It seems everybody want a piece of the President.
So called experts in the field of politics have been giving different
opinions of what kind of a leader-President of a country is the former Mayor of
Davao City. The President has been both an enigma and a revelation at the same
time. He has done things for the country where his predecessors have not even
imagine.
His understanding of the changing geo-politics in Asia as well as in the
different parts of the world has been the foundation of his independent foreign
policy we are all know experiencing. *
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| President Rodrigo Roa Duterte at the Philippine Military Academy's Alumni Homecoming (photo credit GMA News) |
There is an article posted today in the Washington website dated March 20,
2018 titled “Understanding Duterte’s mind-boggling rise to power ” written by
Richard Javad Heydarian is a former professor at De La Salle University and
Ateneo De Manila University .
For purposes of sharing the knowledge to our reading public ,we have
quoted in full the whole article written
by Mr. Heydarian for the convenience and
knowledge of our readers.
Understanding Duterte’s mind-boggling rise to power
MANILA, Philippines —
In what could be the beginning of the trial of the century, the International
Criminal Court has initiated
a preliminary probe into alleged extrajudicial killings in the Philippines.
The prime target is no
less than President Rodrigo Duterte, who has overseen a bloody campaign against
suspected drug dealers since his ascent to power in 2016. Almost overnight, the
Southeast Asian country transformed
from a “bastion of human rights and democracy” into potentially the
latest member of an exclusive club of nations that have seen their leaders
prosecuted for crimes against humanity. In response, Duterte has called to
withdraw his country’s membership to the international body, which would
make the Philippines only the second nation, after Burundi, to withdraw.
Duterte’s rise — his
mind-boggling popularity and curious mélange of rhetorical overdrive and policy
equivocation — can’t be understood in isolation. It has to be situated within a
broader context of how populism takes root in rapidly modernizing nations like
the Philippines, because Duterte is, first and foremost, a populist; he uses,
to quote
one political researcher, a “political style that features an appeal to ‘the
people’ versus ‘the elite’, bad manners, and the performance of crisis,
breakdown or threat.” *
Lessons from history
Reflecting on his
country’s transmogrification in the opening decades of the 20th century, the
Italian Marxist thinker Antonio Gramsci lamented how “the old [order] is dying
and the new cannot be born,” warning how “in this interregnum, a great variety
of morbid symptoms [begin to] appear.”
With the liberal
bourgeoisie discredited, Italian socialists and fascists fought for the soul of
the nation throughout the first half of the century. As Gramsci observed in his
home country, “incurable structural contradictions have revealed themselves …
and that, despite this, the political forces … are struggling to conserve and
defend the existing structure.”
The result was a
political deadlock, which paved the way for the rise of the most pernicious
perversion of populism: fascism. Almost exactly a century later, Gramsci’s
portrayal of his country eerily resembles the zeitgeist among many troubled
emerging (and mature) democracies in the opening years of the 21st century.
Recent years have seen
the liberal elite suffering one electoral setback after another around the
world, as strongman-populists dislodge the establishment in favor of a new
brand of politics that seems both familiar and new. The specter of what
American pundit Fareed Zakaria calls
“illiberal democracy” is haunting the democratic world, as a distinct process
of what I call
“authoritarianization” puts into question the durability of democratic values
in one nation after the other. *
Democracy fatigue
This is particularly
true among the members of what
American political scientist Samuel Huntington termed the “third democratic
wave,” which swept across the developing and post-Soviet world over the past
four decades. What we see today is the emergence of hybrid regimes that combine
elements of electoral democracy with autocratic governance.
Often the culprit
behind democratic decay and degenerative mutation is the absence of functioning
state institutions that have the capacity to discipline rapacious elites,
enforce laws and insulate the bureaucracy from the undue influence of interest
groups. As a result, we are beginning to experience a troubling phenomenon — a
“democratic fatigue” — as a growing share
of citizens, including in developed societies, becomes comfortable with the
notion of military rule or full autocratic takeover.
The zeitgeist of
democratic decay and democracy fatigue — namely, the deepening public
dissatisfaction with business-as-usual practices of the (democratic) political
elite — is most acutely apparent among Asia’s oldest democracies, such as the
Philippines. At the heart of this great transformation stands Rodrigo Duterte,
the tough-talking mayor-turned-president who has single-handedly transformed
the Philippines’ domestic and foreign policy trajectory unlike any of his
predecessors.
Emerging market
populism
The rise of populists
like Duterte is part of an arc of
populism that has inundated major emerging market democracies,
where, unlike in the West, immigration and economic decline aren’t issues.
Instead, the appeal of populists and strongmen in these countries lies in their
uncanny ability to tap into collective frustrations — most especially among
aspirational middle classes — over the inefficacy of state institutions to
accommodate new voices and provide basic goods and services. *
The widening divide
between exponentially rising social expectations and glacially advancing state
capacity provides a perfect gap for populists to seize power based on a promise
of overnight salvation. The ultimate sacrificial lamb, however, is the liberal
constitutional order among fledgling democracies. We’ve seen this everywhere
from India with Prime Minister Narendra Modi to Turkey with President Recep
Tayyip Erdogan and Indonesia with popular presidential candidate Prabowo
Subianto.
Stylistically, as a
president, and substantively, as the former mayor of Davao, Duterte is a
hands-on, macho leader who has little appreciation for institutional checks and
balances. Yet his attempt to replicate his “Davao model”
on the national scale has been far from successful and is fraught with risks of
unintended consequences for his administration and the well-being of the
Philippines. His signature “war on drugs” campaign has — even by his own
admission — fallen short of its objectives, while triggering domestic and
international backlash.
The Southeast Asian
country, like Gramsci’s Italy, is caught in an interregnum, struggling to
anchor itself somewhere between strong-man populism, autocratic nostalgia and
democratic resistance — with no clear resolution on the horizon. The
Philippines has entered a twilight zone.
Report from Washington Post
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