The younger Marcos, who now serves as House Majority Leader, described a tense Malacañang encounter during the 2022 campaign in which associates of then-president Rodrigo Duterte allegedly laid out a list of demands before agreeing to back his father’s presidential bid. He recounted the episode during a Saturday, August 8 interview with PRTV, an outlet tied to a company founded by presidential cousin and former speaker Martin Romualdez.
According to Sandro, the price of Duterte’s support was control over some of the most powerful positions in government. “He told the President (Marcos), ‘Fine, we’ll support you on the condition that we get to choose the executive secretary, we get to choose the House speaker, we get to choose the Senate president, we get to choose the secretaries…'” he said. “They demanded a lot of things.”
The House leader traced the confrontation to an unexpected summons his father received after reaching out for Duterte’s endorsement. “We got a call asking us to come to the Palace. We waited there for about two hours, just sitting around. Then we were finally ushered into the presidential guest house. I’ll never forget it. At the time, there was still no official endorsement from Malacañang,” he recalled, speaking in a blend of English and Filipino.
Rather than meeting the president himself, Sandro said, the Marcos camp was directed toward three unnamed individuals. “We were supposed to meet the President but instead we were made to face three people. I won’t say who they were. They essentially asked us, ‘What’s your plan? What can you do for us?'” he said. He declined to name the trio but noted that one currently holds a government post.
The elder Marcos left the meeting shaken, according to his son, who quoted him as saying: “Alam mo, kulang na lang, papatayin na nila ako e.”
No endorsement ever materialized. Duterte withheld his support throughout the race, instead throwing his weight behind longtime aide Bong Go, whose candidacy eventually collapsed when Go pulled out. The Davao City leader went further, publicly dismissing his eventual successor as a “weak leader” and a “spoiled child” ahead of the vote. Marcos still swept to victory by a wide margin over former vice president Leni Robredo.
Sandro suggested the seeds of the eventual falling-out were visible early on. “Part of me kind of saw it coming, not because of any one person, but because there were so many different parties around them, so many of them…. It was a power struggle,” he said.
That struggle had deep roots. Duterte was said to have been unhappy that his daughter, then-Davao City mayor Sara Duterte, settled for the vice-presidential slot beneath Marcos in a pairing known as UniTeam, an arrangement widely credited to former president Gloria Macapagal Arroyo. The partnership frayed once in office, particularly after the vice president was handed the education department rather than the defense post she had pushed for.
The rupture became open conflict in 2024, when Sara Duterte stepped away from the administration and her father leveled accusations that Marcos was a drug user. The government later moved against the elder Duterte, carrying out an International Criminal Court arrest warrant connected to his anti-drug campaign, and he has remained in custody at The Hague since March 2025.
Sara Duterte now confronts her own reckoning in the Senate, where an impeachment trial threatens to bar her from holding public office should the chamber vote to convict.
