[In This Economy] Economic risks of a Sara Duterte presidency

2026-02-20 - 06:53

Sara Duterte’s announcement that she is running for president in 2028, unusually early even by Philippine electoral standards, is obviously a move designed to dominate the narrative, freeze out rivals, and project inevitability. Admittedly, she’s faring well in the polls, and she’s leveraging on this fact to project power — even as impeachment complaints are piling up, even as her father awaits trial in The Hague, and even as many of her father’s closest allies, like Senators Bong Go and Bato Dela Rosa, have been explicitly named by the International Criminal Court (ICC) as “co-conspirators” in the drug war. But here I want to explore what a Sara Duterte presidency might mean for the Philippine governance and the economy, given her own track record. Mayor and vice president Let’s start with her stint as mayor of Davao City. After the decades-long rule of Rodrigo Duterte, Sara inherited a well-oiled dynastic machine that rotated posts in her family to strategically circumvent term limits. Back in 2025, she said she’d support an anti-dynasty law, but in fact the Duterte dynasty expanded after the May 2025 polls. As mayor, Sara also acted with an iron fist — literally involving a fist, in the case of physical assault on a court sheriff in 2011. That act, which was caught on tape and she publicly admitted to, is symptomatic of Sara’s comfort with coercion as a first-resort tool and a willingness to subordinate legal institutions to personal authority. These instincts, if scaled to Malacañang, could have real consequences for the rule of law, contract enforcement, and institutional predictability. Her record suggests a governing style that prioritizes coercion over institutional restraint. Sara Duterte’s time as vice president only deepens these governance concerns. The confidential funds controversy at the Office of the Vice President and the Department of Education was not merely a political scandal but also a window into how she views checks and balances and fiscal oversight. Civilian agencies such as these are not supposed to have large, opaque intelligence-style budgets. By the looks of it, Sara has no real concern at all about fiscal responsibility, nor an understanding of the concept. This matters enormously given the budget scandals of late, and amid chronic deficits and debt. In addition, she’s been essentially silent about allegations of P51-billion worth of flood control projects pushed by her brother, Paolo Duterte, who was a representative of the 1st District of Davao City in the 18th Congress. The radio silence on this issue is unsettling, and it suggests that efforts to pursue legitimate budget reforms and curb budget-related corruption will likely come to a halt under another Duterte presidency. During her stint as education secretary, the picture is equally troubling. The Philippines entered the Marcos Jr. period with a severe learning crisis, with international test scores of our students among the worst globally, pandemic-era learning losses compounding decades of underinvestment, and a teaching workforce that needed serious structural reform. Sara produced no coherent learning-recovery strategy. In an economy where human capital is the driver of long-run productivity, that omission is economically consequential. Recall that she initially wanted to get