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MANILA: Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. is delivering his state of the nation speech while confronting diverse crises midway through his six-year term, including recent deadly storms with more than 120,000 people encamped in emergency shelters, turbulent ties with the vice president and escalating territorial disputes with Beijing in the South China Sea.
About 22,000 policemen were deployed Monday to secure the House of Representatives complex in suburban Quezon city in the capital region before Marcos’ address to both chambers of Congress, top government and military officials and diplomats.
Thousands of protesters staged rallies to highlight a wide range of demands from higher wages due to high inflation to the immediate impeachment trial of Vice President Sara Duterte over a raft of alleged crimes.
Marcos’ rise to power in mid-2022, more than three decades after an army-backed “People Power” revolt overthrew his father from office and into global infamy, was one of the most dramatic political comebacks. But he inherited a wide range of problems, including an economy that was one of the worst-hit by the coronavirus pandemic, which worsened poverty, unemployment, inflation and hunger.
His whirlwind political alliance with Duterte rapidly floundered and she and her family, including her father, former President Rodrigo Duterte, became her harshest critics.
The former president was arrested in March in a chaotic scene at Manila’s international airport and flown to be detained by the International Criminal Court in the Netherlands for an alleged crime against humanity over his deadly anti-drugs crackdowns while still in power.
Sara Duterte became the first vice president of the Philippines to be impeached in February by the House of Representatives, which is dominated by Marcos’ allies, over a range of criminal allegations including largescale corruption and publicly threatening to have the president, his wife and Romualdez killed by an assassin if she herself were killed during her disputes with them.
The Supreme Court ruled Friday that the impeachment case was unconstitutional due to a key procedural technicality, hampering Duterte’s expected trial in the Senate, which has convened as an impeachment tribunal. House legislators said they were planning to appeal the decision.
Unlike his predecessor Rodrigo Duterte, who nurtured cozy ties with China and Russia, Marcos broadened his country’s treaty alliance with the United States and started to deepen security alliances with Japan, Australia, New Zealand, Canada France and other Western governments to strengthen deterrence against increasingly aggressive actions by China in the disputed South Chin Sea. That stance has strained relations between Manila and Beijing.
Defense Secretary Gilberto Teodoro said the Marcos administration would continue to shift the military’s role from battling a weakening communist insurgency to focusing on external defense, specially in the disputed South China Sea, a vital global trade route where confrontations between Chinese and Philippine coast guard and naval forces have intensified in recent years.
“The president’s statements were, we would be unyielding and resistant to Chinese aggression in the West Philippines Sea,” Teodoro said in an interview by the ABS-CBN TV network, using the Philippine name for the stretch of disputed waters off the western Philippine coast. “We’ve been gearing up toward that mission.”
Last week, US President Donald Trump hosted Marcos in the White House for talks on tariffs, trade and further boosting their countries’ treaty alliance.
After returning to Manila, Marcos traveled to an evacuation center outside Manila to help distribute food and other aid to villagers displaced by back-to-back storms and days of monsoon downpours that have flooded vast stretches of the main northern Luzon region, including Manila.
More than 6 million people were affected by the onslaught, which left more than 30 others dead, mostly due to drownings, landslides and falling trees.