Philippine election: Who is Bongbong Marcos, what has he said about China, and why can’t he visit the US?
- The presidential frontrunner and son of dictator Ferdinand Marcos doesn’t have a clear platform and has few views on China, although he has repeated the word ‘unity’ in rallies
- If he wins, he’ll be the first Philippine leader who cannot set foot in the US, where he and his family face arrest for defying a court order to pay US$353 million to human-rights victims
Ferdinand “Bongbong” Marcos Jnr, the frontrunner in the Philippines’ presidential election on May 9, claims he never wanted to become a politician.
“I was really avoiding politics,” the son and namesake of dictator Ferdinand Marcos told CNN Philippines in a rare interview last month. People had been urging him to enter politics since he was a teenager but “I didn’t want to do it because my father had already done it”.
Marcos Snr in 1972 ran a martial law regime that jailed, tortured and killed many Filipinos, and looted the country of billions of dollars, which the dictator and wife Imelda used to amass artworks, gems and US properties until a “people power” uprising in 1986 pushed him into exile in Honolulu, where he died.
Decades later, Marcos Jnr, himself a convicted tax evader, is the strong favourite to win the presidency. A survey by Pulse Asia this week showed 56 per cent of 2,400 respondents backed him, while 24 per cent supported his closest rival, current Vice-President Leni Robredo.
While much is known about the late Marcos patriarch and his family, who is 64-year-old Bongbong Marcos and what have others said about him?
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Bongbong Marcos Jnr leads in polls in final weeks of Philippine presidential election campaigning
A high-school graduate
Before entering politics, Marcos Snr was a law graduate from one of the country’s top schools, the University of the Philippines. He aced the bar exams and became a congressman at 32, a senator 10 years later, president at age 48 in 1965, authoring several books along the way.
