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Tusor, Anita. (2023). “Mapping Global Populism — Panel 2: Populism, Macho-Fascism and Varieties of Illiberalism in The Philippines.” European Center for Populism Studies (ECPS). June 14, 2023. https://doi.org/10.55271/rp0041

This report is based on the second event of ECPS’s monthly panel series called “Mapping Global Populism” which was held online on April 27, 2023. The panel brought together expert populism scholars from Australia, Hong Kong and the Philippines. As a by-product of this fruitful panel the report consists of brief summaries of the speeches delivered by the panelists.

By Anita Tusor*

This report is based on the second panel of ECPS’s monthly panel series called “Mapping Global Populism” which was held online in Brussels on April 27, 2023. After concluding our “Mapping European Populism” Panel Series, ECPS is moving beyond the borders of Europe and expanding its project to include cases of populism around the world by organizing a new panel series to map global populism, bringing scholars together every month to discuss the state of political populism in a different region of the world. The second panel hosted 4 prominent scholars from Australia, Hong Kong and the Philippines. As a by-product of this fruitful panel, the report consists of brief summaries of the speeches delivered by the speakers.

The panel was moderated by Dr Paul Kenny, Professor in the Institute for Humanities and Social Sciences at the Australian Catholic University and included the following speakers: Dr Adele Webb, Research Fellow in Democracy and Citizen Engagement at the Centre for Deliberative Democracy and Global Governance, University of Canberra; Dr Mark Richard Thompson, Professor of Politics at Department of Asian and International Studies and director of Southeast Asia Research Center at the City University of Hong Kong; Dr Jean S. Encinas-Franco, Professor in the Department of Political Science at the College of Social Sciences and Philosophy, University of the Philippines at Diliman; and Dr. Jefferson Lyndon D. Ragragio, Assistant Professor at the Department of Science Communication at the College of Development Communication, University of the Philippines at Los Baños.

“Populist Are Rather Want to Provide a Mirror to the People”

In addition to leading the public, Duterte has also very much followed the public. This tells us something about populism in general too where we are often conditioned to think about populist demagogues who lead the people and drag them along to their own sort of Machiavellian purposes. Very often what we see is that populists are rather want to provide a mirror to the people and actually reflect popular views. So, in the Philippines case, this obviously raises some disturbing implications, which is that we have essentially popular illiberal democracy or popularly illiberal views.

Dr Kenny started his introduction with a brief overview of the populist administration in the Philippines. Although Rodrigo Duterte left his office in 2022, he has left a unique legacy in the study of populism and democracy which forces us to question our preconceptions. By any measure and source, Duterte’s six years of presidency was extremely violent. Official figures put the death toll of extrajudicial killings somewhere around 6.000 (FDEA, 2022), while NGOs and human rights organizations, journalists and other civil society monitors put the figure over 20.000 or even closer to 30.000 (Roudabeh and Buenaventura, 2021, ICC, 2023, UN OHCHR, 2022). Among those deaths were a number of journalists whose death coincided with the general erosion of press freedom (Amnesty International, 2022). There was also repression of judicial autonomy with frequent interferences and intimidation of the judiciary, including the deaths of some judges and lawyers. 

Despite this, what you might call a certainly discomforting record, Duterte remained -throughout his term in office- extraordinarily popular. This phenomenon is similar to his predecessors whose popularity didn’t dip after an initial honeymoon period, whether that lasted a few months or a few years, they remained popular. As Dr Kenny pointed out, we could see the same with the chairperson of PDP-Laban: right through to the end of his administration, Duterte’s support remained widespread across different demographics. According to analysis of public opinion data, the former president’s support was generally higher among younger and better educated Filipinos (Kenny and Holmes, 2020). Dr Kenny also noted that, although Duterte was initially more popular among men, this gender gap actually disappeared after the first few months of his administration. 

The Philippine President, famous for his penal populism, was especially popular because of his signature war on drugs and illegal drugs campaigns. This campaign in particular of all the policies of the Duterte government met with extremely high approval; usually up around 90 percent (Ibid.). Nonetheless, his administration was not only popular because of the war on drugs. For instance, despite his public buffoonery on occasions, he attended very carefully to economic matters, especially inflation. Data shows very clearly that his popularity tracks inflation (Reuters, 2018). Whenever it went up, his popularity suffered modest declines and he was very careful to address inflation both on a national and subnational level. Economic issues in general were never far from the mind of Duterte, his pollsters and administrative (Capuno, 2020). 

Professor Kenny has briefly tackled the issue of succession as well, highlighting that Duterte has sought to influence the succession to his chief ally, Senator Bongo, with his daughter Sarah Duterte proposed as vice president. The internal machinations among the elite eventually scuppered these plans with Sarah essentially rejecting this idea. In the end, Duterte was unable to secure his preferred succession. This, in many ways, is the very definition of democracy: an election removed him from office and prevented him from determining who would follow him. So, we had this kind of paradoxical situation, explained Dr Kenny: Duterte was quite illiberal on many key issues, especially around (1) judicial checks on the executive, (2) legislative checks on the executive power, (3) on press freedom and (4) public checks on executive power. Nevertheless, he remained extraordinarily popular, and the regime remained essentially democratic (Kreuzer, 2019). This is a real puzzle. To solve it, Dr Kenny’s own intuition and publications point us towards populism which can perhaps help fill the gap and provide an explanation.

To flag some of the issues that our moderator thought the concept of populism and theories of populism can help us resolve, the first is the fact that Duterte was very much a charismatic leader and individual leader who portrayed his administration as an essentially personalist rule which was sanctified by democratic elections and by popularity. This meant that Duterte had a very limited political organization behind him since he relied extraordinarily on popular support, on direct relationships with the people. Ultimately, in contrast to regular political parties in the West, he couldn’t rely on any guarantees from parties. Consequently, he paid a great deal of attention to public opinion polls, and he was quite sensitive to them.

In addition to leading the public, Duterte has also very much followed the public. This tells us something about populism in general too where we are often conditioned to think about populist demagogues who lead the people and drag them along to their own sort of Machiavellian purposes. Very often what we see is that populist are rather want to provide a mirror to the people (Panizza, 2005) and actually reflect popular views. So, in the Philippines case, this obviously raises some disturbing implications, which is that we have essentially popular illiberal democracy or popularly illiberal views. Lastly, closing his provocative framing of our second panel on global populism, Dr Kenny has mentioned that although in their lectures, some of our panelists may mention a lot of the negative things that Duterte has done, nevertheless, we have to think about what this means in a democracy, if those negative things including something as disruptive as the war on drugs are actually popular. 

Dr Adele Webb: “Populism, Illiberalism and Authoritarianism in the Philippines: From Past to Present”

The late Marcos and Duterte in their authoritarian populist style have also spoken of good model citizens who are deserving of rights versus those who weren’t. Yet arguably their populace is based more on the idea of unity than it did on division. And of course, the closing of democratic spaces by calling for unity should remind us of the most recent election. The platform that Bongbong Marcos and Sarah Duterte joined was unity. Unifying north and south, unifying two powerful political families, and unifying the country against ‘disruptive opposition voices’ who want to raise questions about the sins of both fathers.

The first presentation was carried out by Dr Adele Webb from Brisbane who noted that this is an important year for Australians as they vote for a referendum to alter the constitution in recognition of the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Voice to represent Indigenous Australians to the parliament and federal government on matters of Indigenous affairs. Moving on to the subject of the panel, which is a different contested landscape, Dr Webb first presented the structure of her lecture on populism in the Philippines. Her speech was organized around three ideas or three findings that are pertinent to our deeper understanding of the populist phenomenon as it manifests in the Philippine context, but which also contributes some closing reflections on how the Philippine case and its dynamics might sharpen our use of the term populism more generally.

According to the first panelist, in thinking about the existence of populism in the Philippines, there are three broad themes that are significant to note. The first is the fact that like many other postcolonial democracies, there are permanent features of the political arena, both in terms of institutions and in terms of voter attitudes that match descriptive representations of populism and the characteristics of the political landscape that provide a favorable political opportunity structure for populist politics. The electoral arena is dominated by moralistic rather than programmatic appeals. In the context of weak parties and the almost total absence of ideologically and ethically driven parties and identities, democratic competitions founded on social cleavages or competing ideas are very rare. Instead, political actors vying for power, foster a sense of symbolic performative vertical accountability between the people and themselves by portraying themselves as the main custodian of public interests and citizen demands. Citizens, for their part, tend to be more tolerant with strong executive power, with limited legislative intervention, desiring quick fixes and decisive actions. And all of this, of course, relates to what scholars have pointed out already that the Philippines is a quintessential case of O’Donnell’s (1994) delegative democracy categorization. Pluralism is weak and the political actors not only use this but reinforce it by talking of a unified people, as if the country needs to have one heart, one soul, one mind and only then can overcome the challenges that it faces. Together these factors provide a fertile ground for populist appeals. 

Nonetheless, Dr Webb reminds us that -while actors that we might describe as populist-, come and go, the resonance and potency of popular sentiment remains. We have witnessed this in the striking consistency in political rhetoric of key presidential figures. The way Corazón Aquino talked about the path to transformation when she was elected following the spectacular deposing of the late Ferdinand Marcos in 1986, was at times almost indistinguishable from the way Manuel L. Quezon talked about transformation in the late 1930s and early 1940s. Moreover, even the way Marcos himself talked about it. She made herself custodian of the nation and its prosperity, perpetuating the motif of “people’s power” that she spoke not in conservative but in revolutionary terms. “Now the country is back in our hands. Another revolution is about to begin,” she told an audience of workers on Labor Day in 1986. If Marcos had become demonized as the epitome of Philippine moral corruption, Aquino was the opposite, symbolizing everything that was morally good. Despite this division between “good” and “bad,” she stated that “Only the power of a unified people could make it succeed.” 

The late Marcos and Duterte in their authoritarian populist style have also spoken of good model citizens who are deserving of rights versus those who weren’t. Yet arguably their populace is based more on the idea of unity than it did on division. And of course, the closing of democratic spaces by calling for unity should remind us of the most recent election. The platform that Bongbong Marcos and Sarah Duterte joined was unity. Unifying north and south, unifying two powerful political families, and unifying the country against ‘disruptive opposition voices’ who want to raise questions about the sins of both fathers.

Moving on to her second theme that is noteworthy when considering populism in the Philippine context, Dr Webb discussed the missing factors of populism in the Southeast Asian country, as despite the permanent presence of popular speeches on the political landscape, some things considered integral to the rise of populism elsewhere are largely missing in the Philippines. In European liberal democracies, the rise of populism has gone hand in hand with increasing political polarization. The radicalization of publics and discourse, hyper partisan media that fosters antagonism, together these two phenomena, populism and polarization, are deemed the great threat to the liberal democratic order. In contrast to this, the Philippines stands out as a country with low political polarization. 

Duterte’s popularity took on an almost unique polar nature. It’s not to say that there were no opponents inside and outside Congress, but instead of developing into a coherent anti-populist block, as has been observed elsewhere, Duterte enjoyed an unprecedented cross-class approval that endured his six-year term. There is an important exception to this according to Dr Webb. Before Duterte, whenever the Philippines was invoked in discussions of populism, it was Joseph Estrada who was named. Although he represented a different brand of populism, and he defied all the old, typical Presidents. “The us” and “them” of his highly persuasive, populist performance was based on material grievances, on the deep social inequalities that marks society. He had chains of vertical loyalty but not with the morally pure, unified people but predominantly with the poor. For the first time, populism produced polarization. Both the grand coalition of anti-populist, anti-Estrada movement and those who mobilized in Estrada’s defense, each saw the other as enemy of democracy and themselves as democracies’ true agents. Therefore, if in the long history of politics in the Philippines, this is the exception then how do we understand the grievances and anxieties that have driven populist politics, particularly the authoritarian or illiberal kind of Duterte and Marcos, which uses popular sentiment to legitimize state repression?

The third point made by Dr Adele Webb stated that to understand the resonance of populist appeals, and the logic of populist voters in accepting them, we need to consider their deep historical roots. So, there are novel features of Duterte’s regime that deserves attention, of course, not to mention the victims of his vile war on drugs. Yet, at the same time, if we’re using populism as an analytical concept, we should place his politics in a long view, and we should seek to understand the logics that drive his appeal in historical context. If we don’t historicize our analyses, at least two things are at stake according to the warning of the panelist. The first is if we continue to give too much power to populist actors as if they have made people do things that are simply cruel, that make no sense and have no relationship to the democratic desires. And second, if we don’t historicize, we fail to acknowledge that political attitudes and political institutions are produced by and producers of the conditions of possibility.

Considering Duterte’s platform, Dr Webb points out that it was based around igniting two sources of popular anxiety. The first was related to law and order. The Philippines had become a narco-state, and economic and political stability were impossible if this problem wasn’t eradicated. “It’s going to be a dictatorship,” he warned in a 2015 TV interview. The police and the military were the backbone and his electoral campaign translated into a state sanctioned killing spree. This wasn’t the only anxiety Duterte has inflamed. He was also a populist nationalist, who preyed upon the fragile sovereignty of the post-colonial Philippines. He claimed to embody the Philippines defiance of an unresolved history of colonial subjugation and indignity. The resonance of this was vividly captured when he infamously cursed US President Obama during the press conference in Davao: “I am the president of a sovereign state and we have long ceased to be a colony. I do not have any master, but the Filipino people.” The antagonism here was not between moral citizens versus criminal scum, but the unified and sovereign Filipino people against a malignant foreigner.

This later anxiety, Dr Webb argued, has been mostly ignored. Perhaps because it implicates non-Filipinos. The formal, law and order pitch has gained the most attention. The grotesqueness of the war on drug has proved both hard to watch and hard to look away from. “Many people at the moment are abusing that freedom and doing things which are not good. But we have this one politician, Duterte, whose type of leadership is like Marcos. And many people like that. And if you see Davao right now, it is one of the safest places in the Philippines. For me, if that type of leadership is implemented again, I think it’s much better,” said one of the interviewees of Dr Webb in 2015 showcasing the popularity of penal populism.

Dr Webb tried to make sense of such sentiments by explaining how some have explained it as evidence of lingering authoritarian nostalgia from the Marcos period, while others argued that it is a case of penal populism, in which modest economic growth empowers an expanding middle class, who express their anxiety about criminality and government corruption. While both these explanations bear some truth, both need to be further historicized. As this sentiment predates the post-1986 era. Dr Webb’s research demonstrates that as far as back as the 1940s, a perceived need for discipline was shaping middle class perceptions of what was a legitimate exercise of democratic power. In particular, the type of leadership that was deemed necessary. Moreover, in the late 1950s, Carl Landon noted that the general increase in crime and disorder since the end of the war had led people to say that there’s too much democracy, and that a little less democracy would be better for the country. By the early 1970s, when Marcos declared the resuscitation of Philippine democracy it was only made possible through his strong, autocratic leadership. Newspaper columnists at the time summed up the prevailing mood as the lack of discipline plunged the nation into the depths. It was exactly what the president did. He put a stop to a total lack of discipline. 

The argument that our lecturer has made in her book was that these sentiments reflect a sustained ambivalence towards democracy (Webb, 2022). And that ambivalence in turn has its roots in the paradox of democratic empire that was unleashed on the Philippines by the United States from the turn of the last century. If we want to talk about the electorate’s propensity for patronage politics, then we must talk about Philippine democracy’s founding patron. There is a striking resemblance between the logic of the electorate, the way they look at the way of democratic progress is imagined and the way the US colonial project of benign authoritarianism operated in the Philippines. It was a logic of pursuing national dignity and democratic ideals through the denial of liberty. Acceptance of their rights for the greater good was deemed to be appropriate behavior of the good student of American democratic tutelage. Unlike in other post-colonial contexts, these imperial logics of governance have penetrated the psyche and the imaginings of how democracy works, and they are very difficult to shake. 

Dr Webb has concluded her presentation by making some final remarks about what the complex case of the Philippines means for our understanding of populism more generally. If the logics that drive populism in the Philippines are deeply rooted in colonial history: What if anything, does it have to do with populism elsewhere? Can the term traverse such diverse contexts? It can, according to the research fellow of the University of Canberra, but only if we see populism not as the problem with our political systems, but as a manifestation of grievances with existing institutions of representative democracy. A signal of the failure of regimes to adequately express the political aspirations of people and to give a fact to notions that are supposedly central to our democratic normative ideal: popular sovereignty and constituent power. This is not to defend populism as a model of political change, but to say that if we blame the unsustainability of our democracies on populism, we sideline and ignore the causes of the feelings of alienation that propel it. 

In the Philippines, this is an old story, the institutions of representative democracy were compromised at their conception under a US colonial administration. At its core, the rise of populism is about the failure of institutions of democracy to ever accommodate the constituency, beyond the populist performative realm. In Europe, it’s a more recent phenomenon accelerated by cultural shifts brought about by neoliberalism and the digital transformation of our social lives. But in both places, populist voters conclude that the only way to make the principle of popular sovereignty effective is to delegate power to a strong, usually male and blustering figurehead, whose transgressions of liberal representative institutions, they mostly forgive, due to the lack of alternative means for addressing deep seated structural inequalities. 

Dr Mark Richard Thompson: “Duterte’s ‘Violent Populism’ in Comparative and Historical Perspective”

Duterte did not undertake major socio-economic reforms and his anti-oligarch rhetoric only served and benefitted his cronies. Duterte was claiming drugs were the source of poverty and if they can just eradicate it, it will fix the economy. This obviously deflects attention from the “death of development” which entails high poverty rates despite decades of high growth. Duterte’s strategy of securitization and “brute force government” has also been employed during the pandemic undermining accountability in a weak state with a poor record of human development.

Professor Mark Richard Thompson presented Duterte’s violent populism in a comparative and historical perspective. To begin, he noted that one problem with populism studies is that it is or has often been very Eurocentric. Although the US gets an honorable mention recently and Latin America sneaks in, we must highlight the fact that Latin American populism has been studied for quite a long time. This is an interesting aspect that in recent studies, particularly political science, a lot of the material is drawn from the European cases, therefore paying more attention to the Philippine case is a great initiative.

Dr Thompson started out his presentation by picking up on some of the comments made by Dr Kenny in his introduction, particularly his point about the paradox of democratic illiberalism, and some comments made by Dr Webb about democratic ambivalence and the nationalist component of Duterte’s appeal. The historical components weren’t really emphasized in the second presentation, but that is not to say it has no vital importance. The professor of the City University of Hong Kong first reflected on Dr Webb’s ideas about late colonialism in the Philippines, then gave a brief overview of his presentation, which touched on discussions of Duterte’s misogyny and also about the role of social media, how important it was for the rise of Duterte and his successor, Marcos Jr. 

Dr Thompson emphasized the comparative aspect of Duterte’s populism as it was mentioned in the lecture title. Duterte does seem to reflect the global trends during his presidency, yet the important distinction is that he was the only illiberal populist to instigate mass murder of tens of thousands. By taking a close look at the figures published not just by NGOs, but by the Commission on Human Rights as well. A government agency, which Duterte has tried to defund but his allies in Congress ultimately backed away from this. Furthermore, we can find numbers by an initiative at the University of Philippines and some international groups that have been coming up with databases as well. Ultimately, we can safely talk about up to tens of thousands of murders confirmed by the Philippine government under Duterte, when they went through their declamatory phase when they were proud of the killings, and they propagated it in the media about what they were doing to stop drug criminality – often incriminating debt pushers and small-time drug users. They have only changed this approach after incredible pushback internationally and domestically. Although that didn’t stop the drug war but did lead them to change the counting and obscure the numbers of victims. 

The lecture was continued by highlighting that Duterte is distinctive because he was engaging in mass murder against his own citizens. We can talk about other illiberal populists such as Putin invading Ukraine, but this is different, it was war on the Filipino people. It was a particularly virulent form of illiberalism as it took the aggressive intent of the idea of us versus them. The populist polarity of two deadly extremes. Furthermore, the ‘othering’ was not based on religion, ethnicity, or migration, but it was othering outsiders. It was against the poor because overwhelmingly – with the important exception of the journalists, judges, and the local mayors -, over half of those identified by Duterte’s drug war were actually murdered, most of them had a poor socio-economic background. There were a few high-profile cases of celebrities and even celebrities were killed, but it was overwhelmingly a war against the poor. 

It was urban, poor, young males, they were the main victims. Nonetheless, Duterte won popular support, including among the poor (Kusaka, 2017). Interesting ethnological studies on this phenomenon, as well as, of course, the opinion polls, show us why Duterte is distinctive from the so-called “base populists” like Bolsonaro and Trump. They had highly polarized societies with a very affectionate base that did not care what these characters were up to. Duterte had effectively a vast portion of the population supporting him. Although it is worth pointing out that there’s an increasing discussion about whether Duterte’s support was due to fear. Dr Thompson believes that overwhelmingly it was genuine support even though there was a bit of a fear factor. People, particularly poor people, for obvious reasons were concerned that the drug war might actually affect them.

One framework for understanding Duterte’s policies has been penal populism (Pratt, 2007, Curato, 2016, Kenny and Holmes, 2020). But Dr Thompson warns that crime concerns were limited until Duterte securitized drugs in his 2016 campaign (Quimpo, 2019). Crime, which was the lowest concern, jumps up briefly during Duterte’s campaign from December 2015 to his election, then it goes back down. Inflation, as it was mentioned by Dr Kenny, remains the most important consideration of Filipino people until today. Moreover, according to the lecturer, penal populism has generally been involved with people being arrested and put in jail for a long time and although that did happen in the Philippines, mass arrests, but there were also mass killings, extra judicial killings. These killings were going on and the drug war continued despite growing domestic and international criticism.

In terms of the origins and nature of Duterte’s violent populism, one has to understand how he nationalized it after having it first developed locally in Davao as mayor for a number of terms. Eventually, he became a popular mayor, dealing with the communist insurgency and dealing with high crime rates. Then he came up with a new idea of what can be called “neo-bossism” where instead of intimidating voters, he wooed them by promising to protect the ‘good people’ against ‘drug induced evil.’ So again, populist polarity worked in Duterte’s favor without upsetting voters and attracting them. His messages resonated well, particularly given the failures of what could be called the liberal reformist regime of Cory Aquino and Fidel Ramos, her successor. The Estrada administration was a bit of an exception, the liberal reformers didn’t like that, and they overthrew Estrada extra-constitutionally. Gloria Macapagal Arroyo was Estrada’s successor. She was supposed to be a liberal but turned out to be a very problematic administration. Finally, the son of Benigno Aquino becomes president, and we seem to have this idea of a good reformist fighting against the problems of the corrupt Marcos dictatorship and continuing to undertake reforms for decades. 

This ultimately is seen as an institutional failure, because although the economy was restored after Marcos left behind an economic disaster despite the recent nostalgia for his presidency, growth was restored but it was not widely distributed, and poverty remains very high in the Philippines. Depending on different methods, more than half the Filipinos will tell pollsters that they are poor. Estrada’s populism, which could be called as proletarian populism, was undermined. There were a number of other political figures who ran against Gloria Macapagal Arroyo, and a movie star Fernando Poe Jr. was disqualified. Furthermore, another major candidate was undermined through what can be called a selective Senate investigation. So, according to Professor Thompson’s explanation, there was an alternative rhetoric, which was certainly less deadly than Duterte’s populism. Duterte has used a similarly repressive repertoire in his failed pandemic response, which can be called “brute force governance” shielding him from responsibility and accountability, as well as deflecting from his obvious governance failures and demonstrating how effective it is as a legitimation strategy. 

Another interesting point our second speaker has made is Duterte’s claim to be a socialist despite harming the poor through his war on drugs and not changing the Philippine economic model that did little good to the poor. He has stated that he would be the country’s first socialist president and started negotiations with the Communist Party when he took office. He also had friendly relations with communist politicians, yet later declared them terrorists and resumed extrajudicial killings against the left. Continuing with his remarks on Duterte’s socialism and economics, Thompson mentioned that Duterte did not undertake major socio-economic reforms and his anti-oligarch rhetoric only served and benefitted his cronies. What we can see is that Duterte was claiming drugs were the source of poverty and if they can just eradicate it, it will fix the economy. This obviously deflects attention from the “death of development” which entails high poverty rates despite decades of high growth. The strategy of securitization and “brute force government” has also been employed during the pandemic undermining accountability in a weak state with a poor record of human development.

Following this, Thompson provided a brief overview of Duterte’s macho populism. He was a misogynist with a hyper masculine display that was seen to demonstrate its authenticity, particularly against the hypocrisy of the old liberal reformers (Encinas-Franco, 2022; Parmanand, 2020; Curato and Ong, 2018). It is important to point out that four of the leading opposition figures Duterte has targeted were women and he went after them very harshly. For daring to challenge the drug war, Senator De Lima was shamed, accused of committing a ‘dual class and gender sin’ and she remains in jail until today on trumped up drug charges. Duterte has also fired his vice president Leni Robredo, who was separately elected in the Philippines, from the cabinet after she criticized the drug war. Maria Ressa, winner of the Nobel Peace prize, still faces a number of legal issues and cyber libel cases that were clearly initiated by Duterte’s administration to intimidate the media. Finally Chief Justice Maria Serena was removed after defending judges tagged for drugs. 

In his last point, Professor Thompson focused on the issue of illiberalism. There has been a lot of discussion in the literature about how widespread anti-pluralist views are in the Philippines and support for a strong leader who gets things done unhindered by constraints (Pernia, 2021). Kenny and Holmes (2020) have pointed out that this shows support for illiberal policies not illiberalism generally or the popularity of the drug war. According to Thompson, these studies demonstrate how Duterte could enjoy high popularity and electoral legitimacy despite massive violation of human rights. It also seems to fit the theory of a famous Philippine political scientist Agpalo’s (pangulo theory, 1981) who talks about the preference of Filipinos for strong terms, and would also help explain this nostalgia for the Marcos dictatorship. The latter helped his son, Marcos Jr. to win the 2022 elections and explains why Cory Aquino is now seen as a weak president. Consequently, Dr Thompson states that there is a strong liberal tradition reminding us that Cory Aquino has once unseated Marcos suggesting that the current illiberalism is situational. We also do see that, even if it’s not a coherent opposition movement, there are strong anti-drug and then later anti-terrorism protests in the Philippines. 

To conclude, the lecturer highlighted that Duterte was ahead of the recent illiberal populist curve elected a few months before Trump and a year before Bolsonaro. Albeit there are similar social media ills to be looked at such as Cambridge Analytica and Facebook. A Facebook executive spoke about one reason why the Philippines has been identified as patient zero is Facebook disinformation. Illiberalism seems to be persisting under Duterte’s successor, Marcos Jr. Although Duterte’s illiberal realignment toward China is now being re-evaluated by the new president under pressure from the US, also by the military and public opinion as well. This marks an interesting shift, yet the main takeaway here is that the Philippines is being an extreme example of the populist dichotomy of ‘the good people’ and ‘criminal others’ used to legitimate mass killings. It was a highly militarized brute force governance by Duterte’s – a democratically legitimated but highly illiberal leader-, who blames ne’er-do-wells for complex social problems facing the country. This strategy has also deflected attention from mass poverty by what Bello (2019) has called “a fascist original.” Finally, the current dominance of illiberalism in Philippine politics has been met by considerable, if not entirely, coherent, liberal pushback, which goes back to a century-old tradition of resolve and the independence movement more generally.

Dr Jean S. Encinas-Franco: “Gendered Populism of Dutertismo and Hypermasculinity in the Philippine’s politics”

Looking at migration and Duterte’s gendered rhetoric Dr Encinas-Franco uses Moffitt’s definition of populism as a political style and asks the question: Why is Duterte very popular with Filipinos overseas? Duterte garnered 70 percent of the votes in 2016 among Filipinos overseas. Since 2004, the government has allowed overseas migrants to vote if they are still Filipino citizens. The former president’s candidacy has increased overseas votes by more than 30 percent. These votes generally have not been a significant contribution to the overall voter turnout until 2016. Moreover, a lot of overseas Filipinos campaigned for Duterte.

Dr Jean Encinas-Franco talked about gendered populism and hypermasculinity in the Philippine’s politics. In the lecture’s outline, Dr Encinas-Franco broke down her presentation into four main points: (1) populism, gender and international migration; (2) Duterte as a populist and a brief historical background of Philippine out migration; (3) Duterte’s gendered rhetoric towards migrants; and (4) some concluding remarks. To start with the first point, the third speaker reviewed the literature on gender and populism: There has been a lot of studies linking the two together and, in fact, it has been expanding. Drawing from Saresma (2018: 177), who coined the term ‘gendered populism,’ she refers to the concept, “a simplifying understanding of gender as a ‘natural,’ essentially dichotomous order based on positioning both women and men in hierarchical locations in terms of power.” 

Moving on to introduce international migration to the equation as well, the Professor points out that the literature on gendered populism and migration has a Eurocentric bias, which Dr Thompson referred to a while ago about populist studies in general. If these studies talk about international migration, they usually refer to host states and the usual strategy would be for populists to engage in racism and ‘othering’ of immigrants, coupled with criticism of feminism and privileging the traditional family to protect them from the ‘othered immigrants.’ Some argue in defense of why gender and migration has become very prominent in Europe is that immigration has been a crisis in most countries in Europe. Yet in the Global South, particularly in the Philippines, Philippine labor out migration actually also has a lot of history of crisis situations in which the government had to break its relations with the Coalition of the Willing. 

Looking at migration and Duterte’s gendered rhetoric Dr Encinas-Franco uses Moffitt’s (2016) definition of populism as a political style and asks the question: Why is Duterte very popular with Filipinos overseas? Duterte garnered 70 percent of the votes in 2016 among Filipinos overseas. Since 2004, the government has allowed overseas migrants to vote if they are still Filipino citizens. The former president’s candidacy has increased overseas votes by more than 30 percent. These votes generally have not been a significant contribution to the overall voter turnout until 2016. Moreover, a lot of overseas Filipinos campaigned for Duterte. In her study, Professor Encinas-Franco traces their support and their fanaticism to Duterte in 2015. 

The context of Philippine labor out migration is such that since 1974, the government has been involved in labor export through the labor code, which institutionalized overseas employment. Today, there are more than 12 million Filipinos abroad in more than 200 countries and territories. Although this data, warns Dr Encinas-Franco, is severely underreported. It has also consistently been the fourth largest remittance recipient country in the world. In 2020 alone, the Filipinos abroad remitted $35 billion dollars to their country of origin. A key characteristic of overseas migration is the feminization of migration in which not only 60 percent of Filipino migrants are women, but a lot of Filipino migrants are also working as so-called feminized domestic workers and caregivers. Moreover, migration scholars also refer to the government as paternalistic. In terms of how they view Filipino migrant women, there are stricter regulations for women migrants’ mobility compared to men, and deployment bans on domestic workers. Nine out of 10 migrant domestic workers are women. On the other hand, there is also a huge bureaucracy to cater to Filipino migrants’ needs. 

Looking at a case study of Duterte’s presidential visit to South Korea in 2018, where he had delivered a three-hour speech. Duterte’s speech has received particularly strong attention from migrant Filipinos in Seoul. Furthermore, this speech has made international headlines because he gave a migrant Filipino woman a kiss. Professor Encinas-Franco has analyzed the speech and its transcript to identify what are the themes that comprise this speech. One central trope was “the protective and angry father.” In his speech, he said that he will protect anyone from destroying his country (referring to drug addicts). Duterte framed his message in a way that makes sense to Filipinos abroad by emphasizing that their children’s welfare is his priority. This resonated very well to migrant Filipinos abroad and, in a sense, it justified violence against fellow Filipinos as extremely necessary. This is just one sample of his rhetoric as a migrant, as a protective and angry father. 

The second trope mentioned by our third speaker was “the Filipino every man.” Duterte has usually dressed in ordinary clothes, not in formal attire. The populist ex-president would also use humor and curses. Remaining relatable but projecting the image of a very powerful man. Dr Encinas-Franco has also noted that in the speech in South Korea, Duterte admitted to having two wives. Although he has to make this moral transgression excusable by saying that there is no such thing as a first family. “We are all first family, we are all workers of the government, working for the Filipino people.” A very symbolic message which certainly resonated very well with Filipino migrants because in this rhetoric, they would feel that they are really part of the nation, that their president really cares for them, and that they don’t mind whether he has two wives. They also don’t mind whether this is some form of a double standard given that he has accused late legislators Senator Lila De Lima of committing adultery.

The third trope explored by our lecturer is that Duterte was a “Ladies’ Man.” Of course, to justify his actions, he has asked for permission to kiss the migrant woman, in fact, he also asked whether the migrant woman had a husband, explained Professor Encinas-Franco. Nevertheless, he presented it as something that’s ordinary and that these people also said that it was just for enjoyment and a part of Filipino culture. Drawing from Mendonca and Caetano (2021: 227) who studied Bolsonaro and said that this is common, Dr Encinas-Franco made parallels between the two populist leaders. The ladies’ man approach is a formula that the voting base of populists do not mind mainly because “it gives new meaning to the authority of the office and the denial of its standard forms.” It means that Duterte is really one with the people. 

The reaction from the Duterte-camp further amplifies and forgives Duterte’s messages. The reason behind this is that they see it as a joke or part of Filipino culture which does not need to be excused or apologized for. This erases and closes any form of resistance because it’s merely a joke. The fact that women were also laughing as seen on the video of the South Korean speech meant compliance to the patriarchy (Connell and Messerschmidt, 2005: 848). There were also women, Cabinet Secretaries and Undersecretary from the camp of Duterte who didn’t mind what the party leader did. But what does this make of Duterte’s behavior? It forgives the perpetrator. Moreover, even legislators noted that the president’s behavior was an assault and abuse of power. Notwithstanding, when they look at the Philippines’ good record in terms of gender equality laws, they actually individualize Duterte’s actions and rhetoric. They tend to frame Duterte’s misogynistic actions, rhetoric, and practice as an individual issue, rather than a societal and systemic issue. So, in effect that tells us that it closes resistance.  

In her concluding remarks, Professor Encinas-Franco emphasized that the reason why Duterte’s speech and his rhetoric is so powerful among migrants is that it’s quite different from the usual bureaucratic language that the state employs. The state is very much involved in catering to every migrant’s needs from pre-employment to repatriation, but when in doing so, the state uses bureaucratic or legalized rhetoric, while Duterte’s case is very much personalized. His behavior has also embodied masculine entitlement that is not inherently different from the entitlement inherent in deployment bans and stricter regulations for migrant Filipino women. Finally, Duterte’s populist style was very popular, resonated very well with people from all walks of life and ultimately stifled resistance.

Dr Jefferson Lyndon D. Ragragio: “Media Populism and Anti-Free Speech in Duterte’s Philippines”

While the country prides itself as once a bastion of free speech in the region, the Philippines under the Duterte administration reported major push backs against such areas as rule of law, civil liberties, free expression, and press freedom. Since 2018, the Philippines has been classified as an electoral autocracy, meaning that while the country observes multiparty elections, there are insufficient levels of rights in areas like right to suffrage and free expression according to the V-Dem Institute. The classification of electoral autocracy is a downgrade from what the country used to be prior to the Duterte era, which is electoral democracy where there are relatively free and fair multi-party elections and satisfactory degrees of rights.

In the last contribution, Dr Jefferson Lyndon Ragragio spoke about media populism and anti-free speech on Facebook in the Philippines between 2016 and 2022. Using a more modest approach to his presentation, Dr Ragragio focused on the so-called anti free speech. He argued that part of the political legacy of Duterte’s administration is anti-free speech that characterizes a complicated hybrid of hateful, banal, and light rhetoric that bridges the putative relational ties of the leader and his idealized public. Dr Ragragio has aimed to show how Duterte’s anti free speech thrived within the climate of a network of disinformation, and to some extent affective and emotional politics that collectively spoil the civil consensus on political participation.

Dr Ragragio used the case of the Philippines, a Southeast Asian nation of over 75 million Facebook users regarded as the social media capital of the world to demonstrate his arguments. While the country prides itself as once a bastion of free speech and democratic movement in the region, the Philippines under the Duterte administration reported major push backs against such areas as rule of law, civil liberties, free expression, and press freedom. Since 2018, the Philippines has been classified as an electoral autocracy, meaning that while the country observes multiparty elections, there are insufficient levels of rights in areas like right to suffrage and free expression according to the 2023 report of the V-Dem Institute. The classification of electoral autocracy is a downgrade from what the country used to be prior to the Duterte era, which is electoral democracy where there are relatively free and fair multi-party elections and satisfactory degrees of rights. The country’s state of press freedom, once regarded as the freest in Southeast Asia, recorded yearly decline from 2017 to 2022, placing the country from 127 to 147 spots (Reporters Without Borders, 2023). So, there are certainly manufacturers or systemic – emerging and even hybridized – factors that contributed to this democratic backsliding. This type of crisis is transnational and global in character, which forces us to reevaluate some of the ways we approach the features of contemporary and digital politics. 

The concept of populism is elusive and understood in many ways, yet the key characteristics of populism, especially the notion of the people are evident in many societies across geographical lines. Some scholars of populism explain that the core element of the term is to speak and act in the name of the people broadly defined, and that this act of representing the people by the leader can be manipulated to construct political identities and political conflicts. Although sharing this observation, Dr Ragragio limited his work in his presentation to using an understanding of populism as a political communication style that uses certain rhetoric, identity, and media to connect with the people: for instance, the disenchanted or the agreed groups, while it also aggravates ‘the other’ centered around elite or the establishment.

This understanding has allowed our speaker to highlight the centrality of rhetoric and style in the communicative expression of mediated populism. In terms of its relationship with disinformation, populism is central if not intrinsic to the evolving practices of networked disinformation or what some call digital propaganda. The multifaceted practices associated with disinformation come in different forms like political trolling and digital black box in the Philippines. 

A cursory look at recent studies on free speech under contemporary populism would show a variety of speeches or brands of speeches used by populist actors. In Duterte’s Philippines, the prominent kind is that of hate speech, which aptly describes the leader’s hostility against the political opposition, including human rights activists, church leaders, and politicians opposing the brutal war on drugs. Duterte’s open hostility against the dominant centuries old Catholic Church and its teachings, something past Philippine presidents didn’t bother to do, is a clear expression of hate speech that dehumanizes and incites discrimination against the perceived ‘other.’ So, some scholars call it extreme speech that broadens the hostile character of hate speech to include culture specific practices and sentiments that resonate with expressions of the digital public. This includes such expressions as remorse and rumors that connect with the imaginations of some segments of the politics. Anti-free speech in Duterte’s Philippines is represented by hateful, banal, and light rhetoric that targets and appeals to different segments of the politics. 

In his presentation, associate professor Ragragio focused on three ways, or three narratives employed under the Duterte administration. (1) The first is the marginalization of the political opposition. (2) Second is the appeal to the notion of family. (3) Third is the appeal to the notion of religion. So, amplifying the label of terrorism in the first narrative, the diehard supporters of Duterte, popularly known as the DDS, orchestrated the supposed anti-elite and nationalist rhetoric of Duterte. DDS is a mobilized yet highly unstructured coalition of individuals and networks that maintain an active presence online, especially on Facebook and YouTube. On YouTube, for instance, it’s no less than the national government’s channel, people’s television network that reports on how DDS members worldwide are gathering to express their continued support for Duterte whose life according to his supporters is endangered by the elite. DDS uses the referee of below one or the color yellow. So, the yellow is a political color associated with another political family, another political clan to target the perceived other. Duterte and his incendiary social media armies were able to signify yellow with political opposition marked with elitism, incompetence and a bogus sense of nationalism.

The second narrative is about the populist notion of family which shows how the strongman yet compassionate brand of the leadership of Duterte is capable of securing the welfare of families, children and future generations. On Facebook, the leader was dramatically referred to as “Father of the Nation,” showing how he managed to spend quality time with family and children, despite his political career. For his online supporters, Duterte epitomizes a strong brand of leadership that can bring back the long-gone discipline expected of every Filipino. A leadership brand that is humane enough to protect the law-abiding populace. In one Facebook photo on Duterte’s page, he is promoting the caring image of the leader, notwithstanding the leaders’ press remarks against women, the clergy, local politicians, and journalists.

The third notion is about the populist notion of religion, which highlights the devout identity of the leader through practices and identification with recognized symbols of fate such as kneeling and praying, showing images of processions, being prayed over by leaders of different churches, -although these leaders come predominantly from the prominent Catholic faith-, and expressions of prayers and aspirations. The religion related posts, conflate facts and fictitious accounts to magnify the pious image of Duterte. Dr Ragragio showcased an edited photo of Duterte kneeling and praying with a comment asking for God’s protection of Duterte to provide an example of his case. Further, posts by other pro-Duterte Facebook pages would also claim that the leader was indeed a gift from God to the Philippines. 

In his speech, the fourth panelist has demonstrated the complicated mix of hateful, banal and light sentiments that target the aspirations of the digital public. The Philippine case showed how we can expand the belligerence and strict binarism typical of political populism. Features that while central to contemporary populism may not fully account for the sophisticated terms of populism and contemporary digital politics at large. Under the new administration of Ferdinand Marcos, Jr and Sara Duterte, the anti-free speech honed by the previous administration, presents real world dangers to this day. 

Duterte continues to exhibit closer ties with the church leader, Apollo Quiboloy who is in the wanted list of the US Federal Bureau of Investigation for crimes including sex trafficking of children, and fraud and coercion. The church leaders’ media, called Sunshine Media Network International, serves as one of the primary media platforms of Duterte and his supporters to attack the ‘others’ including independent media outlets and legitimate foreign bodies like the International Criminal Court. 

In the area of legislation, some of Duterte’s close allies in both houses of Congress, the Senate and the House of Representatives, relentlessly advocate pro-Duterte policies like shielding the leader from investigations into his bloody drug war. Just recently, some lawmakers proposed to upgrade the financial benefits of former presidents, citing solely the case of Duterte. In sum, what we are seeing then is the changing terms of mediated populism that can reform or disable consensus on free speech, one that can disrupt and even redefine our sense of political participation in the digital sphere. Finally, Dr Radragio reminded us to be more attentive to the innovative terms of mediated populism so we can better address the rhetorical, digital and real-world challenges of anti-free speech.

(*) Anita Tusor is a recent graduate of the Double Master’s Program of King’s College London and Renmin University of China in Asian and European Affairs. She also holds a M.A. in Applied Linguistics and a B.A. in Hungarian and Chinese Studies. Previously, she has worked with different think tanks and is currently working as a Research Assistant at the ECPS and the International Institute of Prague. Anita’s research interests include the processes of democratisation and de-democratisation, populist constitutionalism, political parties and their systems, and foreign malign influence operations.

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