Millions of Philippins began to vote on Monday in a mid-term election widely considered as a referendum on the explosive quarrel between President Ferdinand Marcos and dismissed Vice-President Sara Duterte.
The capital’s workers, Manila, actively installed polling stations on Sunday for a race which will decide more than 18,000 posts, seats in the House of Representatives at highly contested municipal offices.
It is the race for the Senate, however, which has potentially major implications for the 2028 presidential election.
The 12 elected senators will form half of the jury on Monday in a trial of the dismissal of Duterte – temporarily fixed for July – which could see it definitively prohibited from the public service. In a speech during a rally last week, Duterte said that her name and the name of her family “were dragged in the mud”. “Who will really benefit if the Duterte family has disappeared from this world?” Not the Philippins, not the victims of the crime, the unemployed, the poor or even the hunger. ”
Duterte’s length quarrel with former ally Marcos exploded in February when she was dismissed by the Chamber for “high crimes”, including corruption and an assassination plot against the president. She denied allegations, adding that she had presented the intrigue of assassination as a hypothetical scenario.
Barely a month later, his father, former President Rodrigo Duterte, was arrested and advanced to the International Criminal Court (ICC) on the same day to cope with an accusation of crimes against humanity during his anti-Dogus Died campaign.
Sara Duterte will need nine votes in the Senate of 24 seats to preserve all hope of a future presidential race.
Following Monday, seven of the candidates’ candidates in the top 12 were approved by Marcos while four were aligned with his vice-president.
Two, including the independent sister of the president, Imee Marcos, were “adopted” as honorary members of the PDP-Laban party of the Duterte family on Saturday.
The decision to add IMEE Marcos and the personality of the television Camille Villar to the party’s slate aimed to add “more allies to protect the vice-president against dismissal”, according to the resolution.
During his last rally in Manila on Thursday, Duterte invoked the specter of “massive” electoral fraud and once again referred to the transfer of his father to the ICC as a “abduction”.
Despite his detention in The Hague, the elder Duterte remains on the ballot in the southern bastion of his family from Davao City, where he seeks to resume his former job as mayor.
At least a local survey predicts that it will gain comfortably.
The national police of the archipelago nation has been on alert for more than a week, and around 163,000 officers have been deployed to obtain polling stations, escort electoral officials and guard control points.
Thousands of additional people from soldiers, fire services and other agencies have been mobilized to maintain peace in a country where battles in highly contested provincial positions are known to break out of violence.
A municipal council of hope, a ballot officer and a village chief are among the 16 people that the police said they were killed during attacks on Monday’s elections.
On Saturday, a candidate for the municipal councilor was one of the two men of an “armed group” killed during a shooting with the police and the military of the Autonomous Muslim region of the southern island of Mindanao, a notorious home of violence linked to the elections.
Further north, a group of men was arrested the same day at Cebu airport while it was carrying 441 million pesos (nearly $ 8 million) in cash, a crime under electoral rules aimed at preventing the exchange of bribes for votes.
Both cases were still the subject of an investigation.
