No regret colors the President’s view of the alliance that carried him to Malacañang, even as the partnership that defined the 2022 campaign has since collapsed into open hostility. Asked by Bloomberg Television whether teaming up with Vice President Sara Duterte was a misstep, President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. rejected the premise outright.
“No, I don’t think so,” he said. “I think for the time that it was, that was the best thing that we could do. We had the same idea of what needed to be done in government. Maybe that’s changed, but if you look at it in the context of that period, I think that was the right thing to do still.”
The two campaigned together under the UniTeam banner, with Marcos seeking the presidency and Duterte the vice presidency, and both swept past their rivals by wide margins.
Whatever shared purpose once held the ticket together has since unraveled. Duterte stepped down in June 2024 from her posts as education secretary and as a vice chair of the government’s anti-insurgency body, a departure that laid bare the widening rift. First Lady Liza Marcos, for her part, has said her opinion of Duterte turned after the vice president was seen laughing while former president Rodrigo Duterte accused Marcos of drug use.
Matters escalated further when Duterte said she had arranged for someone to kill the President, the First Lady, and then-House Speaker Martin Romualdez should an assassination plot against her own life succeed. That statement became one of the grounds in the impeachment complaint against her — the second such complaint, lodged last month by the Marcos-allied House of Representatives.
Pressed on whether reconciliation remained possible, Marcos declined to cast the standoff as a feud. “I’m not conducting any more political war against anyone. I’m just trying to do my job. It is par for the course that you will be attacked, that you will be criticized. All I worry about is work,” he said.
He also pushed back on the notion that the country’s politics had narrowed into a clash of dynasties. “Everyone is saying there’s elections in a couple of years. And of course we have to attend to that. But I think it is not entirely accurate to describe that…there are warring families. The response is really to leave politics aside. Because the work of national development is a million times more important,” Marcos said.
