The Philippine Senate yesterday started the impeachment trial of Vice President Sara Duterte, following every week of chaos by which the feud between the Duterte and Marcos households reached a excessive pitch of stress.
Final week, the Home of Representatives voted overwhelmingly to question Duterte for a variety of transgressions, together with corruption, misuse of presidency funds, and plotting to kill her former ally, President Ferdinand Marcos Jr.
If convicted, which requires a two-thirds vote within the 24-seat chamber, the 47-year-old would lose her publish and be banned from holding elected workplace for all times.
Duterte, who has introduced her plan to hunt the presidency in 2028, has denied the costs. Her legal professionals stated that they’re “totally ready to defend the vice chairman earlier than the Senate,” and that it might be “incumbent upon the prosecution to discharge the burden of proof.”
Wearing purple robes, the senators yesterday had been sworn in as senator-judges, whereas Senate President Alan Peter Cayetano, an ally of Duterte who was elevated to the Senate presidency in a management coup final week, assumed the function because the courtroom’s presider.
“The trial of Vice President Sara Zimmerman Duterte is hereby open,” Cayetano declared.
As Rappler lays out, the trial course of includes quite a few steps. Cayetano yesterday issued a writ of summons, directing Duterte to file a solution to allegations inside 10 calendar days of receiving the doc. After receiving Duterte’s reply, a crew of prosecutors from the Home of Representatives will file their reply inside 5 calendar days. There’ll then be a pre-trial interval by which each side will current their proof to the Senate, adopted by the trial correct, though the courtroom didn’t say when this is able to happen.
The impeachment stems from two complaints, filed in February, which allege that Duterte misused 612.5 million pesos ($10 million) in confidential funds in her capability as vice chairman and schooling secretary. The complaints additionally reference her unexplained wealth, accuse her of bribery when she was schooling secretary, and take purpose at her public menace to have Marcos, his spouse, and the president’s cousin Martin Romualdez, the then-Home speaker, assassinated within the occasion of her personal killing.
Duterte was beforehand impeached in February 2025, for the same suite of transgressions, together with “violation of the structure, betrayal of public belief, graft and corruption, and different excessive crimes.” In July, Duterte earned a reprieve when the Supreme Court docket dismissed the grievance on the grounds that it violated a constitutional ban on having a number of impeachment proceedings in a single yr.
The impeachment drama is one subplot of the political feud that has raged between Duterte and President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. for a lot of the previous two years. The 2 leaders teamed as much as nice political impact forward of the 2022 presidential election, once they each had been elected with decisive majorities, however have since fallen out over a mixture of private and political disagreements.
The feud led Marcos’ allies to start investigations into Duterte’s conduct as schooling secretary, previous to her resignation in mid-2024. It additionally led Marcos final yr to approve the arrest of Duterte’s father, former President Rodrigo Duterte, on an arrest warrant from the Worldwide Prison Court docket (ICC). The 81-year-old is now awaiting trial at The Hague-based courtroom on fees of crimes in opposition to humanity associated to his bloody anti-drug marketing campaign.
The result of the Senate trial stays unsure.
The Dutertes have extra allies within the Senate than they do within the Home, and it could be tough for the chamber to muster the two-thirds vote essential to convict the vice chairman. On the identical day that Duterte was impeached within the Home, allies of the Dutertes within the Senate ousted the physique’s president, Vicente Sotto III, and changed him with Senator Cayetano in a bid to sway or frustrate the impeachment trial.
This spawned a brand new subplot of the Marcos-Duterte drama. Among the many senators who confirmed as much as vote was Ronald “Bato” Dela Rosa, a former chief of the Philippine Nationwide Police who led the primary section of Duterte’s “warfare on medication.” The ICC has named Dela Rosa as a co-conspirator of Duterte and issued a warrant for his arrest in November. Having been in hiding since, he was compelled to indicate as much as forged the essential deciding vote for the management change.
Nonetheless, Dela Rosa additionally confronted officers from the Nationwide Bureau of Investigation who confirmed as much as execute the ICC warrant, which the courtroom formally unsealed just a few hours later. He then fled behind the locked door of his Senate workplace, the place Cayetano and different allies subsequently declared that that they had positioned him underneath the Senate’s “protecting custody.”
The following standoff erupted into violence on Wednesday night time as Senate safety personnel and authorities brokers making an attempt to apprehend Dela Rosa briefly exchanged fireplace inside the Senate constructing. Within the chaos, Dela Rosa managed to slide out of the constructing, and his present whereabouts are unknown.
The query now could be whether or not Duterte’s allies within the Senate have the numbers to stymie Sara Duterte’s conviction. Solely 9 votes within the 24-seat chamber are wanted to acquit the vice-president, and 13 pro-Duterte senators voted to execute final week’s management “coup.” With Cayetano now in cost, it appears doubtless that Duterte will survive and press on towards the doubtless decisive electoral showdown in 2028.
Nonetheless, it’s onerous to foretell with certainty. Dela Rosa’s presence throughout the trial isn’t any foregone conclusion, given the specter of arrest hanging over him, and because the Related Press notes, a number of among the many 13 senators who voted for final week’s management change have been implicated by witnesses within the ongoing corruption scandal involving flood management initiatives. They may face potential arrest if indicted, which might take away extra votes from the pro-Duterte column.
No matter occurs throughout the Senate trial, the political warfare between the Dutertes and Marcoses is unlikely to return to a conclusive finish. The previous two years have proven that each side are prepared fairly shamelessly to wield the ability of the nation’s establishments behind professions of high-minded precept, so as to be certain that they arrive out on prime. Certainly, it appears virtually inevitable that the battle will run on, in zero-sum style, till the subsequent presidential election, and presumably past.
