The Philippines in 2017: Turbulent Consolidation

At the end of 2017, President Rodrigo Duterte and his administration finished in a stronger position than at the beginning of the year, as did the Philippine economy. This was the case despite 2017 being a turbulent year, even by Philippine standards.

Marawi City, the largest city in Muslim Mindanao, was taken over for months by a coalition of ISIS-inspired local and regional terrorists. A fifth of the country ended the year under martial law, while the rest of the country remained under an indefinite state of emergency declared in September 2016. The Philippine National Police were twice removed from the crusade-like war on drugs, due to gruesome deaths of apparently innocent foreigners and children, and then reinstated. The Philippine government suspended peace talks with the communist insurgents, started them again, then suspended them again and reclassified the Communist Party of the Philippines and its armed wing, the New People's Army, as terrorist groups. Congress' Commission on Appointments knocked back the largest number of cabinet appointments made by any president (five). According to President Duterte, China threatened war if the Philippines exercised its maritime rights in the West Philippine Sea.¹

In Southeast Asian Affairs 2017, Aries A. Arugay from the University of the Philippines analysed the socio-political reasons for President Duterte's surprise "outsider" victory in the May 2016 presidential elections.² His victory was truly a populist watershed moment in the country's post-Marcos democratic development. Joseph Franco from the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies in Singapore and a former Philippine soldier deployed to Mindanao dissected President Duterte's new and often contradictory approach to the insurgency in Muslim Mindanao and the terrorist groups it continues to spawn.³

Building on these two chapters, this year's Philippine country overview contends that 2017 was a year of political consolidation for President Duterte and his administration. The year saw much of the potential for change and a new style of government promised by President Duterte's May 2016 victory, for good and bad, be turned into political reality. The chapter begins by looking at developments in national politics and how the president's political position strengthened and his prerogative was wielded over the year. Second, it briefly covers worrying developments in the three main internal security concerns: the president's national war on drugs, the entrenched nationwide communist insurgency, and the insurgency in Muslim Mindanao and its terrorist dimensions. Then, it looks at the uncertain development of an "independent" foreign policy, with particular attention given to Philippine relations with China, Japan and the United States. The final section looks at the country's robust economic performance and major economic reform success and their political benefits.

National Politics

President Duterte is unique in Philippine presidential history. He is the first president from Mindanao (the most distant part of the country from Metro Manila) and the first president to come to the office directly from a local government position (mayor of Davao City). Befitting this unique background in local politics far from the national political elite in Metro Manila, President Duterte has adopted a particularly mayoral approach to the presidency.⁴ This approach, echoing Donald Trump's approach to the presidency in the United States of America, rails against any constraint, even if legal or constitutional, to his personal political prerogative.

This intensely personal, brusque and often confrontational approach to the highest political office has been well received by a large majority of the electorate. According to the well-respected Social Weather Stations' quarterly polls on trust and support for the president, President Duterte entered office with the highest level of trust, finished his first year with the highest rating and maintained the highest ratings over the first quarter of his single six-year term of any president polled. In December 2017, eighteen months into his iconoclastic and bloody term in office, 71 per cent of adults polled were satisfied with the president, while only 13 per cent were not.

Belying the stereotypical views of populist outsider leaders, President Duterte's popularity is strongest among the most educated and the wealthiest, as well...