Brute Force Governance: Public Approval Despite Policy Failure During the COVID-19 Pandemic in the Philippines

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic has exposed enormous governance deficits globally. Several populist strongmen practiced “medical populism” – ignoring scientific advice, proffering denials, and blaming others. More technocratic leaders recognised its severity, implementing strict lockdowns. But some failed to adopt more flexible restrictions once testing improved due to local enforcement difficulties, termed “blunt force regulation.” Although neither a pandemic denialist nor an obtuse technocrat, Philippine president Rodrigo R. Duterte's response combined aspects of both approaches with blame shifting and one-size-fits-all lockdowns while also securitising the crisis. Utilising methods developed during his bloody “war on drugs,” Duterte imposed a heavily militarised approach, scapegoated supposedly disobedient Filipinos (pasaway) and bullied local politicians. While the Philippines has been among the worst pandemic performers globally, Duterte's approval ratings remained robust. It is argued “brute force governance” undermined the dynamics of accountability, enabling him to win public approval despite policy failure.

Introduction

Similar to the U.S. president Donald Trump and his Brazilian counterpart Jair Bolsonaro, Philippine president Rodrigo R. Duterte gave a “masculinist political performance” during the COVID-19 pandemic (Parmanand, 2019, 2020). But while Trump and Bolsonaro continued to downplay the pandemic, Duterte abandoned denialism, switching course to implement draconian lockdown measures to curb the spread of the disease. Playing to their political bases, Trump and Bolsonaro instrumentalised a libertarian discourse and projected an image of invincibility. Duterte, by contrast, “shapeshifted” from “the invincible man” who did not fear COVID-19 to his nation's “tough protector” in the fight against it (Parmanand, 2021).

Once Duterte finally did act in mid-March 2020, he imposed one of the world's longest and most severe lockdowns (Mendoza, 2020). He declared a national state of calamity and had a pliant Congress enact the Bayanihan to Heal as One Act (RA 11469) which gave him emergency powers to combat the virus and provided for subsidies to deal with its social impact. The lockdown was carried out in a highly militarised fashion due to heavy reliance on the police and armed forces as testing for and tracing of COVID-19 cases lagged badly (Dizon, 2020; Yusingco and Pizarro, 2020).

Duterte's approach appeared similar to other countries facing administrative hurdles which also opted for severe and prolonged lockdowns, such as Italy (Roberts, 2020). But besides being due to information deficits early on during the pandemic, these inflexible lockdowns were also a response to uncertainties regarding enforcement – particularly of the national government's concern that local administrators would not carry out orders. This resulted in “blunt force regulation” as this “simplifies monitoring and controlling individuals from afar” (van der Kamp, 2021b).

This analysis appears applicable to the Philippine state given its well-known administrative deficits and enforcement challenges it faces even in normal circumstances, much less during major crises (Piling, 2013). Yet Duterte's reaction to the pandemic cannot be fully understood in such public administration terms as it overlooks the importance of his populist repertoire and strong-arm tactics. Although no longer a COVID-19 denialist, Duterte was also not merely engaged in an effort in problem solving, albeit with the tools of “blunt force regulation.” Rather, he remained a “vigilante president” (Coronel, 2019) whose demonstration of decisiveness has enabled him to distract attention from the larger picture of his failure to solve major problems in the country. Adapting tactics developed during the so-called “war on drugs,” Duterte's COVID-19 response was an additional chance for him to demonstrate his supposed ability to deal with severe crisis which the notoriously corrupt and inefficient Philippine state was incapable of handling.

Under the lockdown, the social conditions of the poor worsened dramatically as hunger reached record levels with a third of households affected. Demonstrations demanding food deliveries to deprived areas during the lockdown were met by Duterte ordering police to “shoot them dead” (Arguelles, 2021; Billing, 2020; Tomacruz, 2020). As COVID-19 cases mounted in spring, late summer and early fall of 2021 amidst a slow vaccine roll out, the Philippines became not just one of the worst pandemic performers in Asia but also globally, being ranked the last of 121 countries surveyed in infection control, vaccination, and mobility (Sarao, 2021). It was also rated last in a similar COVID-19 “resilience” survey of fifty-one countries (Bloomberg, 2021). Yet instead of taking responsibility for his government's poor performance, Duterte blamed “pasaway” – obstinate and irresponsible, largely lower class Filipinos – for supposedly following pandemic regulations (Hapal, 2021; Lasco, 2020a, 2020b) and local governments for their incompetence and patronage politics (Gera, 2020).

This paper argues Duterte has neither been a COVID-19 denialist nor an obtuse technocrat in dealing with the pandemic. Rather, his approach has combined the blame shifting characteristic of “medical populism” with a lockdown strategy typical of “blunt force regulation.” He has securitised the pandemic by singling out the pasaway. The next part of this paper discusses the concepts of “medical populism” (which involves the exculpatory logic of denialism) and “blunt force regulation” (a technocratic but still inefficient approach overly dependent on lockdowns). It then suggests neither of these concepts adequately explains Duterte's pandemic response. However, like the medical populists, he did attempt to deflect from his pandemic management by securitising the crisis while using “one-size-fits-all” lockdowns.

The subsequent section shows how Duterte fashioned this strategem as mayor of Davao city during his “war on drugs” that securitised a major but not acute problem to deflect from broader social and political issues that involved brutal “one-size-fits-all” enforcement, which became his “calling card” to win the presidency. He then implemented the drug war nationally, scapegoating small time users and dealers who were targeted in police campaigns which local officials were strong-armed into joining.

The final section shows how – drawing on the highly militarised techniques of the drug war – Duterte utilised a brute force governance strategy to deal with the pandemic. Like the drug war, it was also largely a failure. But it too helped deflect public criticism toward a “securitised” enemy, the pasaway.

Medical Populism, Blunt Force Regulation, and Brute Force Governance

For the sake of the analysis offered in this paper, it is useful to distinguish two flawed governance approaches to the COVID-19 pandemic employed in several countries around the world – “medical populism” and “blunt force regulation” – before introducing a third concept, “brute force governance,” in an attempt to elucidate the Philippine case. The first involves populist leaders such as Trump or Bolsonaro who ignore science, deny the severity of the crisis, and dramatise (“spectacularise”) their unscientific pandemic responses based on conspiratorial “knowledge claims” which allow them to shift the blame to others in order to deflect from their ineffective pandemic policies (Hedges and Lasco, 2021; Lasco and Curato, 2019; Lasco, 2020b). Blunt force regulation, by contrast, employed in Italy for example, has involved implementing lockdowns which proved inefficient as they failed to allow for flexibility in the application of these economically punishing measures once it became possible through better testing due to local enforcement concerns (van der Kamp, 2021a, 2021b). It is argued Duterte's brute force governance represents a third approach, combining negative aspects of the first two but also worsening it further through the securitisation of the pandemic. Duterte opted for highly militarised and indiscriminate enforcement in which he bullied local officials to comply while scapegoating dangerous “others” in order to deflect public attention from policy failures.

Populist leaders such as Brazil's Bolsonaro and the U.S.'s Trump are the most obvious examples of medical populist efforts to simplify the pandemic by downplaying its severity and offering easy (quack) solutions while deepening the divisions by promising to protect the “good” people from dangerous others (Hedges and Lasco, 2021; Lasco, 2020a). With the outbreak of COVID-19 in the early spring of 2020, both U.S. president Trump and his Brazilian counterpart Bolsonaro denied the severity of the pandemic (Parmanand, 2021). They both also prized their own physical virility and promised their respective populations that they would largely be immune to the pandemic (Parmanand, 2021). Moreover, they often rejected or at least cast doubt on scientific advice offered from experts in their own governments, instead promoting unproven cures and discouraging social distancing and mask wearing. They thus defied standard crisis management which entails a serious assessment of risks, transparency, aiming for unity and relying on scientific advice, particularly important in a medical emergency. Although the pandemic only worsened – with both Trump and Bolsonaro accused of causing the unnecessary deaths of hundreds of thousands by their inaction and anti-science posture – they both remained popular among their base of supporters.

As discussed above, Duterte was also initially a denialist, joking about the pandemic and saying Filipinos’ strong antibodies would make them highly resistant to the new virus. A “macho populist” like Bolsonaro and Trump, Duterte initially “stigmatised public concern and caution by characterising it as a hysterical overreaction” and “feminising” those warning of the dangers to public health (Parmanand, 2020, 2021). This was characteristic of the Philippine president who has often been openly misogynist, repeatedly telling rape jokes in public appearances which earned him international notoriety but have been widely interpreted in the Philippines as rejecting the hypocritical moralism of the previous administration in favour of a “crass” but more authentic politics (Abinales, 2015; Curato and Ong, 2018). It is telling that four of the highest profile public figures Duterte has targeted have been women. Duterte had senator Leila de Lima jailed who had earlier been the Chair of the Commission on Human Rights and Justice Secretary. She had investigated Duterte's involvement in drug vigilante killings when he was mayor of Davao. As senator she had chaired senate hearings examining drug killings when Duterte was mayor of Davao and after he had become president before being removed by the president's allies in the senate the autumn of 2016. These senators then turned the tables by interrogating her driver, who was also her lover (a dual sin in a class-bound society with double standards), in order to “slut shame” her and “prove” alleged links between de Lima and drug lords, which she denounced as outrageously misogynist (de Lima, 2020). Duterte fired (separately elected) Vice President Maria Leonor “Leni” Robredo from a cabinet post after she had criticised the drug war, including in front of the UN. ¹ Maria Ressa, editor of the critical online newspaper Rappler and Nobel Peace Prize winner, still faces a possible long jail term based on cases supported by the Duterte administration widely seen as harassment and part of a general effort to intimidate critical voices in the media. Former Supreme Court Chief Justice Maria Lourdes Sereno was removed from office through a highly irregular legal manoeuvre after questioning Duterte's claim several judges were involved in the drug trade (Deinla et al., 2018).

But, as discussed above, Duterte quickly pivoted away from pandemic denialism, no longer claiming he and the nation were invincible but instead implementing a drastic lockdown as the nation's “tough protector.” This, however, still allowed him to frame his response in macho populist terms (Parmanand, 2021). While Lasco (2020b) considers Duterte a “medical populist,” a crucial difference between the Philippine president, on the one hand and Bolsonaro and Trump, on the other, is that the Philippine president quickly transitioned from denying the severity of the pandemic to adopting a harsh lockdown strategy. He nonetheless remained true to his previous illiberal populism in his politics of securitisation and scapegoating, as will be discussed in more detail below. He also continued to attract strong partisan support with his crude but seemingly authentic political style which contrasts a virtuous people with an out of touch elite who are often coddling supposedly dangerous marginalised groups (Abinales, 2015; Judis, 2016: 15).

Duterte's messaging was that personal responsibility was crucial for the success of the government's lockdown during the pandemic (Lasco, 2020b). To explain its failures, the Philippine president engaged in “finger pointing” which was “parroted” by his “minions and government” at the irresponsible “pasaway” said to regularly violate quarantine who were primarily to blame for an increase in COVID-19 cases during successive waves of the pandemic (Lasca, 2021: 1). Kusaka (2020) has termed this “disciplinary quarantine” that is based “on a moral dichotomy between ‘good citizens,’ who abide by strict regulations, and undisciplined “evil others (pasaway), who endanger the nation.” As will be discussed more below, this helped him deflect from the government's failures in dealing with pandemic, ensuring that his popularity long remained at record levels. ²

More technocratically oriented leaders around the world initially ordered sweeping lockdowns to deal with the onset of the pandemic. But some who failed to adopt more flexible approaches once testing and contact tracing capacity improved have been described as employing blunt force regulation (van der Kamp, 2021b). Such indiscriminate enforcement measures were due to uncertain local compliance to national pandemic directives that simplify monitoring and were meant to ensure greater control from afar. This can be understood as “principal-agent” problem, due to the national government's (the principal) doubts about agents’ local officials’ (their agents) willingness to carry out national policies, leading to a strict, one-size-fits-all approach as opposed to less severe and economically punishing lockdowns (van der Kamp, 2021b).

Italian Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte, for example, imposed a harsh nationwide lockdown in early 2020 but refused to adopt a softer, more regionally targeted approach once greater possibilities of testing and tracing became available (Roberts, 2020). Conte's initial lockdown was widely accepted by the public but after the economic impact of these indiscriminate lockdown measures had become increasingly evident, his popularity sank and his government collapsed in early 2021 (Poggioli, 2021). Van der Kamp (2021b) argues that Italy's inflexible lockdown was largely due to concerns that local politicians would be unwilling to enforce restrictions without strict national controls. But ultimately this backfired economically and politically.

By contrast, Angela Merkel's government in Germany adopted a more flexible approach with regionally targeted, rolling lockdowns. While in part due to the German federal system, it was also attributed to flexible national steering which improved the resiliency of the German response (Robinet-Borgomano, 2020). In addition, the Federal Government and the local states (Länder) worked closely together to fashion a post-lockdown strategy “characterised by a gradual resumption of economic activity, along with the obligation to wear masks in public space and the use of a digital tracking application” (Robinet-Borgomano, 2020). This allowed Germany “to pursue the more complex, risky, but far less costly approach of targeted restrictions” (van der Kamp, 2021a, 2021b). While this contributed to Germany having one of Europe's lowest death rates and suffering the least economic impact during the pandemic, it did have the unintended consequence of provoking a large anti-lockdown movement. ³

Alongside Germany, relative success stories in combatting COVID-19 – for example, Singapore, South Korea, Taiwan, and Vietnam – “effectively flattened the curve and managed to minimise the damage to their economies.” Keys to success included “agile test, trace, and treat systems to counter any flare ups; strong public-private partnerships in the health industry; effective application of technologies for information dissemination and contact tracing; and all this with less dependence on draconian lockdown measures” (Mendoza, 2020).

Because the Philippines failed to implement such subtle “scalpel”-like strategies used in these successful countries, it had to adopt the “axe” of “blunt force regulation” (Mendoza, 2020: van der Kamp 2021a). In imposing severe and often indiscriminate measures, Duterte openly expressed distrust in the willingness of local governments to follow national policy. He bullied local governments, blaming them for policy failures and accusing them of patronage politics. He also securitised the pandemic, justifying the heavy use of police and military in enforcing often indiscriminate measures. Thus, Duterte had gone well beyond simply using the blunt instrument of “one-size-fits-all” to control local governments’ enforcement. Rather, he implemented a highly militarised response to the pandemic which also involved blame shifting. As will be shown below, the impact on the Philippine economy – sharply increased poverty and record levels of hunger – proved devastating to the poor.

The Drug War as Brute Force Governance

Following Hapal (2021) and Thompson (2021a, 2021b), the Philippines’ response to COVID-19 shows striking continuity with Duterte's “war on drugs.” Both involved securitising a major but containable problem, defying expert advice in the process. This justified a highly militarised approach which Local Government Units (LGUs) were bullied to carry out. Both Duterte’ drug war and his COVID-19 strategy relied on a populist dichotomy of “virtuous,” law abiding citizens, versus “evil” outsiders/criminals or even “angels versus demons” (Jensen and Hapal, 2018). The Philippines was “still stuck with the drug war blueprint” during the pandemic (Gavilan and Talabong, 2020). Hapal (2021: 3) suggests that in “many ways, the pasaway is a construct resembling the drug addict in the context of the war on drugs.” ⁴

Duterte has often been misunderstood as a typical local mayor and political “boss.” Sidel (1999; also Rocamora, 1995) understands bossism as involving coercive control over territory and local populations. But as Davao mayor or power-behind-the throne (with interruptions due to term limits) from 1987 to 2016, Duterte created a form of “neo-bossism” involving alliance building around external enemies rather than focusing on eliminating political rivals or intimidating the electorate (Thompson, 2021b). A notoriously violent city, post-Marcos Davao had been plagued not only by everyday criminality but also by assassinations and revenge killings by communist rebels and their para-military opponents. Moving to end this violence, Duterte struck a deal with both communists and para-militaries, lessening conflict between them. He then secretly employed policeman, ex-rebels and militia members in what came to be known as the “Davao Death Squad” (DDS) that covertly murdered supposed drug users and dealers (Reyes, 2016: 124). This allowed Duterte to triangulate between the communist rebels and the military while winning popular support by targeting suspected criminals with vigilantes. ⁵ Tellingly, Duterte promised to ramp up this strategy when he faced a close mayoral race with an opponent whom he accused of being soft on crime (not surprisingly Duterte, who would come to be known as “the Punisher,” won easily) (Reyes, 2021). ⁶ Human rights groups estimated that over 700 suspected drug criminals were killed extra-judicially by DDS vigilantes during his time as Davao mayor, with Duterte at one point “bragging” it was actually 1000 (Peel, 2017). Duterte's drug war strategy retained the violent methods of bossism and redirected an anti-insurgency campaign to target alleged drug users and dealers.

In 2016, Duterte used his Davao drug war as his calling card to win the Philippine presidency. Duterte's national appeal was that given the weakness of institutions in the Philippines, particularly a broken justice system, he was able to offer a drug crackdown as a silver bullet to solve the problem. Narag (2017) argues Duterte called for “the sidestepping of due process and human rights of the suspects, with the belief that we need to cleanse first the corrupt legal system before we can even introduce any meaningful reforms.” He played to a “legally cynical public” that did not trust a broken judicial system to convict drug offenders whose cases were often dismissed on technicalities. David (2021) argues that during the presidential campaign Duterte established “a direct union between him, the leader, and the people's destiny” which appealed to many Filipinos “in the context of the growing perception that the entire system of government, politics, the economy, and the law was hopelessly broken.” This required “an unconventional leader who could solve the country's persistent problems in as short a period as three to six months, using novel means” (David, 2021) Duterte's “dystopian narrative shifted the discussion to a more urgent solution,” the arrest and/or killing of drug dealers and users “until the problem is eradicated.” But this “comes at a price,” Duterte warned, “the price of liberal rights” (Curato, 2017: 7).

Quimpo (2017: 146) has argued securitisation – “how security threats are constructed and how extreme measures in addressing such threats are justified” – lay at the heart of Duterte's drug war. Duterte “shrewdly picked on an issue of broad popular concern – drug trafficking – and securitised it” (Quimpo, 2017). This involved turning a major but not acute (and according to the government's own official figures declining) problem, into a major issue of public concern (Lasco, 2016). Garrido (2021) suggests “Duterte fits the archetype of the strong leader,” with the drug war representing “a performance of discipline made all the more effective by its spectacular quality.” But its significance has been “primarily symbolic,” suggesting “the drug war is targeted not just at drug dealers and users but at a disorderly public generally” (Garrido, 2021).

It is telling that opinion poll survey data show the traction Duterte gained with this illiberal populist messaging, with the fight against illegal drugs going from a lower-level concern to the public's top priority in Pulse Asia surveys of January, February and April 2016. Strikingly, just a few months after Duterte's election, poverty, jobs, inflation, and corruption again overtook criminality as major concerns (Pulse Asia, 2016; Thompson, 2021b). Duterte had created a “narrative of a nation overrun by illegal drugs which, if left unmitigated, would lead to the destruction of the Philippines” and “this dire depiction evoked a sense of urgency and warranted extraordinary action” that was “framed in such a way that it valorised and protected the innocent and dealt harsh or deadly consequences to the errant” (Hapal, 2021: 5). This highly militarised, police-centric approach enabled Duterte to “govern through killing” (Johnson and Fernquest, 2018; Juego, 2017). It also enabled him to justify “increased state repression, intensified criminalisation of the drug problem,” while rejecting “a public health approach to the proliferation of illegal drugs” (Regilme, 2020).

Duterte's rise to some extent parallels the ascendancy of other populist demogogues who have drawn on the “globalisation of rage” given “massive disparities of wealth, power, education, and status” (Mishra, 2016, quoted in McCoy, 2017: 5). ⁷ But Duterte's drug war makes his form of populism quite distinctive. Duterte has inscribed his politics on “the battered and bloodied bodies” of his victims (McCoy, 2017: 5). His “violent populism” is unique because he alone among contemporary illiberal populist leaders “has instigated mass murder under the guise of a ‘war on drugs’” (Thompson, 2021b). Tens of thousands of suspected users and dealers have been extra-judicially murdered during the drug war according to human rights groups and the United Nations (Maru, 2018; United Nations High Commissioner on Human Rights, 2020).

Although implemented nationally, Duterte's drug war relied on bullying local governments to implement it. Dozens of mayors and vice mayors have been killed during the Duterte presidency, an unprecedented number (Gavilan 2018) . Many of the assassinated local officials had been accused by the government of abetting the drug problem, although they had never been formally charged (Ropero, 2021; Talabong, 2019). Given such intense intimidation, it is not surprising that local officials were reluctant to stand in the way of Duterte's drug war carried out by the Philippine National Police (PNP) who were given carte blanche powers. Kreuzer (2020, also see Kreuzer, 2016) shows that in areas where LGU officials demonstrated “political submission to the new administration and largely left the implementation of the national policies to the local branch of the PNP” there was not only “a huge spike of deadly police violence during the first year of the war on drugs” but also “excessive levels of vigilantism that seems to have gone unchecked in these LGUs.”

A leading global expert on anti-drug campaigns – who pointed out that “the failures of the ‘war on drugs’ have been well documented” – predicted from the outset that “the Philippines’ new ‘war’ will fail and society will emerge worse off from it” (Collins, 2016a: 9, 2016b). Collins (2016a: 16) warned against “widespread criminalisation or any other ‘pigheaded’ antidrug policies.” Duterte, of course, ignored such expert advice which in fact proved prescient. Besides the terrible toll of the killings as well large number of arrests which have swelled the prison population, this violent campaign has not led to a reduction in supply, as even the country's top police drug official admitted in early 2020 (Allard and Lema, 2020).

Yet this does not mean the drug war was a failure in political terms. Duterte's popularity soared not despite but because of the drug war (Cabato, 2016; Thompson, 2018). It deflected from the nation's major problems of unequal development, un- and underemployment, and high poverty levels (Rodan, 2021: 247). The drug war symbolised Duterte's unyielding political will to transform a country with a broken system of governance. His discursive demonology resonated strongly, putting “order over law” (Pepinsky, 2017: 120).

Brute Force Governance During the COVID-19 Pandemic

COVID-19 was a grave challenge to all world leaders but posed a particular problem for illiberal populists. Teehankee (2021) argues it has proved difficult to sustain the typical populist “people” versus “the elite” narrative against this “viral and existential threat,” which was as an “unfamiliar ‘enemy’” that proved difficult to “discipline.” In addition, Duterte could not blame an external enemy, China, as Trump and Bolsonaro had, given the Philippine president's efforts to maintain his close ties with China and his hostility to the West for its criticism of his drug war (Teehankee, 2021; Suorsa and Thompson, 2018). In addition, as discussed above, Duterte abandoned the denialist strategy taken by the medical populists Bolsonaro and Trump, which enabled them (largely successfully) to play down the severity of the pandemic to their own base of supporters (Lasco, 2020b).

Instead, Duterte opted for a severe and long lasting lockdown which began when he declared a public health emergency in early March 2020. By the middle of that month he had placed the country under a state of calamity for six months. During this time, much of the Philippines was under enhanced community quarantine (ECQ) which was effectively a total lockdown, with the lists of those activities outside the home permitted decided government's Inter-Agency Task Force on Emerging Infectious Diseases. Only in late 2020 was most of the country placed under the modified general community quarantine that was somewhat looser, allowing for the resumption of many business and other activities, though still subject to strict limitations (Atienza, 2021). But further “hard” ECQ lockdowns were imposed in March 2021 and again in August 2021 as cases surged, with mounting deaths in the first four waves of the novel coronavirus (De Leon, 2021). ⁸ A fifth Omicron variant wave occurred in early 2022, with major hospitals becoming inundated by admissions which increased by as much as six times in the first week of the year (Bolledo, 2022). With more health workers infected with COVID-19, the government struggled to keep the healthcare system functioning (Magsambol, 2022). Fortunately, the fifth wave quickly peaked and had rapidly subsided by late February 2022.

As the pandemic has evolved, the government claimed its response has been “excellent” (Ranada, 2021a), with Duterte's leadership receiving high praise from his underlings (Lalu, 2022). But experts have been much less upbeat, arguing that “the Philippines are already paying a high economic price due to lockdowns that choke economic growth, intensify unemployment, and ratchet up poverty now that the pandemic is nearing its second year” (Hartigan-Go and Mendoza, 2021). They added that “due to less effective pandemic management, the trade off on the margin is likely to be brutal in terms of lives lost.” Overall, they suggest that “containment in the Philippines is weak” despite implementing the “longest general lockdown in the world” and being “one of only five countries that have kept their schools closed for well over one year of pandemic” (Hartigan-Go and Mendoza, 2021). A World Bank Report blamed the low vaccination rate due to a slow roll out for the rapid spread of the Omicron variant (de Vera and Aurelio, 2022). The government did, however, begin adopting more granular lockdown strategies.

Despite this poor performance, Duterte wasted little time in trying to gain control of messaging about the government's pandemic prevention measures. By mid-March 2020, he had begun a weekly address to the nation in which he stressed the need for personal discipline and that his orders be strictly enforced by LGUs. In April following Duterte's notorious “shoot them dead” denunciation of protestors demonstrating against lockdown restrictions because of growing hunger, the government ramped up round ups of quarantine violators, with 100,000 quarantine violators arrested by September. Aggressive lockdown enforcement resulted “in multiple incidents of abuse by police and deputised civilian officials” (Tablabong, 2020). This was not surprising as the PNP was using “the same rules of engagement in the pandemic as in its other operations, primarily the anti-drug campaign” (Gavilan and Talabong, 2020). While neighbouring Southeast Asian countries also opted for periodic lockdowns, the Philippines was distinct in that it “placed the entire country in a highly-securitised lockdown – one of the longest and strictest in the world” (Arguelles, 2021).

Although Duterte was not as openly anti-science as other illiberal populists like Bolsonaro and Trump, he often targeted health critical doctors and nurses (Ranada, 2020). Duterte's weekly COVID-19 briefings soon turned into “late-night tirades” which were often “directed against healthcare professionals” by seeking to “delegitimise their claims” for a better pandemic response and “silence dissent” while masking “an inconvenient truth, that is, the Philippines continues to lag in its COVID-19 response, and Filipinos continue to suffer for it” (Hapal, 2021: 15).

This showed that while Duterte was no longer a COVID-19 denialist, he was not carefully following scientific advice either. Rather he was a determined strongman claiming he could offer a quick fix through an inflexible lockdown that was in fact unable to cope with the complex problems involved in dealing effectively with the pandemic, particularly because testing and tracing were not sufficiently ramped up. Already by the end of 2020 it had become clear that the harsh, across-the-board quarantine measures had turned the pandemic into a “full-blown economic, health, political and social crisis” (Arguelles, 2021). Due to a lack of testing and tracing, the lockdown failed to keep cases and deaths from rising rapidly, soon becoming the highest per capita in Southeast Asia. At the same time, “hunger and poverty among Filipino families and the loss of jobs and economic opportunities reached historical highs,” with 7.6 million Filipino households (representing one-third) experiencing involuntary hunger as the economy contracted in 2020 by nearly 10 per cent, the highest ever recorded (Arguelles, 2021). The poor lost daily earnings in a subsistence informal economy they were dependent on for survival. Slow and often erratic deliveries of food support and cash subsidies impacted the most vulnerable Filipinos. For urban poor Filipinos in Metro Manila and other major urban areas living in cramped slums, “social distancing and work-from-home arrangements are privileges reserved for the middle and upper classes of Philippine society” (Teehankee, 2021).

By this point it had become evident that Duterte had found a scapegoat to justify these indiscriminate but largely ineffective lockdown measures by securitising the pandemic. As mentioned above, he blamed the pasaway – hard headed, largely lower class Filipinos – for supposedly not following pandemic regulations (Hapal, 2021; Lasca, 2021; Lasco, 2020a). Hapal (2021: 10–11) elaborates on the significance of the pasaway as scapegoat for Duterte's harsh lockdown measures:

Informing the Philippines’ draconian COVID-19 response is an entire discourse surrounding the archetype of the pasaway. The pasaway, seen as a bullheaded character ignoring the ill-effects of COVID-19, serves as the embodiment of an existential threat that needs disciplining. By arresting the pasaway, the government is, in effect, protecting the well-being of law-abiding Filipino citizens. The antithetical relation between the pasaway and law-abiding citizen reinforces the war-like narrative and justifies the intense policing of the former. The construct of the pasaway is informed by deep-seated class prejudices, amplified by a populist leader peddling oppositional narratives in an attempt to maintain control and gain power. The pasaway is such a concern for the government that no less than President Duterte himself has repeatedly lambasted Filipinos for their lack of discipline.

The pasaway could be blamed for the devastating waves of the coronavirus as the best laid government plans could be portrayed as having been upended by these disobedient Filipinos. Class prejudices could be mobilised as the pasaway were seen to be ill-disciplined, largely urban poor males who had also been the main target of the drug war. The term brought together “a range of different negative traits with implicit class contempt,” thereby reinforcing middle class prejudices and legitimating a militarised response to control this underclass (Hapal, 2021: 11). Filipinos’ supposed lack of discipline created the need for a stern authority figure, “Tatay Digong” (father Duterte), as the Philippine president is popularly known. Malcom Cook has suggested many supporters feel a “connection with Duterte…emotional and visceral, not based upon a cost-benefit judgment of his policy performance” (cited in Aquino, 2019).

As has been pointed out by several authors (e.g. Hapal, 2021; Lasca, 2021; Lasco, 2020a), blaming the pasaway for the rise in cases during the pandemic was pure scapegoating without any evidence for such disobedience whatsoever. Available data shows that most Filipinos have followed quarantine regulations quite carefully. In fact, they have been among the most “obedient” citizens globally (Punongbayan 2020). According to Imperial College London/YouGov Covid-19 Tracker by the Institute of Global Health Innovation from March 2020 to July 2021, among citizens of twenty-four countries surveyed, Filipinos were actually the most likely to wear masks (in the July 6–12, 2021 survey), with 92 per cent of respondents saying they always wore them when outside the home. In that same survey, they were also most likely to always avoid “crowded areas” (Institute of Global Health Innovation, 2021). Social distancing and wearing masks are not wedge issues in the Philippines (Hapal, 2021: 11). This obviously differs from countries like the U.S. where mask-wearing became part of a cultural war, with only a little more than half of Americans saying they always wore masks outside in mid-2021 at the height of the Delta wave of COVID-19 (Institute of Global Health Innovation, 2021).

Besides singling out the pasaway for blame, Duterte also bullied LGUs during the pandemic. In mid-March 2020, Duterte ordered LGUs to abide by his national quarantine orders or face disciplinary measures (Valente, 2020). However, most LGUs were not given “clear instructions from the national government” about the lockdown and how to meet the challenges of the pandemic (Atienza, 2021). They often lacked resources and management skills in local contexts in which patronage politics was common (Gera, 2020). This distinguished Duterte's approach from blunt force regulation, discussed above, while suggesting parallels to the drug war. Instead of relying of bureaucratic procedures to enact lockdowns, Duterte intimidated local governments into submission, with national police and military taking over key roles during the pandemic. Duterte had ordered the Department of Interior and Local Government (DILG) and Department of Justice to closely monitor LGUs and not hesitate in filing cases against “wayward officials” (Valente, 2020).

Duterte had centralised national power over LGUs earlier in his presidency despite promises to make constitutional changes to turn the country into a federal system (Gera and Hutchroft, 2021). Shortly before the pandemic, one of Durterte's congressional allies had criticised the DILG for its bullying of LGUs which involved them being “dictated upon” and “ordered around” (cited in Fernandez, 2020). The pandemic enabled Duterte to further concentrate national powers through the “Bayanihan to Heal as One Act” in which Congress granted President Duterte sweeping emergency powers (Hutchcroft and Holmes, 2021). But Duterte's centralisation of power disguised the national government's “weak steering” which therefore was more reliant on “strong-arming” local officials to implement policies than on regularised bureaucratic regulations (Gera and Hutchroft, 2021). The dysfunctional nature of the relationship between LGUs and the national government became particularly apparent during delays in vaccine procurement in 2021, leading it to be the country in Southeast Asia slowest to receive the vaccines and to ramp up inoculations (Cook, 2021; Noble, 2021).

The government's Social Amelioration Program (SAP) was also politicised by the national government, making the LGUs easy targets for Duterte. Emergency subsidies, particularly cash aid for poor households, were a key provision of the Bayanihan Act. Given widespread delays in their distribution, it was not long before Duterte was accusing many LGUs of abusing these funds for patronage purposes. The DILG, ordered by Duterte to “probe and arrest corrupt officials,” warned LGUs about “injecting politics in relief distribution” (cited in Gera, 2020). The LGUs, in turn, rejected these charges, saying that these problems were due to difficulties the national government's Department of Social Welfare and Development's had encountered in identifying beneficiaries and validating beneficiary lists. They “faulted the national agency for its red tape, fragmented guidelines, vague information and lack of clarity in task allocation” (Gera, 2020). While the Duterte administration was criticising patronage abuses at the local level, Senator Bong Go, a close Duterte aide, was claiming credit for the distribution of SAP benefits in preparation for his (later abandoned) presidential bid in 2022. This very much also appeared to be patronage politics, except in this case practiced at the national level by an administration loyalist (Gera, 2020). There was ample evidence of hypocrisy in the Duterte administration during the pandemic, particularly scandals related to procurement issues such as overpriced face shields (long required in the Philippines despite their doubtful efficacy) which the Philippine Senate began investigating in mid-2021 (Buan, 2021).

Conclusion

Neither a pandemic denialist nor an obtuse technocrat, Philippine president Duterte's pandemic response nonetheless combined blame shifting characteristic of “medical populism” with a one-size-fits-all lockdown strategy typical of “blunt force regulation” while at the same time securitising the pandemic. After initially flirting with denialism, Duterte opted for a highly militarised lockdown, reliant on heavy police and military presence. Though not as blatantly anti-science as Trump or Bolsonaro, he attacked health professionals. Duterte instead presented himself as a strongman offering a quick fix. But the problems posed by the pandemic were complex which his inflexibly imposed and highly militarised lockdowns were incapable of solving. Duterte scapegoated the pasaway despite data showing Filipinos were among the world's most obedient citizens in following lockdown instructions. He also criticised the poor performance as well as patronage politics of local governments although they faced confusing national instructions and the slow distribution of subsidies. Long and inflexible ECQ lockdowns led to soaring poverty and record hunger levels with huge job losses and lost economic opportunities.

As of October 2021, the Philippines remained at the bottom of Bloomberg’s (2021) global pandemic “resilience” ranking of fifty-three countries based on vaccination coverage, virus containment, the severity of lockdowns, quality of healthcare, progress toward restarting travel, and the overall mortality throughout the pandemic. The Philippines was also last among 121 countries in the similar Nikkei Asia “recovery” index covering infection control, vaccination and mobility (Sarao, 2021). The Philippine government itself estimates it will take at least 10 years to recover from the effects of the pandemic (Agence-France, 2021).

Globally, opinion polls showed the pandemic “reversed the rise of populism,” including diminishing “approval of populist leaders” (Foa et al., 2022). But for Duterte, “rather than being a curse…the pandemic turned out to be a gift” which allowed him to “renew the public mandate for his illiberal agenda” (Arguelles, 2021). Despite mismanaging the pandemic, his popularity remained high, aided by pro-Duterte social media trolls and with people gravitating toward a strong leader who made them feel secure (Reed, 2021).

A militarised approach, the scapegoating of the urban poor, and the bullying of local politicians was a strategy Duterte had already been fashioned during his bloody “war on drugs.” The foundering of his COVID-19 strategy paralleled the failure of the drug war to reduce the supply of drugs. But it too shifted blame toward a “securitised” enemy, the small-time drug addict/dealer in the former, the pasaway in the latter. Just as the war on drugs had, his securitised pandemic lockdown boosted his popularity to record levels, peaking in November 2020 when nine in ten Filipinos backed him (this fell to two thirds supporting him by late October 2021 which was, still adjudged as “very good” and higher than his opinion poll ratings had been before the pandemic) (Social Weather Stations, 2021).

The larger question – to which this paper has attempted to make a contribution in answering – is why Duterte continues to “ride high” in the surveys despite his poor performance (Reuters 2020; Regencia, 2021). This has been the case across a number of policy areas, not just his mismanagement of the pandemic but also the related deep economic recession (the worst since WWII) and the continued prevalence of illegal narcotics despite a bloody “war on drugs” (Mendoza, 2021). The paradox of Duterte's popularity despite poor performance during the pandemic can be linked to a discourse of “collective discipline” which had become the hallmark of the ‘virtuous citizens’ who make up his base” (Lasco, 2020b: 1424). By emphasising the importance of personal responsibility during the pandemic and focusing on the local setbacks in the implementation of national government policy, Duterte “othered” supposedly irresponsible, urban poor pasaway while faulting LGUs. Such “brute force governance” undermined the dynamics of accountability, enabling Duterte to win public approval despite policy failure during the COVID-19 pandemic.