SONA2020: Pandemic tests, exposes ‘weaknesses’ in Duterte’s military-reliant leadership
MANILA—President Rodrigo Duterte will deliver his penultimate State of the Nation Address on Monday with his leadership severely put to test by a coronavirus pandemic that has infected more than 80,000 Filipinos with no signs of slowing down.
The government has been increasingly under pressure to do more as the Philippines now tops the Southeast Asian region with the most number of active COVID-19 cases. “I think he wasn’t prepared for it,” political science professor Antonio Contreras said of the president’s response to the pandemic, one that has relied heavily on ex-military generals instead of putting health experts in the lead.
But the pandemic now requires an entirely different approach, “exposing the weakness of pandering to populist sentiments of his base constituency,” said professor Julio Teehankee, visiting fellow at Kyoto University’s Center for Southeast Asian Studies. The closure of ABS-CBN's free TV and radio broadcast triggered widespread public condemnation, even if Malacañang insisted that the president had nothing to do with it.
Like a good number of intellectuals, Contreras was drawn to the promise of this no-nonsense former city mayor elected to the presidency on the strength of more than 16 million votes. A Social Weather Stations survey from July 3 to 6 showed that 3 out of 4 Filipinos wanted Congress to grant ABS-CBN a new franchise.
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