By announcing that he is running for the vice presidency in 2022, together with his own daughter as presidential candidate, Duterte appears to be afraid of the tremendous resistance to his long-running scheme of realizing a full-blown fascist dictatorship ala Marcos by proclaiming a pseudo-revolutionary government or nationwide martial rule tied up with charter change carrying authoritarian provisions.

It looks like the coward in Duterte is prevailing over the ruffian character that he usually displays. But still the braggart gangster Duterte stands. He intends to claim conclusively although falsely that he has already defeated the armed revolutionary movement of the people and that therefore there is no immediate ground for nationwide martial law of indefinite duration. He is satisfied with the state terrorism already being carried out by the NTF-ELCAC under his terror law.

Still the coward in Duterte is showing. He has become aware of at least two groups within the AFP and PNP which are ready to take action against him in line with his previous pronouncement a few years ago that anyone can shoot him dead if he would stay as president-dictator beyond the constitutional limit of his term in 2022. Obviously, he thinks that running for the vice presidency excuses him from the aforesaid pronouncement.

But running for the vice presidency does not save Duterte from the public perception and public abhorrence of the fact that he is violating the constitutional provision that no one can exceed the six-year presidential term (a provision made precisely to prevent the Marcos phenomenon of overstay). The people clearly see that he is violating his own constitution for the sake of greed and political incest with his own daughter and that he is trying to preempt the hand of justice from taking him to account for his grave crimes of mass murder, plunder and treason.

Duterte underestimates the fact that the people detest him for having manipulated the results of the 2019 mid-term elections and abhor him for scheming to cheat again in the 2022 presidential elections. The people are too well aware of the fact that 5 of the 6 Comelec commissioners are Duterte appointees and that Duterte and Dennis Uy own the TIM Corp. which is the Philippine counterpart of Smartmatic.

Duterte is blind to the level of public awareness and opprobrium of his crimes because of his own narcissism and sociopathic greed and because of his own sycophants, the psywar machinery of his running dogs in the military and police, his own troll armies, mercenary poll survey firms and the reproductions by corporate media of the press releases of his own government and armed forces. Duterte forgets that Marcos was overthrown by the people as a result of cheating in the 1986 snap elections.

Let us assume that history does not repeat itself with exact precision and allows Duterte to prolong his rule under the guise of being vice president to a compliant president whose rape he has so cavalierly waved away as the antic of a drama queen. The health, economic and political crisis that he has aggravated will engulf and swallow him and will provide more favorable conditions than ever for the unprecedented rise of the people’s revolutionary resistance. ###