BY THIS time, many Filipinos must be convinced that President Duterte, despite repeated threats to resign, would not step down, not until he’d finish his term in 2022. He might even stay a decade longer, good health and the new constitution permitting.
Last week, critics expressed fear he would hold the office for a total of 17 years if the Constitutional Committee’s draft constitution would be adopted by the Constituent Assembly. (Computed thus: six years regular term, plus three years transition to federal state, plus eight years reelection.) His response? He’d leave Malacañang even earlier than the 2022 cutoff.
Selfie with God
The “if” in the president’s latest threat: a person would die, go to heaven and come back with a photo of himself and God. Two potential impossibilities: (1) returning from the dead and (2) doing a selfie with the Lord.
Some people might file that under “Crazy” but the other “ifs” were pretty sensible, such as:
He’d quit if he couldn’t end the illegal drugs problem and yield to Bongbong Marcos, then the rumored VP;
He’d quit if he or his children would be proved to have engaged in corruption or amassed unexplained wealth in secret bank deposits;
He’d quit if he couldn’t raise the salaries of police and soldiers this year.
He gave himself an indefinite extension for the first; the second is almost impossible against a sitting president; the third was done.
Tough conditions
Others were highly unlikely to happen or difficult to measure, such as:
He’d quit, if the Filipinos would lose trust in him. (If Pulse Asia or SWS polls were the gauge, how much slide in ratings would make him leave? Not specified.)
He’d quit, if “enough” women would petition for it, following the kissing-a-married-woman-on-the-lips incident in Seoul, Korea. (How many are “enough” and how would it be done?)
Like a woman
Someone tweeted on Feb. 19, 2017 that Duterte could be compared to a woman in a love affair who threatens many times to leave the man and she finally does but comes back two days later.
The simile is apt only as to the woman seeking assurance she is still needed and loved. But unlike a romance story, if the president resigns, the outcome is that the successor occupies the office; he can’t get it back on demand.
Which brings up one reason his threats to resign may sound empty and far from serious: if he’d ride out into the sunset, Vice President Robredo, whom he does not relish as the next president, would come galloping into Malacañang. Maybe if the Presidential Electoral Tribunal would rule for Bongbong Marcos’s protest, Duterte’s threats to quit would seem more plausible.
Reasons why
Why has Duterte made all those threats? It could be because he is fed up with his job and couldn’t find ready solution to the nation’s problems. His recent complaints about the economy being “in the doldrums” and the slow pace of LGUs, suggesting that vice mayors do away with their mayors to move things, indicate impatience.
It could be that he wants to be continually told the people trust him. The regular poll surveys, which keep his ratings aloft, must tell him that. And when they do, that emboldens the president even more to threaten to leave.
Or it could be just an expression, a figure of speech, a device in rhetoric: convenient in pushing a point, shaking up an audience, and useful in rebuilding self-confidence.
Letting go
But like the loved one who keeps reminding the lover he could lose her, Duterte could push the affair to a point of no return.
There is the risk that a nation, nagged to death by the leader’s threats to leave, might finally decide to let go.