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<img src="https://cdn.kahimyang.com/resources-23/marcos-duterte.avif" loading="lazy" alt="Presidents Duterte and Marcos Jr." />
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If the government fails to act, it would have to cede jurisdiction to the International Criminal Court (ICC) at The Hague, which is seeking to investigate him.


It is an extremely difficult situation for Marcos.


Marcos won the presidency in 2022 with an unprecedented majority of 31.6 million votes, by teaming up with <a href="https://kahimyang.com/kauswagan/articles/2867/today-in-philippine-history-may-31-1978-sara-duterte-a-creative-leader-shaping-philippine-politics-was-born-in-davao-city" class="news_link">Sara Duterte</a>, Rodrigo Duterte's daughter, as the "UniTeam" vice presidential candidate. To cement the "UniTeam" partnership between the Marcos and Duterte families, Duterte supported the controversial burial of the remains of the late former president <a href="https://kahimyang.com/kauswagan/articles/595/today-in-philippine-history-september-11-1917-ferdinand-e-marcos-was-born-in-sarrat-ilocos-norte" class="news_link">Ferdinand Marcos Sr</a>. at the Libingan ng mga Bayani. Marcos had died in exile in Hawaii in 1989, but every president until then had failed to support the burial of his remains at the Libingan. Duterte alone supported it, saying no law prohibited it, and hoping it could help in the nation's healing process.


In the 2016 election, which Duterte won by a landslide, Marcos Jr. lost his bid for vice president to Leni Robredo, the administration candidate. But in 2022, Marcos won by an overwhelming majority, and his teammate Sara got close to a million more votes than he did. This led some supporters to suggest that Sara had carried Marcos in that election rather than the opposite. She aspired to become his secretary of national defense. But although the position remained unfilled for a while, he demurred and offered her the position of secretary of education instead. This was the department with the biggest official budget. He tried to sweeten the pot with an offer of "confidential funds" which carried the seeds of future controversy and conflict.


Relations between Marcos and Duterte got estranged when Marcos' first cousin, House Speaker Martin Romualdez, proposed a constitutional shift to parliamentary government through "people's initiative" (PI). Under the Constitution, Congress may propose to amend or revise any of its provisions by a vote of three-fourths of all its members, without saying whether the Senate and the House of Representatives shall vote separately or jointly as one house.

Since the Congress is a bicameral body, which approves every piece of proposed legislation separately as two houses, the common understanding, particularly by the Senate, is that the two houses shall vote on any proposed constitutional revision or amendment separately. The House proposal, however, was for the two chambers to vote jointly, which would effectively reduce the Senate of 24 members into an insignificant portion of the House of 316 members. Sen. Maria Imelda Josefa "Imee" Marcos, the President's elder sister and chairman of the all-important Senate Foreign Relations Committee, was the first to see this as a poorly disguised attempt to abolish or disenfranchise the Senate. Eventually, the whole Senate came up with a unanimous resolution denouncing the House initiative.


For his part, Duterte saw the House-proposed PI as a "politicians' initiative" to undo the existing constitutional structure by extending the president's six-year term after 2028 and abolishing the present term limits by shifting to parliamentary government. This would allow the outgoing president by 2028 to become the prime minister of a new parliamentary government.

Taking the ICC out of the picture