Welcome Back, Sara

By Joey Salgado

After almost a month of WFH (that’s “Work From Hague” according to a viral meme), Vice President Sara Duterte returned to the country like a thief in the night, armed with a renewed mission to lead the reanimated Duterte forces in their political war of attrition against the Marcoses.

During her stay at the Hague, the Vice President switched on the charm, smothering the assembled throng of adoring migrant workers with profuse expressions of thanks for their undying devotion to her father, former president Rodrigo Duterte.

In her speeches and interviews, she was politician Sara, the amiable, Dreamworks vision of cuddly-cute. She portrayed her father, confined several meters away in a detention cell awaiting trial for drug war killings during his tenure, as a victim of injustice, deprived not only of liberty but the comfort necessities of kulambo, slippers, and Pinoy food.

The captive crowd rages and weeps as she speaks, imploring her, in countless Facebook posts and reels, to continue her father’s legacy and set things right.

By now we are all familiar with the Vice President’s shapeshifting persona. To the adoring crowd at the Hague, Sara Duterte is salvation and hope. But to the Marcoses and their allies she remains a clear and present threat to power who must be stopped.

Her election as president in 2028 will be both prize and ticket to restoration and retribution, a license to get back at those who had wronged her, her chief of staff for whom she threatened death on the Marcos couple, and her father, whose arrest she met with uncharacteristic calm and acceptance.

The Vice President’s political fate rests with the Senate, half of whom will be voted to office in the midterm elections this May. Up until the arrest of Duterte the father last March, the popular sentiment is that the midterms would be a walk in the park for the administration-backed candidates.

That may have changed.

On the surface, outrage over the former president’s arrest seems to have dissipated. But the invigorated Duterte base and their sympathizers, especially in Mindanao, continue to simmer, seeking outlets to vent and a rallying figure to summon their courage. For the DDS operators, the goal should be obvious: disrupt the administration coalition’s plan for midterm dominance.

And if there’s anyone whose name is synonymous with disruption, it’s Sara Duterte.

Resetting the strategy

A commissioned survey, conducted days immediately after the arrest, yielded rather troubling results for the administration.

While a clobbering in Mindanao was expected, the survey showed significant declines for administration bets in areas previously assumed to be in the bag. Former president Duterte’s arrest may have been excellently planned and executed, but the administration may have miscalculated the extent of public sympathy.

With more or less a month to go before election day, administration strategists need to recalibrate their political strategy and redraw the political map. The only solid strategy for now? Hope and pray that the sympathy will ebb by the end of April. That’s where Sara Duterte can complicate things.

But the Vice President openly campaigning against the administration ticket, not necessarily for the entire PDP-Laban slate, would also be a risky play for her. Greater visibility makes her an easy target for the administration. House impeachment prosecutors can again press their case against her fitness for the presidency, to reset the narrative and make her a campaign issue. And they know her pressure points, how to trigger her famous temper.

A few days before her arrival, the House released a new set of names of alleged recipients of intelligence funds from the Office of the Vice President and the Education Department during her tenure as Secretary. It’s an odd collection of aliases lifted from grocery items. A newspaper carried an exclusive story of court martial proceedings supposedly being prepared against two of her former military aides tagged as recipients of millions in intelligence funds. Expect more bombshells in the next few weeks.

A congressman, asked to comment on the Vice President’s arrival, perhaps summed up the administration’s sentiment: it's a good thing that she's back.

This article also appears in Rappler