the Duterte family, including Congressman Paolo Duterte (Sara’s older brother), complained about losing access to development funds. This left the Dutertes vulnerable to challenges from other Davao-based Mindanao dynasties, most notably the administration-aligned Nograleses, who are contesting the mayoralty of Davao City and the local congressional seats this year. Suddenly, the Dutertes have found themselves potentially pinned down even in their own backyard.
Rumblings of Coups
Unwilling to be sidelined, the Duterte dynasty has lashed back, verbally attacking the president and his family while threatening to topple the current administration by extraconstitutional means. Although increasingly short of funds and influence, the Duterte family is still a force to be reckoned with since it relies on multiple pillars of support whose resiliency is proven.
First, the Dutertes enjoy near-universal backing on their home island of Mindanao, which has historically been neglected by the elites that dominate “imperial Manila.” As astute politicians, the Dutertes have effectively weaponized historical grievances against establishment elites and, accordingly, built a “Solid South” base of support in the Visayan-speaking regions of the country against Tagalog- and Ilocano-speaking elites from Luzon, which holds the national capital and slightly more than half the country’s population.
The family also enjoys wide support among influential religious groups such as Quiboloy’s Kingdom of Jesus Christ and the far larger Iglesia Ni Cristo (INC). These groups have millions of members across the country and beyond. In January, the INC organized a “peace rally” by means of which more than a million people indirectly expressed opposition to Sara Duterte’s impeachment. Congress was unimpressed and went forward with its action against her, but it is not far-fetched to think that the Senate (or at least the portion of it seeking reelection) was intimidated: How else to explain the slow-walking of her trial?
The Dutertes are also relying on the loyalty of ex-generals and servicemen, especially those who enjoyed swift promotion and plum retirement benefits, including cabinet appointments, under the previous administration. During his six-year tenure, Duterte named a dozen ex-generals, including former military chiefs, to hold key ministerial portfolios such as defense, social welfare, and telecommunications. The dynasty sows discord within the barracks while rumbling about the prospect of staging a coup. In November 2024, Rodrigo Duterte effectively called on the armed forces to drive Marcos from office.
“There is a fractured governance in the Philippines today,” the former president told the press. “Only the military . . . can correct it.” Rumors that Sara would be impeached were rife at the time. He went to ask how long the military could support a “drug addict” as president, recalling his unsubstantiated accusation that Marcos Jr. has a cocaine habit. In recent weeks, the Duterte camp has been raising the specter of the late President Ferdinand Marcos Sr., who ruled as a dictator from 1972 until his ouster in 1986 by the People Power movement. The Dutertes’ claim is that under Marcos Jr., who held the Ilocos Norte governorship during part of his father’s presidency, the Philippines has been “veering toward dictatorship.”
The Marcos Jr. administration has responded in kind by not only indirectly supporting the impeachment of Sara Duterte, but also by directly lodging charges of sedition and grave threats against other members of the southern dynasty. Moreover, the incumbent also relaxed and then dropped his opposition to ICC warrants against Rodrigo Duterte on charges of crimes against humanity. When the elder Duterte flew back from a March trip to Hong Kong, he was held for a few hours at a military base before being whisked to The Hague. The Duterte camp was shocked. Its hope had been that the Philippine Supreme Court would bar any international legal body from arresting the ex-president. The stakes of the looming elections are now higher than ever, with the Duterte camp desperate to rally popular support, portraying itself as a victim of political persecution.
Accordingly, both the Marcos and Duterte camps are actively courting members of the liberal-progressive opposition, who lack central leadership and are deeply split on both tactics and ideology. Former vice-president Leni Robredo has, so far, only publicly supported two liberal senatorial candidates, former senators Paolo Benigno “Bam” Aquino and Francis “Kiko” Pangilinan, while more progressive candidates have either formed their own separate slates or opted to run as independents. The genuine opposition groups are also divided over impeachment, with “Never Marcos” liberal candidates tending to avoid the issue while progressive “Never Duterte” forces openly call for holding the Dutertes accountable.
Bereft of competitive “third choices,” voters this May will have to select from pro-Duterte versus pro-Marcos candidates. Senate races in the Philippines are notoriously hard to predict and often produce big surprises, but it is clear that this year’s midterms will be the most contentious and consequential the country has ever seen.
The island nation’s two most potent political dynasties are locked in a battle royal, and they agree only that the archipelago is not big enough for both of them. The Dutertes will not go gently into the political sunset. Expect them to fight tooth and nail in hopes not only of surviving but of making it back to the Malacañang Palace (Sara’s original mission before things went off the rails). Whoever dominates the next Senate, therefore, will likely determine the future of Philippine democracy.
Richard Javad Heydarian is a senior lecturer at the University of the Philippines, Asian Center, and a columnist for the Philippine Daily Inquirer. His books include The Rise of Duterte: A Populist Revolt Against Elite Democracy (2018) and The Indo-Pacific: Trump, China, and the New Struggle for Global Mastery (2020).
Copyright © 2025 National Endowment for Democracy
Image credit: Ted Aljibe/AFP via Getty Images
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