Continuity

2019 saw broad-based protest movements in nearly every part of the world.

In our neighborhood, the Hong Kong protests seem as intense as when I started midyear. We entered the New Year with the US Embassy in Baghdad under such intense siege from protestors the diplomatic staff needed to be evacuated. Across most of Africa, old regimes are challenged from the streets.

In this fresh year, the turbulence will likely continue as the global economy slows down. No one has any clear idea how Brexit will play out even as that has become a certainty with Boris Johnson’s immense electoral triumph last month.

This might seem a strange thing to say: the Philippines has been an oasis of political peace and continuity. Sure, jihadist bandits strike from time to time in the deep south and the hugely decimated communist insurgency continues to linger, the zombie of a dead ideology.

But the consensus behind the Duterte government is staggering. There is no significant challenge to the persisting political arrangement. There is no alternative offered.

The political opposition, or what is left of it, is down to contracting a ridiculously expensive American lobby group in a vain effort to tar the international image of the President. The best this lobby group could deliver are two American senators inserting a provision in their national budget barring entry to the US of those responsible for detaining Leila de Lima.

While this expensive lobby effort did produce some noise and briefly put de Lima in the spotlight, it surely did not dent Duterte’s approval and trust ratings – which is the truly important thing. The role Duterte plays in shaping our political future is not going to be shaped in the halls of the US Congress.

The stratospheric approval and trust ratings President Duterte enjoys beyond the midterm is the phenomenon that will shape political outcomes in the years to come. Specifically, it will shape the succession process after his term of office.

What makes Duterte’s approval and trust ratings truly phenomenal is that it is not the product of a highly organized political party or even a loosely formed popular movement. It is due, almost entirely, to the power of his personality.

Given the prospects for an even stronger economic performance in the coming two years, it is unlikely the President’s public support would erode.

Call him a populist if you must. Through all his intermittent rants, off-the-cuff decision-making and truly horrible gaffes, this presidency rests on the solid foundation of a pragmatic, pro-growth economic strategy.

The Duterte economic team is remarkably low-key. They are not interested in glory for themselves. They are simply working hard and delivering results, leaving all the credit for Duterte to harvest.

When inflation rose in 2018, the economic team responded decisively. In 2019, the inflation rate was brought down to what might be called ridiculously low.

When Duterte committed his presidency to bringing down poverty incidence to just 14% by 2022, the economic team is now on the verge of delivering on that target in 2020.

When the price of rice was driving up inflation and causing food poverty, the President’s allies delivered what was considered impossible for three decades: shifting the paradigm to free trade in rice and away from the subsidy-hungry, stagnation-inducing protectionist policies we were used to.

This revolutionary measure, which will reshape our agricultural sector for decades, required the investment of huge amounts of political capital. But Duterte has a lot of that to spare.

When Duterte promised a Golden Age of Infrastructure to bring our economy to par with our dynamic neighbors, the economic team delivered a package of tax reform measures that made it fiscally possible to do that – with the ODA support of our development partners. Today, the Build, Build, Build program is the single most important factor driving domestic economic activity. In 2020, with all the shovel-ready projects, the infra program will begin delivering its full impact on the economy.

With an improved, more inclusive, revenue flow, the country won an upgrade in its sovereign risk ratings. At BBB+, the country ranks better than some European economies. We are looking to finally getting an A-grade rating before the end of Duterte’s term.

Sometime in 2020, the country is expected to graduate to upper middle-income status to join other emerging economies such as Malaysia. That achievement, too, will be ahead of schedule.

The critics might hate to admit this: we are moving fast and moving ahead of schedule. We are hitting benchmarks that, in 2016, even members of the economic team thought improbable.

The consequence of this is Duterte’s unchallenged political hegemony. The so-called opposition is nowhere close to challenging that hegemony.

The hardcore anti-Duterte bloc of public opinion amounts to only about 3% of the population. That is not enough of a base to mount what they prefer to call a “resistance.”

Duterte, as long as he remains reasonably healthy, will almost single-handedly shape the 2020s. He sets the standard for decisive leadership constantly guided by what is good for the people that our citizens will continue to expect from future leaders. Because of that, he draws a line of continuity into the foreseeable future.

 Some might be reluctant to rank Duterte with the likes of Lee Kuan Yew or Mahathir. But that is what he has become: a leader who manages to set the nation on a firm trajectory unalterable for many years to come.

Who would have thought, in 2016, the man from Davao would loom so large?