Philippines Election: Duterte Allies Sweep Senate, Unofficial Results Indicate

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/14/world/asia/philippines-election-results.html

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MANILA — Allies of President Rodrigo Duterte appear to have swept the elections for the Philippine Senate, according to unofficial results on Tuesday, giving him a stronger grip on the one legislative chamber that had shown some degree of independence from his authoritarian rule.

With more than 95 percent of the vote counted, candidates backed by Mr. Duterte looked likely to win all 12 of the seats in the 24-member Senate that were up for election in Monday’s voting. If that is confirmed in the coming days by the Commission on Elections, then a small opposition bloc in the Senate that had managed to thwart some of the president’s agenda will become substantially weaker.

One by one, candidates in an opposition alliance known as Otso Diretso, meaning Straight Eight, threw in the towel on Tuesday, and a spokesman for Mr. Duterte essentially declared victory.

“The victory of the administration candidates and the shutout of the Otso Diretso candidates send a strong message that our people yearn for stability and continuity of the genuine reforms that the administration started,” the spokesman, Salvador Panelo, said in a statement. He said the new Senate would help in “crafting the president’s legislative agenda.”

Unlike the House of Representatives, which has backed Mr. Duterte’s bloody war on drugs, martial law in the south and other policies that have alarmed human rights groups, the Senate has shown some degree of defiance. But the president’s strongest critic in the Senate, Antonio Trillanes, did not seek re-election this week, and another incumbent opposition senator, Bam Aquino, a cousin of the former president Benigno S. Aquino III, appears to have been defeated.

That would leave just four anti-Duterte senators — one of whom, Leila de Lima, cannot vote because she has been jailed since 2017 on drug-trafficking charges, which she says were fabricated to silence her. Before her arrest, Ms. de Lima led a Senate panel investigating extrajudicial killings in the drug war, perhaps the most vivid example of the opposition bloc’s defiance of the president.

If the sweep by Mr. Duterte’s allies is confirmed, he will be in a stronger position to push policies like revising the Constitution to essentially end term limits; making children as young as 9 subject to prosecution; and bringing back the death penalty, which the Catholic Philippines abolished long ago.

Among the 12 Duterte allies apparently headed for the Senate are the president’s longtime aide Bong Go, as well as Ronald dela Rosa, the police chief who spearheaded his war on drugs in its initial stages.

That bloody campaign, which has killed thousands since Mr. Duterte took office in 2016, has been condemned internationally but is popular in the Philippines, where a recent poll found that about 80 percent of the public approves of the president’s performance in office. Mr. Panelo, the presidential spokesman, credited the Senate results to “the Duterte magic.”

“It was a good fight,” said one opposition candidate, Gary Alejano, a former Marine captain. He added, “For the meantime, let us regroup, reassess and plan, because our love for the country does not depend and end in elections.”

Richard Javad Heydarian, a political analyst who teaches at De La Salle University in Manila, said “the more pessimistic assessment is that now President Duterte possesses the supermajority that is necessary to push his authoritarian style of governance to its logical extreme.”

But he said the president’s sway in the new Senate might be less strong than it appeared. Most of the 12 apparent victors are “tactical allies with their own points of view,” not through-and-through Duterte supporters, he said.

Filipinos also voted on Monday to fill hundreds of seats in the House of Representatives, which was certain to remain in the hands of Duterte allies, as well as local offices across the country. In Mr. Duterte’s hometown, Davao, his three children appeared to have won elections for mayor, vice mayor and representative in Congress, in what some saw as the start of a Duterte dynasty.

Mr. Panelo, the spokesman, said the president was opposed to political dynasties, though he acknowledged that many supporters wanted his daughter, Sara Duterte, apparently re-elected as Davao’s mayor, to succeed him as president when his term expires in 2022.