How Duterte rigged the elections

May 14 statement by Jose Maria Sison, chief political consultant of the National Democratic Front of the Philippines.

As I have predicted, Duterte was successful in rigging the May 13 elections to deliver to his candidates a false victory in the crucial senatorial race. As I have pointed out, he has to rig the elections because he has the power and the criminal personality and motivation to do so because clean and honest elections would have allowed the opposition senatorial candidates to win and frustrate his greed for power and plunder.

The rigging included the deployment of huge amounts of public and private funds to generate propaganda in various forms in favor of the regime and against the opposition, the use of the military and police for red-tagging, mass intimidation, selective murders and splitting the opposition, prolongation of martial law in Mindanao and declaration of trouble spots in Luzon and the Visayas and, most important of all, complete control of the Comelec [Commission on Elections] and the deputization of military and police personnel for electoral functions.

Duterte is driven like crazy to rig the elections by all means within his power because of his scheme to establish a full-blown fascist dictatorship by scrapping the 1987 constitution under the pretext of shifting to federalism and to prevent impeachment and indefinitely his possible arrest and prosecution before the International Criminal Court for his gross and systematic human rights violations, especially the mass murder of suspects in his bogus war on drugs as well as in his war on the people’s revolutionary movement.

We can therefore expect that Duterte will use his false electoral victory to adopt and implement more draconian measures to suppress the legal democratic opposition as well as the people’s revolutionary movement. He gives no choice to the broad masses of the people but to unite and raise the level of their resistance. The certain worsening of the socio-economic and political crisis will further drive the Duterte regime to commit crimes against the people and will at the same time incite the people, especially the toiling masses of workers and peasants, to fight back.

Duterte’s policies and acts of tyranny, treason, mass murder, plunder and swindling will eventually bring about the people’s resistance that is strong enough to end his rule. Elections are insufficient and ineffective in overthrowing a despotic monster like Duterte. By rigging the elections and continuing his tyrannical rule, Duterte has brought about the conditions favorable for the rise of the legal mass protest movement as well as of the more potent armed revolutionary mass movement.