A thuggish mayor looks set to govern the Philippines - Rodrigo Duterte will probably be the next president of the Philippines

 

WHEN Rodrigo Duterte first announced his presidential candidacy in November, he seemed a long shot. He had been the controversial mayor of Davao, the biggest city in the southern Philippine island of Mindanao, for over 20 years. Just five months before he entered the presidential race Human Rights Watch linked him to vigilante killings of suspected criminals. Voters had never elected a president from Mindanao, or one who had never previously held national office. But on the evening of May 9th, with three-fifths of all votes counted, Mr Duterte held a 17-point lead over his closest challenger. A Duterte presidency looks on the cards, and it will come as quite a shock.

Politics in the Philippines has always revolved around personality more than policy. It is something that Mar Roxas, running a distant second to Mr Duterte, never quite grasped. A worthy scion of a political family (his grandfather had been president) and a former member of the cabinet of the outgoing president, Benigno Aquino, Mr Roxas spent the campaign touting the Philippines’ undoubted success in generating economic growth. Under Mr Aquino, the country was South-East Asia’s fastest-growing economy, with an annual average growth of almost 6%. But Mr Roxas proved a hapless campaigner. Filipinos expect their presidents to “eat with their hands”, while Mr Roxas always seemed to be hunting about for his silver spoon.

Mr Duterte, meanwhile, was all personality. A tough-talking hard man, he never ceased to make it clear that he was unafraid to kill whoever needed killing—he was going to dump the bodies of 100,000 criminals in Manila Bay—legal niceties go hang. He joked about his disappointment that he had not been first in line to sexually assault an Australian lay minister who had been raped and murdered during a prison riot—and then he dared America and Australia to sever ties after their governments expressed disapproval of his repulsive braggadocio.
His campaign threw scorn on the Philippines’ cautious traditional politicians or trapos, a play on the Tagalog for “old rags”. The campaign centred on the issues of corruption and crime. Many Filipinos are at daily risk of both street violence and low-level corruption. They saw in him a saviour. He claimed, with much hyperbole, to have transformed Davao from a city of murderous gangsterism to a clean and orderly mini-Singapore. It went down well with many voters. Beyond Manila, the imperious capital, Mr Duterte was able to harness provincial resentment. But many in Manila too, with its gun violence, its traffic jams and its creaking infrastructure, were attracted to the strongman message.
Mr Duterte tapped into two other grievances. One is that, for all the country’s robust growth, many outside the main cities have barely felt its benefits, if at all. The same share of Filipinos, around 26%, still live in poverty as when Mr Aquino took office in 2010. Many of the poor are in the countryside, hurt by declining farm employment even as the jobs generated in the cities’ flourishing service sectors are beyond their educational reach.
The other grievance is over the country’s narrow, feudal politics, dominated by a handful of rich, aloof Manila families. Though his father was a mayor, Mr Duterte comes from outside this charmed circle. To many, that was qualification enough.

The Economist