Duterte eyes dynastic succession in the Philippines

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After playing coy for months, Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte recently declared that he is considering running for vice-president at elections in mid-2022 in order to avoid being reduced to a lame-duck president. Leading the ticket, as widely rumored, could be none other than his daughter, Sara Duterte, the current mayor of Davao City.
 
Asia Times’ contributor Jason Castaneda reported last week that with the Philippine political opposition in disarray and struggling to coalesce around a charismatic leader, the strongman populist is now openly flirting with the prospect of the first dynastic direct succession in the country’s history.
 
Duterte, he says, has big incentives to stay in office, including fear of prosecution for extrajudicial killings in his controversial drug war. With opinion surveys showing a long-rumored “Duterte-Duterte” ticket already in pole position, Castaneda shared his thoughts on the firebrand leader’s potential bid to sidestep the nation’s single-term limit for presidents.
 
Why is Duterte seeking the vice-presidency in 2022?
 
There are two major reasons why the incumbent populist wants to perpetuate himself in power by all means necessary. First, having failed at ramming through a controversial and highly suspect new proposed constitution, thanks to widespread public skepticism and resistance by more independent-leaning senators with their own personal ambitions, Duterte is looking for alternative ways to stick around.
 
Here is a man, who, after all, has no appreciation for legal term limits, having been the supremo of the southern city of Davao for decades, either directly or through proxies, namely his daughter, Sara. So when he ran for the presidency, I believe he had plans of staying in power for as long as he felt necessary, not only for himself but also for the country.

Duterte genuinely believes that Philippine democratic institutions are so broken that only a supposedly decisive and uncompromising authoritarian figure like himself can save it from apocalypse.

The way he put it in 2016 elections was this: If he doesn’t win, the country will become another “narco-state”, but obviously he was speaking in more general terms about the fragility of the Philippine political system, which was exposed by his very ascent to power and, subsequently, “shock and awe” devastation of fragile democratic institutions.
 
The second, and increasingly urgent reason, is even more straightforward: He faces the prospect of political persecution by all the major players he alienated, both within and without, and, even more crucially, reckoning for his mass atrocities throughout the years of a scorched-earth drug war.
 
The International Criminal Court, the US Congress, and, should an opposition figure win, the malleable domestic courts will likely all go after him once he is out of power. And for Duterte, his fear is that they might not only go after him but also his entire dynasty, with many warlords and rivals waiting for their opportunity to strike in the vicious politics on the southern island of Mindanao.
 
Is a Duterte-Duterte ticket even legal under Philippine law governing term limits for the president?
 
Most constitutional experts, and even some of his allies, maintain that any run for the vice-presidency, which would put him in a position to ascend to the presidency at any moment, clearly and directly violates the spirit and text of the 1987 constitution, which expressly sought to prevent another elected dictatorship as we as saw under Ferdinand Marcos.

So, it’s possible that some critics or civil society groups will try to challenge his run at the Commission on Elections, packed by Duterte appointees, and all the way to the Supreme Court, also packed with Duterte appointees, if necessary.