From Anarchy to Unity of Families in

the 2022 Philippine elections:

A Marcos-Duterte Leviathan state?

Cleve V. ARGUELLES
Assistant Professorial Lecturer, Department of Political Science and
Development Studies, De La Salle University, Manila
[email protected]

Introduction
As a social institution, the family plays a significant role in Philippine
politics. The political and economic domination of elite families in the
country can be rooted in Philippine colonial history when colonial powers
relied on co-opted local prominent families to maintain order and control
(Hau 2017). Since then, the family has been a key institution for local
elites to consolidate and perpetuate power. In contemporary times, they
rely on creating enduring political dynasties in various models and sizes
(Teehankee 2001; Mendoza, Jaminola, and Yap 2019). The fierce electoral
competition among these dynasties and other elite families had been a
permanent feature of Philippine politics since the American colonial period
(Abinales and Amoroso 2005). Characterized as anarchic, it had shaped the
trajectory of Philippine politics including the parasitic but also synergistic
relationship these families have with a perennially weak Philippine state
(McCoy 1993). However, although elite familial rule has survived for
more than a century, it has also been regularly interrupted and pressured
by significant challenges from below in the form of reformist politicians,
protest movements, and even rebellions and revolutions (Quimpo 2008).
2 C. V. ARGUELLES

In this essay, I argue that the political developments leading to and

until the conclusion of the 2022 Philippine elections show that a section
of the country’s elite families are shifting away from the usual anarchic
competition to a path of unity to insulate themselves and the institution
of familial rule from threats of reform and other similar challenges in the
future. This process can be described as the formation of a metaphorical
Philippine Leviathan state, similar to how previously fractured communal,
economic, and political elites in Malaysia and Singapore have come together
to build strong authoritarian states to permanently protect themselves from
the destabilizing threats of communism and liberal democratization (Slater
2010). I develop four points to illustrate my argument. First, the popularity
of former president and populist par excellence Rodrigo Roa Duterte has
driven a demand for a continuity government among the 2022 election
voters. This has benefited the Marcos-Duterte candidacies. Second, the
tandem has also taken advantage of the Marcos family’s well-oiled myth-
making machinery. Although beneficial, none of these could have won them
the elections if not for the careful brokering of arranged marriages among
some of the country’s most dominant political families. This is my third
point. Finally, I explain why the political conditions in post-authoritarian
Philippines have motivated the country’s elites to band together rather than
compete, a longstanding practice in elections, to fortify defenses against
challenges to their individual and collective rule.

The 2022 elections as a continuity election

The landslide electoral victory of Ferdinand “Bongbong” Romualdez
Marcos Jr. and Sara Zimmerman Duterte-Carpio as the 17th president
and 15th vice president, respectively, in the 2022 elections with Bongbong
winning 59 percent of the votes and Sara 62 percent (see Table 1) represents
the re-asserted dominance of familial politics in the Philippines. The old
order that was supposedly in crisis and decay, as many analyses of the
2016 electoral victory of Duterte sharply pointed out (Arguelles 2016,
2019; Thompson and Teehankee 2016; Ordoñez and Borja 2018), was

Asian Studies: Journal of Critical Perspectives

From Anarchy to Unity of Families in the 2022 Philippine Elections 3

made attractive, fresh, and popular again. The unprecedented success

of the Marcos-Duterte tandem in the ballots, hereinafter referred to
as the coalition of old order restorationists, if situated in longer political
history can be seen as a result of more than three decades of attempts
to undermine the EDSA People Power-born Fifth Republic which
required the use of massive resources and strict coalitionist politics.

Table 1. 2022 Philippine election results for President and Vice President

Note: Only major candidates and/or those who received more than one percent of the total
votes are included in this table.
Source: Data from Congress of the Philippines (2022).

Despite the usual pretense of change messaging from all camps, the 2022
election is, for all intents and purposes, a continuity election. Then incumbent
president Duterte exited from the presidency as among the most popular and
powerful of all the Fifth Republic Presidents (Lalu 2022; Hutchcroft and

Early View (December 2022)

4 C. V. ARGUELLES

Gera 2022). His popularity, and populism, was resilient despite the rampant
killings, erosion of democracy and human rights, and mismanagement of
the COVID-19 pandemic (Arguelles 2021; Magno and Teehankee 2022;
Thompson 2022). By election season, most Filipino voters already had a
very positive assessment of his administration and continue to support him.
This popularity of Duterte drove a demand among candidates who can do
a “Dutertismo 2.0.”1 In an October 2021 survey of WR Numero, voters
were asked about the outgoing Duterte administration and their choice of
presidential candidate in the 2022 elections (see Table 2) (Philstar.com 2022).
As much as 55 percent of the voters said they prefer “partial continuity” and
30% said they want “full continuity.” Of the surveyed, a mere 16 percent are
looking for a president who will represent a total change from Dutertismo.

Table 2. WR Numero October 2021 survey on public assessment of the

performance of then president Duterte and voters’ preference for the 2022
elections

Source: Data from Philstar.com (2022).

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From Anarchy to Unity of Families in the 2022 Philippine Elections 5

The Marcos-Duterte tandem have clearly positioned themselves as

the continuity candidates and was effectively perceived by many voters
as such. An analysis of a Pulse Asia survey reveals that the strongest
predictors of voting intention for their candidacies are views on former
president Duterte: those who approve of his administration are also more
likely to support Marcos Jr. (Dulay et al. 2023). Moreover, although then
President Duterte did not give the much-coveted explicit endorsement to
the tandem, there was no need for it to convince the voters that Marcos Jr.
is the candidate for “Dutertismo 2.0.” Since 2016, the former president has
mobilized state resources to repudiate the memories of People Power and
rehabilitate the image of the Marcos family (Masangkay and Del Mundo
2016; Arguelles 2017). He has repeatedly publicly talked about the rule of
Ferdinand Edralin Marcos Sr. and the supposed lasting achievements of
the dictatorship. He also ordered the burial of Marcos Sr., after decades
in interregnum, at the Libingan ng mga Bayani. Duterte has resurrected and
infused fresh insurgent populist energies to what was then the struggling
Marcos family brand—and this will be one of what will be his enduring
insidious legacies in Philippine politics.

The Marcos family’s myth-making machinery

in social media and beyond
Although the benefits of a constituency of continuity voters are clear,
the resounding victory of the Marcos-Duterte tandem was not all the
former president’s doing. The Marcos family also reaped the benefits of
investing in a massive online disinformation machinery that was put into
operations as early as six years ago (Ong et al. 2022), and on-the-ground
disinformation campaigns that have been in place for far longer (Ariate,
Reyes, and Del Mundo 2023). Pro-Marcos disinformation campaigns have
dominated social media platforms popular to a cross-section of Filipino
voters including Facebook and YouTube. It also appears that the campaigns
have been effective although the precise causal mechanism of how it affected
the voting intentions of many Filipinos is still under study. My interviews

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6 C. V. ARGUELLES

with more than 100 Marcos-Duterte voters across the country revealed
that many of their voting considerations were significantly shaped by the
disinformative narratives that were made popular online.2 Many of their
voters think that the Philippine martial law years was the country’s golden
era, that the Marcos legacy is that of the public infrastructures people enjoy
today, and that the plunder of state resources the conjugal dictatorship and
their cronies committed were nothing but black propaganda.
The Marcos disinformation machinery has also systematically
targeted young voters in social media platforms like TikTok (Mendoza
2022). These TikTok disinformation campaigns were designed to portray
the Marcos family as authentic, hip, and relatable political celebrities while
downplaying the family’s leadership in some of the country’s worst cases of
corruption and human rights abuses. For instance, one of the young voters
I interviewed showed me old videos of Imelda Marcos she “rediscovered”
in TikTok. In these videos, Imelda was justifying the use of government
resources for her personal excesses by discussing her “uniquely Filipino
philosophy of beauty.”
The rebranding process for the Marcos family, however, had already
begun even before social media had become central to election campaigns.
The arts and culture community, fashion brands, and lifestyle publications
have previously produced materials depicting a fabulous and glamorous
Marcos family, and these old materials were “rediscovered” from the archives
and were given new life as social media contents. First accomplished offline,
the Marcos rehabilitation has only recently gone digital (Quezon 2022). The
triumph of the Marcos myth-making machinery, then, cannot simply be a
story of widespread brainwashing of voters made possible by social media
technology. Rather, communications scholar Jonathan Corpus Ong (2022,
396–7) points to the multitude of interconnected factors that shape today’s
digital political culture: “... the warlike operations of political fandoms and
attention-hacking techniques of media manipulators have flourished due to
the longer histories of charismatic leadership and patronage politics, inter-
elite competition and factionalism, and the entrepreneurialism of partisan
media outfits.”

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From Anarchy to Unity of Families in the 2022 Philippine Elections 7

Table 3. Pulse Asia pre-election survey on voters’ preference for president

and vice president, September 2021 and December 2021

Note: Only the top four candidates as indicated by the survey results have been included in
this table (Rañada 2021; Mercado 2021).

From Anarchy to Unity of Families

The advantages of either a Bongbong or Sara presidential run are
clear, but it would have still been a risky election competition if not for
a brokered coalition among powerful political families. If the usual route
of anarchic competition among families were chosen, an opposition defeat
may not have been so inevitable. Prior to the formation of a Marcos-Duterte
coalition, Sara was polling at 20 percent and Bongbong at 15 percent in a

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8 C. V. ARGUELLES

Pulse Asia survey (Rañada 2021) (see Table 3). Since re-entering the electoral
arena in 1992, the Marcos family’s successive national wins and defeats
have always been capped at 30 to 35 percent of the votes (Quezon 2022). In
the 1992 presidential elections, the combined votes of the matriarch Imelda
Romualdez Marcos and crony Eduardo “Danding” Murphy Cojuango
were 28 percent of the total. Bongbong lost in the 1995 senate elections
and got only 32 percent of the votes. In 2010, he made it to the Senate
with 35 percent of the votes. However, in 2016, Bongbong infamously
lost the vice-presidential race and managed to obtain 34 percent. In the
following elections of 2019, his sister Maria Imelda Josefa Remedios “Imee”
Romualdez Marcos became a senator with 34 percent of the votes. So how
did the family, in the 2022 presidential race, managed to secure 59 percent
of the votes? The answer to this question is the Marcos-Duterte tandem.
As soon as their joint candidacies were made public, Bongbong started to
poll at 53 percent and Sara at 45 percent in the Pulse Asia survey (Mercado
2021) (see Table 3).
The political marriage among these families was inconvenient at first,
as proven by the desperate charades and tantrums of Rodrigo Duterte
(Quezon 2022). He wanted to run either as Vice President to his daughter
Sara, or for Sara to run with his right-hand man Senator Christopher
Lawrence “Bong” Tesoro Go, or a Duterte-Marcos Jr. ticket with his family
at the top. Surveys after surveys have indicated that Bong Go is unelectable,
and that Sara going on her own may be a risky choice. Still popular but
already exiting from power, Duterte had been outwitted and outplayed by
his own allies and family. Exasperated, the former president said: “I’m sure
this run of Sara [as Vice President] is a decision of Bongbong’s [Marcos Jr.’s]
camp” (Talabong 2021). In the end, the commanding wisdom of former
president Arroyo, one who may be considered the “Political Elder” of the
coalition, prevailed. After all, Arroyo may be the most unpopular, but she
was also in power the longest of all the Fifth Republic presidents. She is
credited as the key broker of the arranged marriage behind the scenes—
Sara was adopted to Arroyo’s LAKAS-CMD party in her vice-presidential

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From Anarchy to Unity of Families in the 2022 Philippine Elections 9

run, and many consider Arroyo to be Sara’s political mentor. There is also
no surprise that Arroyo was motivated to make it work. Before her most
recent political comeback, she was among the most prosecuted leaders of
her coalition. One can imagine her saying, if they are unable to get their
acts together: “Together we stand, divided we might all end up jail mates.”
The arranged marriage between the First Families kept the house
in order and delivered the promise of unmatched “unity” machinery. On
election day, Marcos’ North and Duterte’s South proved to be as solid
as expected. Among the strongest predictors of vote choice in the 2022
elections is whether the voter comes from the same region as the candidate
(Dulay et al. 2023)—that voters support their “own” sons and daughters
has always been a key element of the electoral success of these families.
Since the return of elections after the Marcos dictatorship, many of the
coalition families have been in control of their provinces (Teehankee 2001).
Likewise, they have the means and the recipe, among other resources, to
deploy proven grassroots election machines and through it organize cash
distribution, network building, and turnout discipline. It is almost like
child’s play (Teehankee and Calimbahin 2022). The Marcos and Duterte
families of Ilocos Norte and Davao City are, of course, best examples of this.
The Coalition ensured a concentration of significant political resources in
the Marcos-Duterte campaign aided by their vast networks of local political
allies. Outside their command bailiwicks, this allowed them to corner the
endorsements of resource-rich political incumbents in market vote-rich
areas of Central Luzon, South Luzon, and Metro Manila. For instance, the
tandem has been able to secure the endorsements of at least 50 out of the 80
governors across the country.
The Marcos Jr.-Duterte tandem’s campaign slogan of “unity” may
be more than just the usual empty election rhetoric given how the results
showed that many Filipinos share the same electoral choice. Unlike past
elections, the winners of the 2022 elections were decided not on election
day. As shown in an April 2022 survey by WR Numero (2022), most of the
voters already made up their minds even before the start of the campaign

Early View (December 2022)

10 C. V. ARGUELLES

period (see Table 4). It was a done deal; less voters were even willing to
go through the long rituals of the election season. Philippine election
results have usually reflected the fragmented nature of Philippine society:
an archipelagic nation with diverse identities and loyalties. Some political
families enjoy the support of some regions in the country but not in others
and rarely the entirety of the nation. Presidents and vice presidents may get
the greatest number of votes, but a majority mandate is rather exceptional.
Prior to Marcos Jr., none of the elected Fifth Republic presidents has secured
more than 42 percent of the votes. The differences in cultural and ethnic
identities as well as competing patron-client networks and political factions
across the country has made Philippine elections intra-competitive and
relatively plural for the longest time—no one dynasty rules the kingdom,
and the usual rigodon of families at the top is a sacred informal pact. The
marriage of the First Families and along with it their resources, networks,
and territories have made it possible to disrupt, at least for the time being,
the usually anarchic competition among families in Philippine elections.

Table 4. WR Numero April 2022 survey on the timing of presidential choice

of voters in the 2022 elections

Source: WR Numero (2022).

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From Anarchy to Unity of Families in the 2022 Philippine Elections 11

Is Marcos-Duterte building a Philippine Leviathan state?

But why the unity among families in the 2022 elections? Why build
a coalition and deviate from the usual electoral competition? I argue that
there is nothing like the fear of enduring years of persecution, prosecution,
and popular mobilization in a potential reformist government that brings
together the Old Order restorationist families, especially Arroyo, Duterte,
Estrada, and Marcos. They have intimate experiences of the threats that
a reformist government may pose to their power and rule, especially the
Marcos family whose dictatorship was brought down by the combined
forces of the EDSA People Power and the reformist former president Maria
Corazon “Cory” Sumulong Cojuangco-Aquino. Although recently fully
rehabilitated and restored to power, the Marcos family have yet to also
freely take control of their entire ill-gotten assets that have been frozen
and seized by the Cory government and foreign institutions. Also, they
still face numerous charges, at home and overseas, for the crimes they have
committed when Marcos Sr. was in power. For instance, there is a standing
warrant of arrest in the United States against President Marcos Jr. himself
in connection with a human rights lawsuit. Therefore, although he can now
travel to the US because of the immunity afforded to a head of state, the
same diplomatic guarantee is not extended to the entire Marcos family. The
coalition-building among the First Families and more is a strategic response
to the threat of losing power and the possibility to be subjected to the taxing
power of a reformist government, however it may be episodic.
The administration of former president Benigno Simeon “Noynoy”
Cojuangco Aquino III has pursued cases, a key promise in his election
campaign, against former president Arroyo and her allies. For much of the
Aquino III presidency, Arroyo was under detention for charges of electoral
fraud and plunder. It was only when the Duterte administration came in
2016 that the Supreme Court ended her house arrest. Currently, an informal
network between Arroyo and Duterte-appointed justices are voting together
in judicial decisions concerning high-profile corruption cases including in
the grant of bail for Marcos Jr.’s Chief Presidential Legal Counsel Juan

Early View (December 2022)

12 C. V. ARGUELLES

Valentin Furagganan Ponce Enrile Sr. (Dressel, Inoue, and Bonoan 2023).
Meanwhile, the Sandiganbayan has recently acquitted LAKAS-CMD
party co-chairperson Senator Ramon Bautista “Bong” Revilla Jr.—two
out of the three deciding votes came from Duterte-appointed justices in
the court (Buan 2018). Both Enrile Sr. and Revilla Jr. were charged by
the Aquino III government as part of its anti-corruption and government
reform campaign. Former president Estrada was ousted in 2001 after just a
few years in power when a failed impeachment trial led to a popular uprising
against his administration. Dubbed the “Second EDSA People Power” or
“EDSA Dos,” a middle class and civil society-led resignation campaign
took to the streets to protest Estrada’s involvement in illegal gambling and
other corrupt activities. He was convicted for plunder and sentenced for life
imprisonment but was given executive clemency by then-president Arroyo.
The Duterte family has yet to experience the spectacular defeats
suffered by the other families but the threats they face are no less credible
and serious. My previous interviews with two cabinet-level officials close to
Duterte have also shared that he and his allies have always been haunted by
the prospects of a street mobilization against his government in the style of
“EDSA Uno” or “EDSA Dos.”3 More importantly, former president Duterte
and his allies are under investigation by Philippine and international courts
for their role in the drug war killings of thousands of Filipinos. If the
International Criminal Court decides to issue a warrant of arrest against
the Duterte patriarch or any of their close allies, the cooperation or non-
cooperation of the incumbent government will make a big difference.
It is a shared perception of threat, as Dan Slater argued, that elites
may be driven to form an authoritarian Leviathan (Slater 2010). When
faced with what they perceive as shared and persistent dangers, elites
will choose to act collectively, however costly collective action is. In the
early days of the 2022 elections, what a Maria Leonor Robredo candidacy
and the coalition it inspired represented to the First Families is what Karl
Polanyi would characterize as “the impress of an acute danger … [in
which] … fear remains latent, as long as its ultimate cause is not removed”

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From Anarchy to Unity of Families in the 2022 Philippine Elections 13

(Polanyi 1944, 425). A potential reformist government poses threats to

the rule and power of each of the families and to familiar rule as well.
They know how seriously punitive these threats can be turned into, given
their individual and collective experiences of persecution, prosecution,
and popular mobilizations. In the country’s electoral history, reformists
are elected to power in episodic moments, but these families would rather
not take their chances this time. Like many of their counterparts in other
nations, Philippine elites are typically fractured due to their habitual
involvement in personal and factional conflicts, rendering them unable to
establish or maintain a unified coalition. Inaction may be costly but so can
collective action. Despite the widely held notion that shared state plunder
can facilitate unity, such resources alone cannot disrupt the usual anarchic
intra-elite electoral competition. Slater (2010) argues that elites begin to
contemplate ways to overcome their collective action problems only when
they perceive credible threats to their statuses and interests, especially if the
threat comes from below. Thus, the unity of elites, at least in the formation
of strong authoritarian states in Malaysia and Singapore, is not primarily
driven by the necessity for shared access to state resources but instead by
the more pressing need for protection from enduring and serious threats
(Slater 2010).
In the case of the 2022 Philippine elections, one can see a Marcos-
Duterte Leviathan formed and forming under an inconvenient but necessary
situation. I argue that this unity of families, however momentary, may be
seen as an attempt to build not merely to withstand the persistent challenges
of the day but to facilitate the difficult work of creating more enduring and
durable defenses against reformist ambitions in Philippine politics. How
long this seeming unity of families will last will depend on how much of
each other’s orchestrations can the First Families tolerate as well as how
soon can a fresh and vibrant popular reform energy may take root again in
many Filipinos.

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14 C. V. ARGUELLES

About the Author

Cleve V. ARGUELLES writes on political and social change in the Philippines and
Southeast Asia. He is President and Chief Executive Officer of WR NUMERO, Assistant
Professorial Lecturer in the Department of Political Science and Development Studies at
the De La Salle University, and a Ph.D. candidate at the Department of Political and Social
Change, Coral Bell School of Asia Pacific Affairs, Australian National University.

Declaration of Funding and Conflict of Interest

Select parts of this paper drew insights from my Ph.D. research project generously funded
through the Australian Government Research Training Program Scholarship.

Acknowledgments

The early versions of this paper have benefitted from comments from audiences of the
following events: a 2022 guest lecture on ‘Triumph of the Counter-Revolution in the 2022
Philippine Elections” in the Music, Memory, and Politics Study Lab in the University of
Cologne, a 2022 roundtable discussion on ‘Philippine Politics: Assessments and Projections”
hosted by the Department of Sociology and Anthropology in the National University of
Singapore, and a 2022 online forum “From Duterte to Marcos Jr” jointly sponsored by
the Australian Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade and the Coral Bell School of Asia
Pacific Affairs in The Australian National University.

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From Anarchy to Unity of Families in the 2022 Philippine Elections 15

Endnotes

1
Dutertismo is the set of political ideas, programs, and style associated with Rodrigo Roa
Duterte who served as President of the Philippines between 2016 and 2022. Its core
element is populist politics which features the use of polarizing language and policies as
well as penal populism. For more details, see Arguelles (2021).
2
The interviews were conducted as part of a research project on voter’s motivations in the
2022 Philippine election that I have led as Convenor of the De La Salle University Popu-
lism and Democracy Research Cluster. As of press date, the manuscript is still in progress.
3
The interviews were conducted as part of my Ph.D. research project funded by the Austra-
lian Government Research Training Program Scholarship. As of press date, the manu-
script is still in progress.

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Asian Studies: Journal of Critical Perspectives