| Image by Elaine J.E. Degale
The blue ink stain lingers, a mark of civic participation and complicity alike. The Philippines’ midterm elections concluded this week with record voter turnout, and equally record-breaking impunity. May 12, 2025, marked yet another “Super Election Year,” with thousands lining up to vote amidst a flurry of vote-buying, disinformation, and political dynasty pageantry that would make even Tammany Hall blush.
But fear not, for the former President Rodrigo Roa Duterte, currently detained by the ICC at The Hague, has been elected as the new mayor in Mindanao’s capital, Davao City.
Duterte’s “return” to office is less shocking than it is symbolic of a global pattern: strongmen rise, fall, and then are welcomed back with lechon and confetti. After all, if a man convicted on 34 felony counts can be the 47th President of the United States, who’s to say a little international detention should stop a political campaign?
To sweeten the deal on his controversial presidency, the world recently observed President Donald Trump defend a luxurious gift from the Qatari government that many have referred to as a “flying palace” — a diplomatic bribe so brazen it makes Clarence Thomas look as innocent as the Pope.
In the Philippines, the heartbeat of democracy is powered less by civic virtue than by ayuda — election-season handouts dressed as public service. These small, strategic financial gifts turn ballot-casting into barter. It’s not far removed from Elon Musk’s latest attempt to buy public opinion via million-dollar social media lotteries, which function more as PsyOp than philanthropy.
As a woman who has lived between America and the Philippines, I’ve come to recognize a shared illness between the two nations: the erosion of the middle class is the anchor that sinks democracy.
In the Philippines, the middle class is barely holding on — defined by the government as families earning anywhere between ₱18,000 to ₱100,000 monthly (about $320 to $1,800). For reference, this would be considered working-class or impoverished by U.S. standards. When a minor accident, illness, or funeral can financially ruin a household, “ayuda” becomes less of a bribe and more of a lifeline.
What Americans call corruption, Filipinos call survival.
” … the facade of democratic progress, the elected elites who oversee this system, are benefiting from the economic oppression of the populace because economic pressures render democratic institutions moot. In a world with no opportunity in the backdrop of abject poverty, democracy means nothing.“
And yet, the U.S. is gradually transforming into the kind of democracy the Philippines has. Trump and his billionaire class friends are on a global tour to celebrate arms deals in the Middle East while Medicaid is on the chopping block. In Trump’s America, the middle class is quietly dissolving under the weight of $1.7 trillion in student loan debt, rising healthcare premiums, and record wealth consolidation where the top 1% of Americans own 31% of the nation’s wealth, while the bottom 50% who share just 2.5% of the nation’s wealth witness their solidarity sliced and diced along social issues divided along the color line.
In 2009, Moeletsi Mbeki wrote a sharp critique of post-apartheid South Africa in his book Architects of Poverty: Why African Capitalism Needs Changing. The main argument of his book identifies that the illness of society is the existence of post-colonial leaders who convince a populace of democratic progress and independence. At the same time, the colonial overlords operate kleptocratic systems in the shadows, as small government grants are doled out to the poor. True economic opportunity dwindles so that the people are fed just enough to stay complicit in their own enslavement, as a cruel system of democracy guarantees social control as opposed to progress. And in this system, the facade of democratic progress, the elected elites who oversee this system, are benefiting from the economic oppression of the populace because economic pressures render democratic institutions moot. In a world with no opportunity in the backdrop of abject poverty, democracy means nothing.
We indeed observe a similar dynamic in the Philippine context, where the major functions of the democratic order are incentivized with ayuda because the middle class is nonexistent. The middle class has been redefined as families that make between $300 and $2,000 per month, which is also known as the poverty rate in America.
That is what we see now. Not only in the Philippines, but globally. The architects of poverty are not hiding. They are running for office. And winning.
These leaders — from the Marcoses to Netanyahu — are cartographers of hunger, drawing borders not between nations but between those who eat and those who serve. Between those who vote and those who own the vote.
In their playbook, distraction is divine. While we scream about South African refugees granted U.S. asylum, we’re too tired to notice the quiet slaughter of affirmative action, public housing, and fundamental civil rights.
They are masterful at divide-and-conquer politics, ensuring every activist movement stays isolated in its silo. Environmentalists don’t talk to labor organizers, and food justice warriors don’t align with prison abolitionists. And while we argue over language, the elite rob us in perfect bipartisan silence.
If we lived in a just world, Trump wouldn’t be touring the Middle East in his Flying Palace. Instead, he’d be sharing a prison wing with Duterte. But alas, the U.S. still runs the world. In our great globalized civilization, we don’t prosecute our imperial figureheads.
We syndicate them.
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Editor’s Note: The Philippine Daily Mirror welcomes Elaine J.E.. Degale as a columnist. Ms. Degale’s column, The Dreamweaver, will appear every Thursday. Her articles will be in the guest column as her handle is being prepared. Her initial column, We Are Sub-Saharan, was published on March 23, 2025.
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Elaine Joy Edaya Degale is a Black-Filipina writer and lecturer at community colleges within the City University of New York (CUNY) and has an Ed.M. and M.A. from Teachers College, Columbia University.
She graduated cum laude from Mount Holyoke College, where she studied International Relations and Development, and continues to support literacy and food programming efforts in Indigenous communities through her Community-Based organization, OperationMerienda.org.
