Bongbong’s Reap What You Sow: How Marcos Created His Own Duterte Monster

Accommodation, Arrogance, Annihilation: The Three Stages of Marcos’ Self-Destruction

By Louis ‘Barok‘ C. Biraogo — August 24, 2025

THERE is a peculiar affliction that strikes Philippine presidents as the intoxicating fumes of Malacañang begin to fade. It is the sudden, frantic realization that power, that most fickle of lovers, is already packing her bags. The question is no longer how to govern, but how to survive the departure.

**“Accommodation. Arrogance. Annihilation. — The Marcos Trilogy Nobody Asked For”**

The South China Morning Post Thesis

The South China Morning Post has posited a thesis that is currently echoing through the gilded halls of power and the grimy backrooms of political consultancies alike: Ferdinand “Bongbong” Marcos Jr. waited too long. He had the Duterte beast in his crosshairs, chose the path of accommodation, and now, like a modern-day Victor Frankenstein, is being chased by the monster he helped animate.

The question is right, but the premise requires the kind of surgical qualification one might use to separate a political hit job from a legitimate autopsy. Did Marcos miss his easiest opportunity to contain the Duterte political machine? Almost certainly. Did he miss his opportunity to defeat it? Not necessarily. And did he ever possess the lawful power to simply stop Sara Duterte from running? Let’s not be ridiculous. This is the Philippines, but we still pretend to have a Constitution.

Constitutional Limits on Power

The heart of the matter is the distinction between two propositions. The first—that Marcos should have politically kneecapped the Dutertes earlier—is a delicious piece of strategic speculation. The second—that he could have constitutionally barred Sara from the 2028 ballot—is a fantasy best left to midnight meetings in smoky rooms. Under Article VII, Section 4 of the 1987 Constitution, the President and Vice President are elected separately. Sara Duterte does not serve at the pleasure of Bongbong Marcos. If she did, she would have been out on her ear the moment she started muttering about digging up his father’s bones.

The 2022 Alliance and Its Aftermath

The 2022 alliance was a masterpiece of cynical political engineering. Marcos supplied the Luzon machinery and the name recognition that promised a glorious restoration. Duterte supplied the Mindanao fortress, the populist rage, and the terrifyingly devoted cult of personality. It was a marriage made not in heaven, but in a polling firm’s spreadsheet. The tragedy, or the strategic brilliance, depending on your perspective, is that this very alliance forged the national political force that now threatens to consume Marcos whole. He wanted a shield; he created a rival.

So, was accommodation a mistake? In the first two years, the argument that it was a rational act of coalition management holds water. Marcos inherited a polarized nation and a congress stocked with Duterte loyalists. A declaration of war on Day One would have been political suicide. The failure was not in the initial handshake. The failure was in failing to recognize when the handshake had turned into a slow, public strangulation. He gave Sara the one currency more valuable than money or power: time.

The Expanding Duterte Machine

And while the clock ticked, a fascinating thing happened. The Duterte political machine has become bigger than Rodrigo Duterte himself. The old man is in The Hague, preparing for a trial that has the potential to be either a courtroom drama or a Netflix docuseries. His International Criminal Court (ICC) date with destiny is November 30, 2026. Yet the daughter’s star only burns brighter. This proves a terrifying truth for the Marcos camp: prosecuting the father does not kill the father’s ghost. It feeds it.

The Polling Reality

The polling is a horror show for Malacañang. Pulse Asia’s June-July survey shows Sara Duterte at a staggering 49% in a six-way race, versus Leni Robredo’s 26%. Sara commands 87% in Mindanao. This is not a mere lead; it is a geographic and emotional fortress. But here is where the hyperventilating headlines obscure reality. The six-way preference survey measures the intensity of a brand. It does not predict the outcome of a two-ticket war. An August OCTA survey pairing Sara with Imee Marcos against a Leni Robredo-Raffy Tulfo ticket showed a statistical dead heat: 45% to 42%. Sara is the strongest individual warrior, but she may not command an unbeatable army. The strategic implication is enormous: this is not over.

And this is where the impeachment saga—a political opera buffa if ever there was one—takes center stage.

Impeachment as Political Weapon

The SCMP calls impeachment Marcos’ “principal weapon.” That is an institutionally dangerous framing. It paints the process as a Malacañang hit squad, which is precisely the narrative Sara wants. The Supreme Court, in its 13-0-2 ruling on the first impeachment attempt, delivered a stinging rebuke to this kind of thinking: “The end does not justify the means.” The Court, citing Francisco and Gutierrez, reminded the political class that impeachment is a constitutional process, not a tool for eliminating rivals. It is “primarily for the protection of the people as a body politic, and not for the punishment of the offender.”

The game has now moved to the Senate. The question is no longer can they impeach her, but can they convict her? And the stakes could not be higher. A conviction is the one constitutionally bulletproof path to disqualifying her. But an acquittal? An acquittal is a political apocalypse for Marcos. It transforms Sara from a suspect into a martyr. She will walk out of the Senate chamber not disgraced, but canonized as the woman who survived the “Marcos machine.” She will campaign on the slogan, “They tried everything. They couldn’t prove it.”

The Grave-Threats Tightrope

The grave-threats case filed by the Department of Justice (DOJ) is legally serious—Article 282 of the Revised Penal Code is no joke, as established in Garma v. People and People v. Azurin. But politically, it is a tightrope walk over a volcano. Every summons, every hearing, every motion filed by the government allows Sara to don the robes of a victim. The more Marcos personally attacks her, the more powerful her persecution narrative becomes. The administration’s only defense is to act with the cold, boring, procedural neutrality required by Republic Act (RA) 6713 (the Code of Conduct) and the anti-graft laws under RA 3019. They must prove, without a shadow of a doubt, that they are not using state power to win an election. Because if they are, that is not just unethical; it is potentially a violation of RA 3019.

The Imee Marcos Wildcard

The wild card in this whole sordid affair is, ironically, a Marcos: Senator Imee. The fact that a hypothetical Sara-Imee ticket polls at 42% suggests a scenario so bizarre it belongs in a political thriller: Ferdinand Marcos Jr. defeated by a coalition fronted by his own sister and his arch-nemesis. This is not just a family feud; it is a Shakespearean tragedy unfolding on a national stage. Is Imee a bridge or a Trojan Horse? We don’t know. What we do know is that dynastic politics is a blood sport, and loyalty is a currency that devalues faster than the peso in an election year.

The Succession Vacuum

Perhaps Marcos’ greatest failure is not his confrontation strategy, but his succession strategy. He has no heir. He has no successor. He announced on August 14 that he would endorse a candidate, but he doesn’t know who. Sara has given her followers a destination. Marcos is still standing in the driveway, looking at the map. His greatest potential ally is the most ironic one: Leni Robredo. To stop the Duterte machine, Marcos might have to swallow the ultimate political humiliation: supporting the woman whose movement was built on dismantling the Marcos restoration. It is a monstrous choice, but political coalitions are not morality plays. They are acts of desperation.

The Brutal Irony

The brutal irony of this entire conflict is that if Marcos uses democratic institutions to destroy Duterteism, he can claim a victory for democracy. If he uses Duterte’s own brand of thuggish political warfare to defeat the Dutertes, he may eliminate the family but immortalize the ideology. He will have proven that the strongman politics he inherited are the only politics that work.

So, did Marcos miss his chance? He missed the easy one. The road ahead is now a minefield. He cannot destroy Sara without creating a martyr. He cannot ignore her without conceding the election. He cannot back a weak candidate without losing. He cannot back Robredo without surrendering his family’s narrative.

Sara Duterte’s greatest asset is not her father’s memory or the Mindanao voting bloc. Her greatest asset is Marcos’ obsession. She is the sun around which his entire political universe now revolves. And the more desperately he tries to contain that sun, the more likely he is to be the one who ends up getting burned. The battle for 2028 is no longer between Marcos and Duterte. It is a battle between the ghost of a dictatorship and the ghost of an alliance, and both of them are fighting for the soul of a state that is too weak to resist either.