Vol. VIII, No. 02 - January 31, 2026
The impeachment complaints filed against the country’s top officials – Marcos Jr. and Sara Duterte – in the past week are but expressions of the Filipino people’s growing outcry for genuine social change. The corruption scandals that have unfolded in recent months, the continuing landlessness of the peasant class, low wages amid rising prices of basic goods, have further revealed the deep rot of bureaucrat capitalism embedded in the workings of the Philippine reactionary government.
Marcos Jr. assumed office on promises of economic relief and stability for the ordinary Filipino. Chief among these was his pledge to lower the price of rice to P20 per kilo. Today, rice prices remain high, frequently breaching P45-P55 per kilo in many areas, while inflation continues to eat away at household incomes which have remained stagnant.
Despite his attempts to isolate himself from the massive corruption scandals in government, Marcos Jr. has been laid bare as the king of corruption. In 2025 alone, estimates suggest that more than P545 billion in flood control funds have been siphoned off into private pockets. Under Marcos’ term, unprogrammed funds in the national budget have also ballooned from P251.6 billion in 2022 to a peak of P800 billion in 2024, triggering public outrage on how large portions of the national coffers are being parked in opaque projects that can only be released through presidential approval. Marcos Jr. himself was also embroiled in Zaldy Co’s expose that revealed how Marcos approved of congressional insertions reaching roughly P100 billion worth of dubious projects during bicameral negotiations.
On the other hand, the impeachment complaints against Sara Duterte stem from her misuse of P150 million in confidential and intelligence funds (CIFs) during her tenure as secretary of education, funds that, by design, evade public scrutiny and were disbursed despite the DepEd (Department of Education) having no mandate for so-called “intelligence operations.” Her role as political heir to Rodrigo Duterte also ties her directly to the legacy of extrajudicial killings and widespread impunity that marked her father’s so-called “war on drugs.”
On top of the failed promises and corruption-ridden rule of Marcos Jr. and Sara Duterte, their term thus far has been marked by a sharp rise in state-sponsored violence against activists, farmers, indigenous leaders, and community organizers. At least 134 people have been killed and 15 forcible disappeared since they took office in 2022, with thousands more have been arbitrarily arrested, forced into surrender, or driven from their homes by indiscriminate military operations and aerial bombings in the countryside.
At the same time, Marcos Jr. has served as a loyal lapdog of US imperialism. Under his administration, the US has been given expanded access to nine EDCA (Enhanced Defense Cooperation Agreement) sites across the archipelago including locations in Palawan and Northern Luzon that are strategically positioned near Taiwan and the South China Sea. This increased military presence and the pre-positioning of war materiel in the islands have turned the Philippines into a staging ground for US war provocations against China.
With so much blood debt already incurred, the impeachment complaints against Marcos Jr. and Sara Duterte represent only the tip of the iceberg in a long and damning record of crimes against the Filipino people. The unfolding scale of corruption in government, the intensifying repression of basic rights and civil liberties, and the blatant subservience to US imperialist interests are forcing ever more broader sections of Philippine society to confront the fundamental truth that the system itself is the problem.
Because of their crimes, more and more Filipinos are coming to understand that genuine change cannot be expected within the same rotten semicolonial and semifeudal system. The solution lies in revolutionary change through the victory of the national democratic revolution which is a struggle to dismantle imperialist domination, feudal exploitation, and bureaucrat capitalism; and the establishment of a people’s democratic government that truly represents the interests of the democratic majority of the Filipino people.