Former Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte won re-election to his old job as mayor of Davao City by a landslide on Monday, despite languishing in a detention cell in the Netherlands while he awaits trial by the International Criminal Court (ICC) for crimes against humanity.
Duterte was heavily favored to win his bid to reclaim the mayor’s office in Davao, a position he held several times from 1988 until he was elected president in 2016. Based on early results, he collected roughly eight times as many votes as his nearest rival on Monday.
Duterte — or perhaps a proxy officeholder, if the details of his incarceration at The Hague cannot be worked out — will succeed his youngest son Sebastian as the mayor of Davao. Sebastian Duterte will step into the office of vice mayor. Rodrigo Duterte’s oldest son Paolo was re-elected to the House of Representatives, while two of his grandsons won seats in local races.
Five more candidates backed by the Duterte dynasty are on track to win Senate seats, a stronger showing than expected in the Dutertes’ struggle for power against the other major Philippine political dynasty, the Marcos family.
Six Marcos-backed candidates are projected to win their seats, which is a much weaker showing than was expected for the incumbent president’s political organization. The final results of the Senate races will not be known until next week.
The Dutertes and the Marcoses teamed up to win the presidency in 2022, with Ferdinand Marcos Jr. taking the top spot and Rodrigo Duterte’s daughter Sara settling into the vice presidency. She did not remain settled for very long. In November 2024, she publicly threatened to have President Marcos killed. She was impeached by the House of Representatives in February 2025 for the threat, along with charges of corruption and dereliction of duty.
The favorable outcome of Monday’s elections was widely seen as a boost for Sara Duterte ahead of her July impeachment trial in the Senate, which would remove her from office — and disqualify her from ever running again, for anything — if it convicts her. She needs to win 9 out of 24 votes in the Senate to avoid conviction.
If Sara Duterte is not convicted, she stands a good chance of winning the presidency in 2028, as Monday’s elections demonstrated the continuing popularity of her family and the diminishing influence of the Marcos clan. Some observers of the Filipino political scene wonder if Rodrigo Duterte cheerfully marched off to prison in the Hague simply to embarrass President Marcos, Jr. for refusing to protect him from the ICC.
The elder Duterte has been charged with thousands of extrajudicial killings during his “war on drugs” from 2016 to 2022. Even though he was taken into custody by the ICC in March and has been detained at The Hague ever since, there was no doubt that he could legally run for mayor of Davao City since Philippine law requires a conviction to ban candidates from running for office.
It is much less certain that Duterte will be able to take the office he won on Monday, due to his detention. Sara Duterte said on Monday she was working with her father’s legal team to arrange for him to take his oath of office from the Netherlands, but she suggested Sebastian Duterte could handle the duties of the mayor’s office for his father in absentia.
The BBC interrupted the Duterte-Marcos Game of Thrones drama to note that another familiar name did very well on Monday: Paolo Benigno “Bam” Aquino IV, cousin of former President Benigno “Noynoy” Aquino III, who held the office from 2010 until Rodrigo Duterte’s presidency began in 2016.
Aquino said he was astounded by his showing in the election, which vaulted him to second place among Senate candidates.
“Just forty minutes ago, I was lying in my bed, with my phone facing down,” he told a crowd of supporters outside his campaign headquarters on Monday night. “When I took a look at my phone, [there were] 250 messages, 80 messages, all saying congratulations. At that point, I told myself: Maybe I really did win. But that result was really not what we had expected.”
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