On Monday, Filipinos voted in record high numbers in the country’s midterm election. Lines began forming outside of precincts at five in the morning and voters endured hours of sweltering heat to cast their ballots. It was universally understood that the stakes in this election were extraordinarily high, as the outcome could prove the tipping point in the fierce political standoff between the camps of President Ferdinand Marcos Jr and former President Rodrigo Duterte.
At the time of writing this article, 80 percent of precincts had finished tallying their results. While many races remain uncertain, a majority are now clearly decided. The results leave the bitter political war unresolved, which in itself is a striking setback for Marcos.
The election was, for the ruling elite, a referendum on Philippine ties with its former colonial ruler, the United States. Marcos, son of the former dictator, took office in 2022 in an alliance with the powerful Duterte faction; his vice president and running mate was Sara Duterte, daughter of the former president. Rodrigo Duterte, president from 2016 to 2022, had during his term in office sought to stabilize economic relations with China by distancing Manila from Washington. He rescinded US military basing deals and downplayed Philippine claims to the South China Sea. Shortly after taking office, under intense pressure from the Biden administration, Marcos Jr reversed course, placing the Philippines at the forefront of Washington’s war drive against China and in the process breaking with Duterte.
The rival factions of Marcos and Duterte represent different layers of the Philippine ruling class. Marcos is shored up by older political clans with historic, colonial ties to the United States. They are the Manila elite. Duterte expresses the growing power of the elites of the provincial hinterlands, long resentful of the inadequate and Manila-centric infrastructure of the country. The forces behind Duterte see in Chinese infrastructure investment an opportunity to shore up their economic interests and political power. Securing such investment requires a break with the aggressive anti-China policies of US imperialism.
These tensions have deep roots. They were expressed to an extent in the presidency and ouster of Joseph Estrada around 2000. The possibility of Chinese investment as a solution to the problem of the hinterland elite, and an orientation to China as the economic future of the country, found initial expression in the second term of Gloria Macapagal Arroyo from 2004–2010.
But while these tensions have been long boiling, it is the deeply destabilizing second term of Trump that has brought them to a fever pitch. How to deal with Washington has become the one great unavoidable question for the political establishment in capitals around the world.
An entirely different set of concerns brought the majority of the record number voters to the ballot box.
Rice prices, long the most fundamental bellwether of social anger, remain at more than double the price, 20 pesos a kilo, that the Marcos government pledged to achieve in 2022. Over a quarter of all Filipino families reported experiencing involuntary hunger in the past three months according a survey published in December 2024. More than 10 percent of the country’s population is compelled to seek employment as an overseas migrant worker in order to provide for their families. There is an immense popular resentment and hostility that found confused and distorted expression in the midterm vote.
Rodrigo Duterte, heading up the opposition slate to Marcos, repeatedly attacked the president for his inability to control rice prices. More than any other factor, this plank won votes.
However, the rival factions of the ruling elite agree on one thing: they are prepared to use any means to suppress this growing social opposition. While they are torn apart by geopolitics, both factions—the far-right populism of Duterte and the dictatorial pedigree of Marcos—represent the imminent danger of authoritarian rule.
Marcos aggressively prosecuted the midterm election as political warfare. He arranged the arrest and extradition of Rodrigo Duterte to stand trial before the International Criminal Court in The Hague. He pushed through the last-minute impeachment of his Vice President Sara Duterte. He whipped up a war-fever against China, denouncing his rivals as stooges of China and made baseless claims of Chinese meddling and espionage in the election.
While half of Philippine governance, town councils, mayors, governors, congressional representatives are all up for grabs in the election, it is on the Senate race that all eyes are fixed. Senators are elected by the entire nation, the top 12 vote-winners take office. The composition of the incoming Senate will determine the political fate of Sara Duterte. Marcos needs a two-thirds majority vote in the Senate, where Duterte’s trial will be held, to secure a conviction, removing Duterte from office and banning her from running in the future.
The preliminary results show that Marcos has not secured sufficient votes to confidently carry out the removal of the vice president from office.
From his prison cell in The Hague, Rodrigo Duterte ran to be mayor of Davao, the southern city that has for decades been his base of power. He was elected in a landslide. His son, Sebastian, won the vice mayoral race and will likely rule in his father’s stead.
Bong Go and Ronald dela Rosa, the foremost allies of Duterte, currently stand at first and third in the Senate race. Go has received nearly five million votes more than the second candidate. Go is a political cipher, a man with no particular personality or platform. His entire identity is as the right-hand man of Rodrigo Duterte. Dela Rosa was the head of the police under Duterte and more than any other figure was directly responsible for the conduct of the murderous war on drugs that landed the former president in The Hague.
The overseas absentee ballots, overwhelmingly the vote of migrant workers, showed an even stronger backing for the Duterte slate. Not a single Marcos candidate made it into the top twelve of the overseas vote.
The intimate allies of Marcos—Benhur Abalos and Francis Tolentino—have not placed. It is plausible, although unlikely, that Abalos will still make it into the top 12, but the current Senate majority leader Tolentino, who made his political career out of attacking China, fell millions of votes short.
Beyond Abalos and Tolentino, the rest of the Marcos slate was a conjunctural and opportunist alliance. This alliance will hold if Marcos holds power. But the majority of the Marcos slate will defect to the Duterte camp if they sense a change in the winds of power. This process was already underway during the election. Camille Villar, daughter of real estate billionaires, part of the Marcos slate, shifted into the camp of Duterte during the election and campaigned with Sara Duterte.
The Liberal Party, which has been in decline for nearly a decade, experienced something of a resurrection. Its candidates, Bam Aquino and Francisco Pangilinan, both secured seats in the Senate. Its pseudo-left political ally, Akbayan, received a record number of votes, 2.2 million at current count, placing higher than any other party-list organization. In the 2022, Akbayan received a mere 236,000 votes.
The unexpected victory of the Liberal Party-Akbayan tandem expressed a broad sentiment among voters to break free of the Marcos-Duterte rivalry. Throughout the election these two dominant factions were popularly referred to as Team Kadiliman (Darkness) and Team Kasamaan (Evil). The Liberal Party ran a campaign focused on food prices and promised good governance to remedy the country’s economic woes. Pangilinan had been food security secretary under the Benigno Aquino III administration.
While the vote for the Liberal Party is, in terms of mass sentiment, a sharp repudiation of both the Marcos and Duterte camps, its gains will likely be a consolidation in the Marcos wing. The allegiance of the Liberal Party has always been with Washington. The Liberal Party administration of Benigno Aquino III (2010–16), of which Akbayan was an integral component, aggressively prosecuted US interests against China.
Support for the Makabayan organizations, the various party-list groups that follow the political line of the Stalinist National Democratic Front, collapsed. Bayan Muna is poised to win less than 200,000 votes. It is likely to the first election in which these organizations fail to win a single seat.
The political crisis in Manila will only deepen in the wake of the election. The Trump administration poses major threats to the Philippine economy with the possible mass deportation of Filipinos, resulting in a huge decline in remittances, and the unresolved issue of US tariffs on imports from the Philippines. An economic slowdown will only fuel infighting in ruling circles as well as political unrest as the social crisis facing millions of working people worsens.