Duterte taking leaf out of Marcos playbook with ‘revolutionary government’

He raised the question as early as August 2015, on a stop at Inquirer offices during his long presidential campaign. The idea that the presidential office was not powerful enough to fix what truly ails the country, for which the cure was a revolutionary government or a “constitutional dictatorship”. He denied such a move would be following in the footsteps of the dictator Ferdinand Marcos. “Why will I be a Marcos? There is a lesson there in history to look at. Why not follow Cory?”
In August, over a year into his raucous presidency, he raised the spectre of revolutionary government (RevGov) again. “For the Philippines to really go up … what the people need is not martial law. Go for what Cory did – revolutionary government. But don’t look at me. I cannot go there.”
Two months later, the “I cannot go there” had been dropped. In October, Duterte said: “If your destabilisation attempt is worsening and it has become somewhat chaotic, I will not hesitate to declare a revolutionary government until the end of my term, and I will arrest all of you and we can go to a full-scale war against the [communist rebel] Reds.”
But in fact Duterte has no legal authority to declare a revolutionary government. His “lesson from history” is based on a mistaken reading of history. Corazon Aquino was brought to power by a revolution, the People Power uprising that repudiated the rigged election results called under the 1973 constitution. She replaced it with a truncated version (removing the most onerous parts), until the people overwhelmingly ratified a new constitution. That’s why – and how – she came to preside over a revolutionary government in her first year in office.
So Duterte’s preferred model comes actually from Marcos: Elected by constitutional fiat, he wants to kill the constitution that brought him to power. (Marcos’ version was called a “revolution from the centre”.) Duterte may not have the legal authority to declare a revolutionary government, but if enough senators and justices, bishops and businessmen, labourers and students remain silent, and he is able to co-opt the military, the president will achieve his goal.
What if the RevGov is a mere gambit? 
I have heard it from sources close to Duterte and from his political allies that he has a strategist’s mind. On reflection, I find that he is in fact a master tactician, but no strategist. He has no message discipline, no policy discipline, no personal discipline. The strategy is one-size-fits-all: Gain power and consolidate it. That’s it. He can dominate certain controversies with tactical counter-strokes. He can take high-profile risks and then realise they were not worth it, such as unexpectedly naming Gina Lopez as environment secretary. And he can lose outright.
The idea that the president is using the revolutionary government card as a gambit, something he will withdraw at the last moment when he has secured the approval of the rest of the political establishment for his other projects, feeds into this nonsense about strategic thinking. I believe the gambit idea arose only as a tactical response to the unexpected pushback from the defence establishment.
But – to extend the metaphor – the equivalent of the revolutionary government gambit in real-world chess is one’s opponent threatening to upend the chessboard and start anew when he realises he is losing. Why would anyone want to play with him again, or at all?
Senators and congressmen who may be tempted to think that, say, their move this week to impeach Duterte critic Chief Justice Maria Lourdes Sereno is a relatively small price to pay for getting the president to reject the revolutionary government option once and for all are only deluding themselves. This is a man who will have no qualms smashing the playing board, or cracking his opponent’s skull with it.