When it comes to pugnacious behavior, U.S. President-elect Donald Trump has nothing on his Philippine counterpart Rodrigo Duterte.
Since taking office last June, Duterte — nicknamed “The Punisher” — has openly condoned vigilante killings of persons deemed to be associated with the drug trade (an average of 13 people were gunned down a day during his first six weeks in office), proudly compared himself to Adolf Hitler, joked that an Australian missionary who was raped in his country was violated because she was beautiful (he even added that he was sorry he hadn’t raped her first), and essentially flipped the bird at the United Nations, before threatening to quit that organization last August for daring to condemn his take-no-prisoners war on crime.
His diplomatic gaffs are stellar in their offensiveness.
He once called the U.S. ambassador to Manila “a gay son of a bitch,” and even berated Pope Francis for causing traffic jams when he paid a visit to the Philippines in January of 2015.
He has referred to U.S. President Barack Obama as “the son of a whore,” and told a Washington Post reporter who wrote an unfavorable article about him to “crawl back into her mother’s womb and suffocate.”
Yes, Duterte is a force to be reckoned with like no other, and the Filipino people absolutely adore him for it.
His popularity rating in August (last time anyone bothered to check) was an astonishing 91 percent.
Most Filipinos are less concerned with Duterte’s crass remarks than with his ruthless, get-it-done-at-any-cost actions.
For them, he is a hero, a knight in shining armor (albeit slightly tarnished by his ribaldry) who is intrepid and fearlessly willing to take on the plethora of crime and network of endemic corruption that has plagued their nation for decades and made life unbearable for normal people.
In his burnt-earth rampage against drugs, he has given free rein to his military and police to shoot first and ask questions later.
In addition to the hundreds of alleged drug addicts and dealers killed by the vigilante death squads, more than 1,500 people have been killed by police officers in anti-drug operations.
And as for mainstream media freedom, as Donnie Brasco would say, “forget about it.”
(Duterte does, however, believe in social media, which helped him win his position and in which he is a tweetaholic.)
But outrageous authoritarianism and uncensored invectives aside, to his credit, Duterte has implemented an array of progressive social programs that have won him broad support in the Philippines, even if many outsiders are seeing him as the Mad Man from Manila.
Not only do the Filipinos admire their new president for standing up to the drug lords and dealers that have run the country since the 1980s, but his government has set up a series of programs to help indigenous people displaced by mining projects return to their ancestral lands, provided subsidized irrigation to subsistence farmers, imposed stricter environmental protection regulations on foreign mining companies (Duterte is a xenophobe of Olympic proportions) and has expanded free healthcare to 20 million of the nation’s poorest.
But none of this comes without a cost; there is a tradeoff.
Duterte has drastically slashed the Southeast Asian nation’s agricultural, labor and foreign relations budgets in order to boost police and military expenditures.
He has also increased the budget for his own offices tenfold.
For now, it seems that nothing will halt Hurricane Duterte (and we are talking Category 5 here), whose proselytes remain undaunted by a currency devaluation (the Philippine peso plunged to an eight-year low in November), a Biblical-scale exodus of potential investors and a homicidal war on drugs that has already cost the lives of at least 5,000 people.
But fans, like lovers, can be fickle, and Duterte still has another six years in office.
Only time will tell how long his inviolable popularity will last.
Thérèse Margolis can be reached at [email protected].
