Just unless his 80th birthday, Rodrigo Duterte, a man who once swore his country to purge a bloody anti-drug and crime campaign, found himself overwhelmed and in detention.
The former president was greeted by the Philippine police when he arrived in Manila on a flight from Hong Kong, where he had gathered his candidates for his candidates for the next election in mid-term among the large Philippine diaspora.
The very discreet mandate for his arrest of the International Criminal Court (ICC) was, it was already in the hands of the Philippine government, which quickly pushed it to execute it.
A fragile M. Duterte, walking with a stick, was moved to an air base in the airport perimeter. An chartered jet was quickly ready to take him to the ICC in The Hague.
How did it go? How did such a powerful and popular man, often called “the asy asian”, been so low?
In vain, his lawyers and family members protested that the arrest had no legal basis and complained that Duterte’s fragile health was overlooked.
During his mandate, Mr. Duterte trained an alliance with the Marcos family – the children of the ousted dictator Ferdinand Marcos who had long worked on a political return. Mr. Duterte could not appear again in the 2022 elections, but his daughter Sara, mayor of the city of southern Davao, was also popular and a strong competitor to replace him.
However, the son of Ferdinand Marcos, Bongbong, who had been in politics all his life, was also well placed to win and very well funded.
The two families have entered into an agreement. They worked together to bring Bongong into the presidency and Sara in the vice-president, assuming that the next elections in 2028 would come and she would have the formidable Marcos machine behind her.
It worked. The two won their positions with a wide margin. Mr. Duterte expected that his alliance protects him from any return to his controversial presidency once he was out of power.
The most serious threat that exceeds him was an ICC investigation on his guilt for thousands of extrajudicial murders carried out during anti -strong campaigns he ordered – after his being president in 2016, but also during his mandate as mayor of the southern city of Davao from 2011.
Mr. Duterte withdrew the Philippines from the Jurisdiction of the ICC in 2019, but his prosecutors argued that they still had the mandate to examine the alleged crimes against humanity committed before that, and launched a formal investigation in 2021. However, President Marcos initially declared that his government would not co-operate with the ICC.
This position has only changed after the dramatic rupture of the Duterte-Marcos alliance. The strains of their relationship were obvious from the first days of the administration, when the request of Sara Duterte gave control of the powerful ministry of defense was refused and that it was rather given to the Ministry of Education.
President Marcos also moved away from the mercurial policies of his predecessor, to repair the fences with the United States, to worry about China in contested seas and to stop threats to carry blood against drug traffickers.
In the end, these were two ambitious clans eager for being able to dominate the Philippine policy, and there was not enough power to share. Relations reached a Nadir last year when Sara Duterte announced that she had hired an assassin to kill President Marcos, if something happened to her.
At the end of last year, the Congress lower room, controlled by the Loyalists of Marcos, deposited a petition to dismiss Ms. Duterte. This trial is expected to take place in the Senate later this year.
If it is welcomed, under the Constitution, it would not be exercised by a high political post, killing its longtime presidential ambitions and even more weakening the political power of the Dutertes.
President Marcos now seems to have used to neutralize his main political rival. But his strategy is not without risk. The Dutertes remain popular in a large part of the country and could be able to mobilize demonstrations against the prosecution of the former president.
Sara Duterte published a statement accusing the government of having returned her father to “foreign powers” and of violating Philippine sovereignty.
An early test of support from which the two clans benefit will be the mid-term elections in May.
In his comments to journalists after the plane carrying his predecessor took off from Manila, President Marcos insisted that he met the country’s commitments to Interpol, who had delivered the ICC. But he was shy on the fact that it was a mandate of the ICC he executed, since many Philippins will wonder what is the mandate of the ICC in a country that has already left his jurisdiction.
It is not without risk either for the ICC. The court is an institution besieged these days, the Trump administration threatening to stop its senior officials if they go to the United States, and some countries willing to extradite those it has charged. Bringing the former president Duterte to The Hague could therefore look like a high -level success.
But there was a warning, from China – certainly not signatory to the ICC and currently registration with the Philippines – and not to politicize the cases of the ICC. This was a barely veiled reference to the fact that this affair, which is supposed to concern the responsibility of serious international crimes, ended up playing a decisive role in an internal quarrel in the Philippines between two rival political forces.
