The Dutertes Aren’t Going Away Without a Fight: What to Take Away From the Philippines’ Election

The Philippines’ 2025 midterm election could have marked a moment of reckoning for the decades-old populist Duterte dynasty. Its patriarch, 80-year-old former President Rodrigo, had been arrested by the International Criminal Court in March for alleged crimes against humanity. His daughter and practical successor, current Vice President Sara Duterte-Carpio, was impeached by the House in February on charges including corruption and threatening to kill political rival President Ferdinand “Bongbong” Marcos Jr. and faces a trial before the Senate later this year.

Instead, however, the election, in which tens of millions of Filipinos braved extreme heat to vote Monday for some 18,000 national and local offices across the archipelago, marked a resurgence for the Dutertes, according to preliminary results.

Rodrigo himself and his youngest son Sebastian were elected mayor and vice mayor of Davao City, where Rodrigo previously served as mayor for more than 22 years before becoming President in 2016 and where the family has long held power. Given that Rodrigo remains in detention in The Hague, Sebastian is expected to discharge the duties of the office.

In the Senate, where Sara’s fate will be decided, key Duterte allies resoundingly won re-election, including Christopher Go, Rodrigo’s former aide, who was the most-voted-for senator, and Ronald dela Rosa, the former national police chief at the height of Rodrigo’s deadly drug war, who ranked third in the overall vote tally. The two, who also face potential arrest by the ICC, staunchly defended the drug war during their first terms in the Senate. Another Duterte-allied lawmaker from the lower legislative chamber, Rep. Rodante Marcoleta, snagged a Senate seat. Marcoleta previously said that he would defend Sara against impeachment.

While some opponents had hoped that an electoral defeat for the Dutertes, following the other blows they’d already faced in the run-up to the vote, might once and for all push the family out of relevance, the Dutertes have instead appeared to reassert their unprecedented influence, experts say. “You’re talking about a President who was more popular when he stepped out of office than when he assumed office,” says Aries Arugay, who chairs the department of political science at the University of the Philippines. Rodrigo’s drug war, like similar ones in Colombia, Mexico, and Thailand, may have earned international criticism, but it also similarly won a significant amount of domestic support, says Arugay, “because of their visuality and their ability to sow fear, which is often a proxy for effectiveness.”

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Emily Soriano’s family did not believe it at first when they heard of Rodrigo Duterte’s shocking arrest on March 11. Like many other families in the Philippines, hers had held off on their sighs of relief until Duterte was flown to the Netherlands later that evening to face charges related to his brutal anti-drug campaign that human rights groups say killed more than 30,000 people.

Soriano’s son, who was 15, was among seven people killed in Caloocan, Metro Manila, in December 2016, as part of that campaign. “Since 2017 up until today, we’ve long called for an end to the killings, and for Duterte and the policemen to be held to account,” Soriano tells TIME tearily. “That call hasn’t gone to waste,” she added.

Indeed, Rodrigo’s arrest was no certainty. For years, he and his allies had fought the ICC to avoid accountability. But as the Dutertes’ rivalry with the powerful Marcoses, who have their own despotic family history, intensified—Rodrigo and Marcos Jr. have traded criticisms over foreign and domestic policy as well as accusations of drug use, and Sara has stepped up her interest in succeeding Marcos Jr. in the 2028 presidential election—the government led by the Marcoses and their allies proved less willing to protect the controversial Duterte family that it had once entered into a delicate alliance with to win the presidency in 2022.

But while Soriano waits for Rodrigo’s ultimate fate to be decided before the ICC, she admits that back home the specter of a Duterte return to power looms. While some observers previously suggested that Rodrigo’s arrest could mark the beginning of the end for the dynasty, the midterm election results appear to show otherwise.

“This is not the end,” Sara Duterte-Carpio said in a statement after the election. “It’s a renewed beginning.” The Vice President framed her family’s and their allies’ showing in the polls as the start of an opposition movement against the Marcos-led government. “We will continue to hold the government accountable, advocate for the issues that matter, and work tirelessly to serve as a strong and constructive opposition,” she said.

For Marcos, the final years of his presidency will now likely be marked by further division and challenges. Once extremely popular, he has seen his approval ratings plummet partly due to his Administration’s performance on addressing domestic issues, such as rising costs of living and concerns about corruption, but also in large part because of the rival dynastic feud. The Dutertes and their allies have claimed that Sara’s impeachment and Rodrigo’s arrest were politically motivated and used both to consolidate support, especially in the southern part of the Philippines, a historic Duterte stronghold.

Sara’s public ratings went up after her father’s arrest, while senatorial candidates allied with the Dutertes like Go and Dela Rosa also saw boosts in opinion polls. The Dutertes’ supporters “were not that noisy prior to the arrest,” says Arugay.

Richard Heydarian, a Manila-based political analyst who lectures at the University of the Philippines, says the boost could also be in part attributed to disinformation campaigns. Reuters reported in April that a network of social media accounts sprang up in the wake of Rodrigo’s arrest, coordinating praise of the Dutertes and attacks on the ICC and Marcoses. Israel-based Cyabra, the tech firm that discovered the network, told Reuters the disinformation campaigns “shaped the conversation” in the lead-up to the elections. 

Still, neither the Dutertes nor the Marcoses have an easy path ahead. While the next electoral competition will be for the presidency in 2028, the most immediate battleground will be in the Senate, which will reconvene in June. And despite key electoral victories for the Dutertes—including Marcos Jr.’s own sister Imee, who broke with her family to back the Dutertes and also appears on track to win a Senate seat—Marcos allies appear to have retained six of the 12 seats up for election in the 24-member chamber.

Public opinion polls consistently show that Sara is most Filipinos’ preferred candidate to succeed Marcos come 2028, but an impeachment conviction, which requires a two-thirds majority vote, would bar her from public office for good under local law.

For people like Soriano, however, the elections are about more than political stratagem and determining which family holds the most nominal power. It’s about how they will wield it. In office, Duterte’s lieutenants, she fears, “are likely to continue what Duterte left behind.”