A month before Ferdinand “Bongbong” Marcos, Jr. was to be inaugurated as the 17th president of the Philippines, his sister, Senator Imee Marcos, expressed the hope that the family would finally be given the platform to “clarify” the legacy of their father. She bared, “We have been there; the truth is our return to the Palace is not that important. What is most important to us is our name, the family name that has become so controversial and so difficult at times to bear. The legacy of my father is what we hope will be clarified at last.”
At his inauguration as president, Ferdinand Marcos, Jr. said: “I once knew a man who saw what little had been achieved since independence in a land filled with people with the greatest potential for achievement, and yet they were poor. But he got it done. Sometimes, with the needed support. Sometimes, without. My father built more and better roads, produced more rice than all administrations before his.”
In his conversation with World Economic Forum President Borge Brende in Davos, Switzerland, in January 2023, President Ferdinand Marcos, Jr. said: “I was determined not to go into politics. I could see the sacrifices he had to make to do a good job. But after we came back from the United States, after exile, the political issue was Marcos. And for us to defend ourselves politically, somebody had to enter politics and be in the political arena so that not only the legacy of my father but even our own survival required that somebody go into politics.”
So, that was what his entry into politics was all about — to defend the legacy of his father and themselves politically, not to serve the people. Bongbong has told the Filipino people how great his father was. He must also tell the whole world. After all, the Guinness World Record attributes to his father the record for “the greatest robbery of a government.”
The Marcos family has had the platform to clarify the legacy of the patriarch for three years now, but all they have said about the widespread corruption and rampant abuse of human rights with which their father’s martial law regime is associated is that it is “all political propaganda.” That is no clarification.
The widespread corruption during the Marcos Regime is supported by testimonies of their father’s own accomplices in the plunder of the national coffers and by documentary evidence. The rampant abuse of human rights is also backed up by the accounts of surviving victims of torture and by the admission of guilt by some of the violators of human rights.
What Ferdinand Marcos, Sr. had done can no longer be undone. His deeds are history. The family name Marcos will remain controversial and difficult to bear, as Imee intimated.
The entry of Imee and Bongbong into the political arena to ensure the family’s own political survival only brings about the final exit of the Marcos dynasty from the national political scene.
Bongbong ran on a campaign of national unity, a subtle way of telling the electorate to forget the corruption and brutality of his father’s regime and to think of the reprise of the Golden Era that his father supposedly brought about. Upon his election, his sister Imee said “I think now is the time to show what we can still do for the country.”
But for most of his years as president, Marcos Junior has introduced no major policy initiatives, nor launched a comprehensive all-inclusive plan for economic transformation.
The P20 per kilo of rice was a major campaign promise. He vowed to recommend a price cap for rice and task government agencies to serve as middlemen in the procurement of harvests. To this day, the P20 per kilo of rice is still not available in the local markets. Regularly milled rice at the markets in Metro Manila sells for P36 to P42 per kilo. Well-milled rice is priced at P40 to P46 per kilo.
In September 2022, President Marcos Jr. vowed that his administration would build, under the Philippines’ Pambansang Pabahay Para sa Pilipino (4PH) program, at least one million low-cost housing units every year until his term ends in 2028 — or a total of six million units. But challenges punctured the overblown promise. As of late 2025, there is no definitive figure for the total number of houses completed and turned over to beneficiaries as many projects are still under construction.
The program’s initial target of six million units by the end of his term has been revised. The current focus is on a target of 3.2 million units by 2028.
In a press conference on Dec. 18, he said it will be an unhappy Christmas for those involved in the flood control corruption mess. “I know their cases will be done before Christmas. The cases filed against them are complete and they will be jailed. They will not have a Merry Christmas,” the President said in Filipino.
While he did not explicitly name any lawmaker, the extremely infuriated citizenry assumed that Senators Francis Escudero, Joel Villanueva, and Jinggoy Estrada were among those he referred to as the three have been prominently implicated with the flood control grand scam. Christmas passed but no senator or congressman was jailed.
The latest Social Weather Stations (SWS) survey, conducted from Nov. 24 to 30, 2025, shows that Bongbong has a net trust rating of -3%. I expect the next SWS survey will show Bongbong’s trust rating to have gone into a free fall.
As for his sister Senator Imee Marcos, she self-destructed during the Iglesia Ni Cristo (INC) rally in November last year when she accused Bongbong and his wife, Liza, of using illegal drugs. Critics saw it as a “desperate move” designed to destabilize the government amidst ongoing anti-corruption protests. Senator Panfilo Lacson, who questioned the motive behind such a public family dispute, found her act of publicly discrediting her own brother in front of a massive crowd “un-Filipino.”
Political scientists opined that Imee’s “big miscalculation” eroded her political base. Marcos loyalists reportedly felt betrayed, believing that if she could turn on her brother, she could very well betray political allies.
Political pundits saw her emotional behavior of crying when she was putting her brother down as juvenile, utterly unbecoming of a senator, and most inappropriate in a rally that called for “accountability, transparency, and justice.” Because of that childish behavior, the INC decided to cut short its scheduled political three-day rally.
The Marcos political dynasty will disappear permanently from the national landscape when the respective terms of office of President Bongbong Marcos and Senator Imee Marcos end — June 30, 2028 for the former, June 30, 2030 for the latter.
Oscar P. Lagman, Jr. has been a keen observer of Philippine politics since the mid-1950s.
