The Filipino Trump: Ferdinand ‘Bongbong’ Marcos Jr Heading for Presidential Landslide

TACLOBAN, Philippines— The son and namesake of the late Philippine dictator Ferdinand Marcos is coasting to a stunning election victory Monday to a six-year term as president, guaranteeing the triumphant return of the Marcos family to the palace from which they fled in disgrace in 1986.

Oblivious to the widespread corruption and nepotism that marked Marcos’s 20 years in power, voters gave Ferdinand “Bongbong” Marcos Jr. a margin of two to one over Maria Leonra “Leni” Robredo, the woman who had predicted Bongbong's election would sanctify and perpetuate the abuses of his father.

Against all such criticism, deep in Marcos country, the historic Marcos name holds an almost messianic appeal over citizens who don’t know or don’t believe the tales of corruption and dictatorship that marked his 21-year rule. Here in the island province of Leyte, ancestral home of Marcos’ 92-year-old widow Imelda, 520 miles southeast of the capital of Manila, the heir to the family name, “Bongbong,” as he is widely known, is seen as a man of the people—even though he’s lived a life of wealth and privilege few can imagine.

Soft-spoken, seemingly modest, Bongbong would appear to bear little resemblance to Donald Trump except for one all-important similarity: He appeals to a heartland of believers, almost all deeply religious, who see him as fending off the “lies” and “fake claims” of a snobbish elite.

Bongbong’s victory, 36 years after U.S. army helicopters carried the Marcos family and cronies from the historic Malacañang Palace in Manila at the climax of the People Power Revolution, provides retribution for a family utterly humiliated ousted by a rival family and its well-to-do, educated hangers-on.

Cheers broke out on the streets here as word spread that Bongbong was cruising to a two to one lead over his relatively liberal rival Robredo. She had bitterly criticized outgoing President Rodrigo Duterte’s bloody campaign against drug abuse in which more than 6,000 people have been killed by official count, upwards of 30,000 in the view of activists.

Duterte under the Philippines constitution, enacted after the overthrow and ouster of Bongbong’s father, could not run for a second six-year term, but the power of his family will endure. In the voting for vice president, separate from that for president, Duterte’s daughter, Sara, mayor of Davao, the Philippines’ second largest city on the large southern island of Mindanao, held a lead of almost three to one over her closest rival, aligned with Robredo, and should be in line to run for president six years hence.

Critics attributed Bongbong’s success in large measure to a virulent internet campaign. “Fake news and disinfo is quite pervasive,” Carlos Conde of Human Rights Watch told The Daily Beast. “That's the one thing that has defined this election.”

Conde, a veteran journalist before going to work for HRW in Manila several years ago, cited studies showing Robredo as “the most common victim of disinfo” and also “the most maligned.” Conde said“Bongbong's camp” “perpetrates the most spreading of fake news and disinformation.”

Bongbong’s millions of fans, however, repudiated attacks on the Marcos family for either his parents’ record or reincarnation of the family name and power in Monday’s election. “The Marcos helped so many people in so many ways,” said Virginia Tumale, a nurse, citing massive construction projects and his interest in promoting nuclear energy in a country that still has no nuclear power plants.

As for Imelda Marcos’ famous shoe collection, discovered after the Marcos family and cronies were flown out of Malacanang Palace by U.S army helicopters to Clark Air Base and then herded onto U.S. Air Force planes for the flight to exile in Hawaii, her apologists here say they were donated by companies promoting their products. Ditto all the bras and girdles piled up in the palace basement. Oh, and the treasure trove of gold and jewelry stuffed into their bags was all theirs, rightfully purchased, nothing to do with looting the national treasury.

Ferdinand Marcos died in Honolulu in 1989, but the family matriarch, Imelda, revered by her fans, reviled by foes for her role in amassing billions of dollars in foreign bank accounts, will be at the vanguard in returning to the palace after Bongbong’s inauguration next month. She already received a measure of revenge when she had her husband’s body flown back to the Philippines in 1993, frozen in a crypt and then buried in Manila’s Hero’s Cemetery in 2016. The cheers here are loudest among poor people who feel left out and looked down upon by the relatively well off, better educated, moneyed elite that supported Robredo.

“Bongbong is humble, he never shows a bad attitude,” said J.R. Arpon, a retired taxi driver talking in a rickety food stand in a cluster of shacks on the edge of this ramshackle city. Arpon flatly rejected charges of corruption of which the Marcos family was accused in cases unresolved in years of court cases “That’s not true,” he said. “They were not involved in stealing from the government.”

As for claims that Marcos ruled as a dictator, Arpon said the man he views as a national hero imposed martial law in 1972 “only as a last resort” in the struggle against the communists’ New People’s Army. He doubted well-documented estimates that tens of thousands were jailed and several thousand killed during the decade of martial law.

“During the time of Marcos there was less hunger, less poverty,” said Anielie Dunduma, whom I met in another shop by the road here. And of course, she said, “Everyone loves Imelda, 100 percent,” as to be expected in a city long governed by members of the Romualdez family into which she was born.

In an atmosphere in which neither Bongbong nor his father can do any wrong, you are assured, seriously, that Marcos’ archfoe, Benigno Aquino Jr., gunned down as he was returning from self-exile in the U.S. in 1983, was actually killed not by Marcos’s henchmen but by a member of Aquino’s own wealthy family. And you’re also asked to believe that the late Corazon Aquino, Aquino’s widow, won the presidency in 1986 in a fraudulent election and was a terrible leader whose son, Benigno Aquino III, president from 2010 to 2016 and who died last year, was worse.

The revenge of BBM, as Bongbong Marcos is often known, was all the sweeter since Leni Robredo, the woman whom polls had long shown he would easily defeat for president, had edged him out for vice president in the last elections six years ago. The national commission on elections threw out Bongbong’s incessant claims of fraud in that election, and Robredo has been vice president ever since. In the kind of repetition that also evokes comparisons with Trump, Bongbong and his aides have never stopped complaining about the result.

Bongbong and Trump differ, however, in one crucial respect. There is no doubt of Bongbong’s overwhelming popularity in the presidential election in which he easily defeated not only Robredo but also a cast of eight other candidates, including renowned boxer Manny Pacquiao, world champion of four weight classes, welterweight, lightweight, featherweight and flyweight, Elected to the Philippine Senate in 2016, Pacquiao ran a distant third, many millions of votes behind Bongbong. One voter here told The Daily Beast he was “too dumb” or “inexperienced” to govern effectively.

Bongbong, having been governor of Ilocos Norte, a province far north of Manila that’s long been his family’s stronghold, commands respect even though he avoided repeated calls to participate in a TV debate with Robredo and other candidates. He is said not to have wanted to waste time refuting all the bad stuff that’s said about his father and mother even as his propaganda machine has burnished his legacy with claims of all the great things his namesake did as president.

The surge for Bongbong was clear at a final mass rally that I attended at which hundreds of thousands cheered repeatedly as he ran through a laundry list of promises to “give more opportunities,” to bring about “democratic stability” and to “unite the people in a more progressive country.”

Talking to reporters, he had facile answers for all questions about his father’s record, saying “martial law was not the decision of my father but of the Congress” and that the untold billions that he and Imelda are said to have salted away “was not stolen but was income from my family.” Claims to the contrary, he said, were “nonsense.”

Fans of Robredo were just as impassioned but not nearly so numerous. In Robredo’s mass rally in a large park in Manila’s upscale Makati district, she vowed to “clean up corruption and represent “all them people,” not just a privileged elite. In fact, Robredo’s campaign undoubtedly gained momentum in the final weeks—though her pleas were little noted by a vast electorate to whom the Marcos names remain virtually sacrosanct.

A spectator with whom I watched both rallies, however, reminded me that Robredo’s adherents looked better educated, better off financially and from a higher stratum of a society riven by class, social, educational and financial differences. “We are polarized,” he said, in an echo of the divisions in American society. “This election will not settle anything. If Bongbong wins, we face much worse problems over the next six years.”