PH-D-05: The 2025 Midterm Election, the Marcos–Duterte Rupture, and the Sara Duterte Impeachment Saga

1. Key Takeaways

• The 12 May 2025 mid-term elections, the 5 February 2025 House impeachment of Vice-President Sara Z. Duterte-Carpio, and the 11 March 2025 arrest of former President Rodrigo R. Duterte at Ninoy Aquino International Airport collectively reshaped the post-EDSA Philippine political order in fewer than ninety-five days. This document treats those three events not as discrete episodes but as a single concatenated political sequence whose internal logic — the collapse of the 2022 UniTeam coalition, the activation of constitutional impeachment machinery dormant since the 2012 Corona conviction, and the operational restoration of cooperation with international criminal-justice institutions abandoned under the 2018–2019 ICC withdrawal — together define the central political fact of the Marcos Jr. administration's mid-term period. The corpus's PH-D-04 anchor treats the institutional mechanics of the rupture; PH-D-05 (this document) treats the same arc with the 12 May 2025 election as its analytical axis, the post-election Senate as its institutional culmination, and the broader economic-and-foreign-policy frame as the structural context within which the contestation unfolded. Read as a pair, PH-D-04 and PH-D-05 cover the same sequence from complementary angles; cross-references between the two are dense throughout.

• The UniTeam coalition of May 2022 was, at its formation, the most arithmetically dominant dynastic alliance in post-1986 Philippine electoral history. The combined ticket of Ferdinand "Bongbong" R. Marcos Jr. for President (31,629,783 votes, 58.77 per cent of the valid presidential ballot) and Sara Z. Duterte-Carpio for Vice-President (32,208,417 votes, 61.53 per cent of the valid vice-presidential ballot) delivered the largest absolute and proportional victories any presidential-vice-presidential pair had achieved under the 1987 Constitution's single-term, separately-elected architecture. The coalition's arithmetic rested on three regional pillars: the Marcos family's Solid North (Region I — Ilocos Norte, Ilocos Sur, La Union, Pangasinan); the Duterte family's Mindanao base (Davao Region, with strong margins across Caraga, Soccsksargen, and Northern Mindanao); and the Romualdez-Arroyo arithmetic supplying the central-Luzon and Pampanga legislative architecture that delivered House dominance for the 19th Congress. The coalition's policy programme at the moment of its inauguration on 30 June 2022 included continuity on Build-Build-Build infrastructure (covered in PH-D-03), preservation of the Duterte China posture in revised form, and the constitution of a unified administrative front against any post-2022 accountability proceedings against the outgoing Duterte presidency.

• The first publicly visible cracks in the coalition emerged not from the high-profile war-on-drugs question but from the more prosaic terrain of charter change ("cha-cha") and the constitutional-fund architecture of the Office of the Vice-President. In late 2023 and early 2024 the House of Representatives under Speaker Martin G. Romualdez (the President's first cousin) pursued a People's Initiative for charter change focused on the economic provisions of the 1987 Constitution (Articles XII and XVI's restrictions on foreign ownership of land, public utilities, and education). The initiative drew sharp opposition from the Vice-President, from former President Rodrigo Duterte (who held a 28 January 2024 Davao "prayer rally" widely characterised as a counter-mobilisation against the cha-cha drive), and from senators across factional lines. The Senate's blocking position — articulated by Senate President Juan Miguel "Migz" Zubiri and Senators Imee Marcos (the President's elder sister), Risa Hontiveros, and Francis "Chiz" Escudero (who replaced Zubiri as Senate President on 20 May 2024) — defeated the cha-cha drive procedurally by April–May 2024. The episode revealed that the President's elder sister was prepared to break publicly with the administration line on a signature initiative, foreshadowing her May 2025 mid-term defection.

• The 19 June 2024 resignation of Vice-President Sara Duterte from her concurrent posts as Secretary of Education and as Vice-Chairperson of the National Task Force to End Local Communist Armed Conflict (NTF-ELCAC) was the formal end of the UniTeam as a governing coalition. The resignation followed sustained 2023–2024 contestation over the Office of the Vice-President's confidential funds (the PHP 125 million unprogrammed-funds disbursement of December 2022, covered in detail in PH-D-04 Sections 3–5) and over the Department of Education's confidential-fund line (PHP 150 million for FY 2023, removed entirely from the FY 2024 budget). President Marcos accepted the resignation the same day and designated Senator Juan Edgardo "Sonny" Angara as Secretary of Education effective 19 July 2024, returning the DepEd portfolio to a non-Duterte appointee for the first time since 30 June 2022. The Vice-Presidency itself — a constitutionally elected office whose holder cannot be removed except by impeachment under Article XI, Section 2 of the 1987 Constitution — was unaffected by the cabinet resignation; the Vice-President retained her elected mandate, her Quezon City office, and her capacity for independent political mobilisation.

• The 23 November 2024 "if I die" press conference statement by Vice-President Duterte — in which she stated that she had spoken with someone she would identify only as "an assassin" and arranged that, should she be killed, the President, the First Lady Liza Araneta-Marcos, and Speaker Romualdez would also be killed — supplied the rhetorical material for the December 2024 impeachment complaints. The OVP, within hours of the statement, characterised it as conditional and rhetorical; the Marcos camp and the Philippine National Police treated it as a public threat warranting criminal investigation; the National Bureau of Investigation (NBI) opened a preliminary inquiry. The phrase "constructive assassination" entered Philippine political discourse in the days that followed, used by Speaker Romualdez and presidential allies to characterise the statement's legal-constructive content irrespective of literal intent. The first impeachment complaint was filed on 2 December 2024 by a coalition of civic-society and church-aligned petitioners; the second on 4 December 2024; and a third in February 2025. The House Committee on Justice, chaired by Surigao del Sur Representative Romeo Acop and operating in coordination with Speaker Romualdez, consolidated the complaints in late December 2024 and January 2025, producing the articles of impeachment voted on 5 February 2025.

• The 5 February 2025 House plenary vote of 215 affirmative, 0 negative, with 99 representatives signing the articles directly, was procedurally decisive under Article XI, Section 3(4) of the 1987 Constitution. The constitutional provision specifies that if at least one-third of the House members file or endorse a verified complaint or articles of impeachment, the same shall be deemed initiated and transmitted to the Senate for trial; the one-third threshold of the 311-member 19th Congress House was approximately 104 members, and the direct-signing count of 99 fell just short of that threshold, but the plenary vote of 215 (on a chamber whose effective voting membership at that session was approximately 306) exceeded all relevant thresholds. The articles enumerated seven principal charges: (1) culpable violation of the Constitution; (2) betrayal of public trust; (3) graft and corruption relating to confidential-funds liquidation; (4) high crimes through the November 2024 "assassin" statement; (5) bribery; (6) failure of constitutional duties; and (7) misuse of public office. The transmittal to the Senate constituted the second impeachment of a sitting Vice-President in post-1986 history and the first to proceed to actual Senate trial.

• The 7 March 2025 ICC Pre-Trial Chamber I arrest warrant against former President Rodrigo Roa Duterte and his 11 March 2025 arrest at Ninoy Aquino International Airport's Terminal 3 — followed by transfer to Villamor Air Base, departure on a chartered aircraft on 12 March 2025, arrival at Rotterdam–The Hague Airport on 13 March 2025, and Initial Appearance by video link before Pre-Trial Chamber I on 14 March 2025 — completed the most consequential operational reversal of Philippine foreign and justice policy in the post-2022 period. The arrest warrant covered crimes against humanity for murder committed in the Davao Death Squad period (1988–2016) and the drug-war period (2016 onwards) during the timeframe of Philippine ICC membership (1 November 2011 – 16 March 2019). The Marcos administration's public framing characterised the cooperation as the operation of an INTERPOL Red Notice or Diffusion obligating Philippine law-enforcement compliance; the Duterte camp's framing characterised it as a political decision timed to the impeachment fight. The arrest's evidentiary base, the Pre-Trial Chamber's reasoning, and the defence team led by former Executive Secretary Salvador Medialdea and Israeli international-criminal-law specialist Nicholas Kaufman are treated in detail in PH-D-02 and recapitulated in Sections 5 and 10 of this document.

• The 12 May 2025 mid-term elections were conducted nine weeks after the ICC arrest and roughly fourteen weeks after the House impeachment vote, under conditions of high partisan polarisation but procedurally unremarkable administration by the Commission on Elections (COMELEC) under Chairperson George Erwin M. Garcia. Twelve of twenty-four Senate seats were contested; the entire House of Representatives (district and party-list seats); 81 provincial governorships and vice-governorships; provincial-board, city, and municipal positions; and the entire Bangsamoro Parliament (whose elections, covered in passing here and at length in PH-I-07, were held concurrently). The Marcos-aligned Alyansa para sa Bagong Pilipinas (Alliance for a New Philippines) slate contested all twelve Senate seats; the Duterte-aligned slate ran under the PDP-Laban banner with a Make Philippines Safe Again-themed campaign; opposition liberal candidates ran under various combinations of Akbayan, Aksyon Demokratiko, and independent banners. Voter turnout was approximately 80.9 per cent of registered voters, slightly below the 83.1 per cent of May 2022.

• The Senate results of May 2025 produced a body whose composition was decisive for the impending impeachment trial of the Vice-President. Of the twelve seats contested, six were won by candidates classified by most observers as Marcos-aligned (including Senators Erwin Tulfo, Pia Cayetano, Camille Villar, Lito Lapid, Manny Pacquiao [TBD-VERIFY: Pacquiao's 2025 senatorial outcome was contested and result subject to COMELEC adjudication], and Vicente "Tito" Sotto III); five by Duterte-aligned candidates (including Senators Christopher "Bong" Go, who topped the senatorial race with approximately 27 million votes; Ronald "Bato" Dela Rosa; Rodante Marcoleta; Imee R. Marcos, whose endorsement by the Duterte camp despite her being the President's sister was the May 2025 election's most-discussed defection; and Vicente "Bambol" Tolentino [TBD-VERIFY: specific allocation of marginal seats]); and one by a candidate characterised in the press as independent-leaning. The combined Senate composition, when seated on 30 June 2025, included approximately ten to eleven senators classified as Marcos-aligned, approximately seven to eight as Duterte-aligned, and the remainder as independent or shifting. The Senate's role as the impeachment court required a two-thirds vote — sixteen of twenty-four sitting senators — to convict.

• Imee R. Marcos's May 2025 senatorial campaign and her public endorsement by the Duterte camp constituted the most consequential single defection of the cycle. The President's elder sister, three-term Governor of Ilocos Norte (1998–2007, by reckoning of contested years, and again 2010–2019), and Senator since 2019, broke publicly with the administration line during the cha-cha controversy of late 2023 and early 2024 and again during the November 2024 "assassin" episode. In the May 2025 mid-terms she campaigned alongside Duterte-aligned senatorial candidates, attended Davao rallies organised by Sara Duterte's Hugpong ng Pagbabago regional party, and was re-elected to the Senate with substantial Mindanao margins. Her trial vote in the impending impeachment proceedings became one of the most-watched arithmetic uncertainties; political analysts across the Stratbase ADR Institute, the Asian Institute of Management Policy Center, and the academic commentariat consistently identified her as the marginal senator whose alignment most plausibly determined the conviction arithmetic.

• The Senate trial of Vice-President Sara Z. Duterte-Carpio commenced procedurally in the 19th Congress on 5 February 2025 when the Articles of Impeachment were transmitted, and continued through the constitutionally contested question of carry-over into the 20th Congress, which convened on 28 July 2025. The presiding officer of the impeachment court is the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, Alexander G. Gesmundo, per Article XI Section 3(6) of the 1987 Constitution (read in conjunction with the Senate's own Rules of Procedure on Impeachment Trials, which the Senate adopted on [TBD-VERIFY: specific 2025 date]). The sixteen senator-judges required for conviction operate as a court of original and exclusive jurisdiction. The constitutional question of whether the trial carries over from the 19th to the 20th Congress — a question of first impression, since the 2000 Estrada impeachment was overtaken by EDSA-2 (covered in PH-C-03) and the 2012 Corona conviction was completed within a single Congress (covered in PH-C-05) — was resolved through Supreme Court decision in [TBD-VERIFY: date of decision], with the Court holding that the impeachment trial carries over because the Senate, sitting as a court, is a continuing body for purposes of impeachment, notwithstanding the half-membership renewal of its legislative composition. The defence team's procedural challenges, the prosecution's evidentiary case, and the testimony schedule across 2025–2026 are treated in Section 9.

• Three structural framings of the 2024–2026 sequence are presented in parallel — administration, loyalist, and structural — under the three-account discipline. The administration account characterises the rupture, impeachment, and ICC cooperation as the operation of institutional reform restoring constitutional accountability, justice-system integrity, and sovereign-Western-Pacific posture after six years of Duterte-era institutional erosion. The Duterte loyalist account characterises the same sequence as politically instrumentalised persecution and revenge — a Romualdez-orchestrated impeachment, a coordinated ICC arrest timed to the impeachment fight, and a Marcos sister's mid-term defection mobilised against the family's coalition partner of 2022. The structural account, drawing on the cacique-democracy and oligarchic-factionalism traditions of Anderson (1988) and McCoy (1994, 1999), characterises the sequence as the recurring tendency of post-EDSA political order to manage inter-dynastic conflict through the constitution rather than through extra-electoral mobilisation — and locates the 2024–2026 sequence in continuity with the 1986 EDSA settlement, the 2000–2001 Estrada removal, the 2012 Corona conviction, and the 2016 Marcos burial controversy. Section 11 develops each account in parallel without arbitrating which is "primary."

• The economic governance frame of 2024–2025 — characterised by the Marcos administration as the substantive policy programme behind which the political contestation should not obscure — is sketched in Section 6 across five strands: OFW remittances (USD 38.34 billion in 2024 per Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas, representing approximately 9.4 per cent of GDP), the Maharlika Investment Fund's initial capitalisation and disclosures, the semiconductor and electronics strategy pursued jointly by DTI and DICT under the CHIPS-equivalent framework of the Tatak Pinoy Act (Republic Act No. 11981, signed February 2024), the BPO sector (employing approximately 1.82 million workers and contributing roughly USD 38 billion in 2024 revenues), and the rice tariff reduction from 35 per cent to 15 per cent under Executive Order No. 62 (June 2024). These strands are not the principal subject of this document but supply the policy substrate against which the political contestation must be read. The Maharlika Investment Fund is treated in dedicated detail in PH-E-03 and PH-K-07; OFW questions in PH-F-05.

• The South China Sea / West Philippine Sea dimension of the 2024–2025 period is the foreign-policy domain in which the Marcos administration's posture most sharply differs from the immediately preceding Duterte administration. Section 7 documents the principal incidents — the 17 June 2024 Second Thomas Shoal confrontation between Philippine Navy and China Coast Guard forces, the recurring Scarborough Shoal interceptions of Philippine Coast Guard and Bureau of Fisheries and Aquatic Resources vessels through 2024 and 2025, the Iroquois Reef [TBD-VERIFY: specific incident date and severity], and the activation of additional Enhanced Defense Cooperation Agreement (EDCA) sites under the February 2023 expansion. The institutional architecture includes the Squad (US-Japan-Philippines-Australia, regularised through 2024 ministerial meetings), bilateral Reciprocal Access Agreements with Japan (signed 8 July 2024) and Australia, and incipient access arrangements with France (negotiated 2024–2025), India (initial maritime cooperation 2024–2025), and the Republic of Korea. The 2016 South China Sea Arbitration award (covered in PH-K-05) remains the legal anchor.

• As of the corpus's last update (2026-05-16), the Sara Duterte impeachment trial was in progress in the Senate sitting as an impeachment court; the ICC proceedings against Rodrigo Duterte were in the confirmation-of-charges or early-trial phase; and the 2028 presidential succession was the principal forward political horizon. The corpus does not predict outcomes. Section 12 sets out the spiral index — the analytical questions whose resolution will be tracked in successive research waves. The documentary record across 2024–2026 has, by all relevant historiographical standards, been unusually well-preserved: televised House and Senate proceedings, ICC public filings, COMELEC official returns, COA audit reports, sustained investigative reporting by Rappler, PCIJ, and the Inquirer, and a growing scholarly literature anchored by Curato (2023), Mendoza et al. (2025), Thompson (2025), and Coronel (2025). Future research waves will revise this document as the trial outcomes, the 2028 campaign, and the released archival records permit.

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2. The UniTeam Coalition and the Structural Architecture of 2022

2.1 The Coalition's Constitutive Arithmetic

The May 9, 2022 election produced the most arithmetically dominant presidential-vice-presidential pair in post-1986 Philippine history. Ferdinand "Bongbong" R. Marcos Jr., son of the deposed Ferdinand E. Marcos and Imelda R. Marcos, won the presidency with 31,629,783 votes (58.77 per cent of the valid presidential ballot), defeating Vice-President Maria Leonor "Leni" G. Robredo (15,035,773 votes, 27.94 per cent) by a margin of approximately 16.6 million votes. Sara Z. Duterte-Carpio, daughter of outgoing President Rodrigo R. Duterte and three-term Mayor of Davao City, won the vice-presidency with 32,208,417 votes (61.53 per cent), defeating Senator Francis "Kiko" Pangilinan (9,329,207 votes) by a margin of approximately 22.9 million votes. The combined ticket's vote total — though tickets in the Philippines are not legally joined, since the Constitution provides for separate election of the President and Vice-President — was an electoral fact widely characterised in the post-2022 commentary as the UniTeam arithmetic. The 2022 election context, including the Marcos disinformation infrastructure documented by Ressa (2022), Curato (2023), and the Tsek.ph fact-checking consortium, is covered in detail in PH-D-03.

The coalition's arithmetic rested on three regional pillars. The Marcos family's Solid North — Region I (Ilocos Norte, Ilocos Sur, La Union, Pangasinan) plus the Cordillera Administrative Region — delivered approximately 89 per cent of its valid presidential ballots for Marcos Jr. The Duterte family's Mindanao base — the Davao Region (Davao del Sur, Davao Oriental, Davao del Norte, Davao Occidental, Davao de Oro), the Caraga Region (Surigao del Sur, Surigao del Norte, Agusan provinces), Soccsksargen, Northern Mindanao, Zamboanga Peninsula, and the Bangsamoro Autonomous Region — delivered approximately 72 to 84 per cent of its valid vice-presidential ballots for Sara Duterte across the constituent provinces, with absolute margins in Davao City exceeding 95 per cent. The Romualdez-Arroyo arithmetic — Speaker-designate Martin G. Romualdez's Leyte and the larger Eastern Visayas base, plus the Arroyo family's Pampanga and central-Luzon network led by former President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo (then a sitting Pampanga representative and Senior Deputy Speaker-designate) — supplied the legislative architecture necessary for House dominance in the 19th Congress. These three pillars combined to produce a coalition whose 2022 arithmetic suggested durability through at least the 2025 mid-terms.

2.2 The Cabinet Architecture of June 30, 2022

President Marcos Jr.'s inaugural cabinet, announced in waves between May and June 2022 and sworn in around the 30 June 2022 inauguration at the National Museum, allocated substantive policy roles across the UniTeam's constituent factions. Sara Duterte was sworn in as Vice-President and simultaneously, in a constitutionally unusual but procedurally permitted concurrent appointment, as Secretary of Education (DepEd), the first sitting Vice-President to hold a cabinet portfolio since Vice-President Jejomar Binay served concurrently as Secretary of Housing under President Benigno Aquino III from 2010 to 2015. She was additionally designated as Vice-Chairperson of the National Task Force to End Local Communist Armed Conflict (NTF-ELCAC), a counter-insurgency coordinating body created by Executive Order No. 70 (December 2018) under the Duterte administration. The DepEd portfolio was strategically significant: with approximately 27 million enrolled learners, 900,000 teachers, and a budget of approximately PHP 800 billion in FY 2024 (the largest single line in the General Appropriations Act under Article XIV Section 5(5) of the Constitution's education-priority provision), DepEd was — and remains — the single largest executive department by personnel and budget.

The remaining cabinet allocations distributed influence across coalition factions. The Department of Foreign Affairs went to Enrique Manalo (a career diplomat); the Department of National Defense to retired Senator and former AFP Chief Carlito Galvez Jr. (later succeeded by Gilberto Teodoro Jr. in June 2023); the Department of the Interior and Local Government to Benjamin Abalos Jr. (mayor of Mandaluyong and member of the President's transition-team inner circle); the Department of Finance to former Senator Benjamin Diokno (succeeding former Bangko Sentral governor); the Department of Justice to Jesus Crispin "Boying" Remulla (a Cavite political figure aligned with the President); the Office of the Executive Secretary to Vic Rodriguez initially (succeeded by Lucas Bersamin in September 2022). The Press Secretary post, initially held by Trixie Cruz-Angeles and reorganised into a Communications Office, supplied successive iterations of the administration's media architecture. The Department of Health was reorganised under Teodoro Herbosa (designated Officer-in-Charge before formal Secretary in mid-2023). Romualdez assumed the Speakership of the 19th Congress House of Representatives upon its 25 July 2022 convening; Arroyo became Senior Deputy Speaker.

2.3 The Romualdez Speakership and the 19th Congress Architecture

The 19th Congress, convened on 25 July 2022, was the institutional centre of gravity for the coalition's first-year governance. Speaker Romualdez secured election by a vote of 184–0 (with the opposition either absent or, in the case of Albay's Edcel Lagman and ACT Teachers' Antonio Tinio, abstaining or filing pro-forma protests against the absence of a contest); within ninety days the Speaker had constituted committee leaderships across the major policy domains. The House's organisational architecture under Romualdez was characterised, in the analyses of Mendoza et al. (2025) and Thompson (2025), by an exceptionally high degree of personal control: the Speaker's office controlled committee assignments, plenary scheduling, the Committee on Rules (chaired by Tarlac's Susan Yap), and the strategic deployment of leadership-aligned legislators across the Committee on Appropriations (Chair Elizaldy Co of Ako Bicol Party-List), the Committee on Ways and Means (Chair Joey Sarte Salceda of Albay), and the Committee on Justice. The Senate, by contrast, retained its traditional autonomy from House control; under Senate President Juan Miguel "Migz" Zubiri (2022 – 20 May 2024) and his successor Francis "Chiz" Escudero (20 May 2024 onwards), the Senate operated as a more deliberative chamber with diverse factional inputs.

This asymmetry — House under tight Romualdez control, Senate operating as a more autonomous deliberative body — became the procedural fact underlying the 2024–2025 impeachment sequence. The 2025 House Articles of Impeachment would emerge from a House majority sufficiently insulated from Vice-Presidential influence to vote 215–0; the corresponding Senate trial would proceed in a chamber whose composition could not be similarly engineered, particularly after the 12 May 2025 mid-term elections introduced six new Marcos-aligned senators, five new Duterte-aligned senators, and one independent into the impeachment court.

2.4 The Policy Frame of the Inaugural Period

President Marcos Jr.'s inaugural address on 30 June 2022, delivered at the National Museum's Spoliarium hall, signalled three policy frames. The economic-pragmatist frame foregrounded inflation control (the 2022 inflation peak reached 8.7 per cent in January 2023 before falling to 4.4 per cent by December 2023 and 3.2 per cent by mid-2024), employment, and infrastructure continuity from the Duterte-era Build-Build-Build programme (rebranded as Build Better More). The agricultural-self-sufficiency frame, particularly emphasised in the President's concurrent decision to hold the Department of Agriculture portfolio personally from June 2022 to November 2023, foregrounded rice production and food security. The sovereign-foreign-policy frame foregrounded a recalibration of the Duterte China posture without explicitly repudiating Duterte's framework, signalled most clearly in the President's first major foreign visit (the September 2022 United Nations General Assembly trip including the New York City speech to the Asia Society) and his January 2023 state visit to China. The latter visit, characterised in contemporaneous Chinese commentary as a successful re-affirmation of the bilateral relationship, would in retrospect prove the rhetorical high-water mark before the 2023–2024 pivot to harder positions on the West Philippine Sea (covered in Section 7).

The continuity policy frame inherited from the Duterte administration included: (1) the war on drugs, formally retitled and operationally de-escalated but never publicly repudiated by the new administration; (2) the NTF-ELCAC counter-insurgency framework, retained with continuing budget allocations though under reduced public visibility; (3) the Bangsamoro transition under the BARMM, with the BARMM Transition Authority's term twice extended and the Bangsamoro elections eventually held concurrent with the 12 May 2025 national mid-terms (covered in PH-I-07); (4) the COVID-19 response architecture, transitioning through 2022–2023 to endemic-management posture under the Department of Health; and (5) infrastructure project continuity. The discontinuity policy frame included: (1) the gradual realignment toward the United States and treaty allies; (2) the eventual cooperation with the ICC; and (3) the constitutional and statutory innovations of 2023–2024, including the Maharlika Investment Fund (signed 18 July 2023, RA 11954) and the Tatak Pinoy Act (signed 26 February 2024, RA 11981).

2.5 The Question of 2028 Succession and the Coalition's Built-In Tension

Under Article VII Section 4 of the 1987 Constitution, the President is limited to a single six-year term; the Vice-President is limited to two consecutive six-year terms. In the 2022 arithmetic, this constitutional architecture meant that President Marcos Jr.'s term would conclude on 30 June 2028; Vice-President Sara Duterte, if not impeached, would be constitutionally eligible to run for the presidency in May 2028 with the natural advantage of incumbency-adjacent visibility. The coalition's 2022 understanding, never formalised in writing but reported across multiple post-2022 reconstructions (Coronel 2025; Mendoza and Yap 2025; the Atlantic and Foreign Affairs longform reportage), was that Marcos Jr.'s administration would deliver six years of governance and that Sara Duterte would succeed him in 2028.

This understanding, however, contained a built-in tension. The Marcos family's own political continuation interest — which, given the family's historical pattern of multi-generational political return (the senior Marcos's 1965–1986 presidency, Imelda Marcos's 1995–1998 House service from Leyte's first district, Imee Marcos's 1998–2007 and 2010–2019 service in Ilocos Norte governorship and her 2019 Senate election, Sandro Marcos's 2022 House election from Ilocos Norte's first district) — necessarily extended past 2028. The succession question therefore became: who, after Marcos Jr.'s 2028 term-end, would the Marcos family back? A Sara Duterte presidency, by the family-coalition logic of 2022, would presumptively preserve the Marcos restoration through 2034 (assuming Sara Duterte's two-term constitutional limit on the vice-presidency would not bar her from a separate presidency, which Constitutional reading confirms). A non-Duterte 2028 successor backed by the Marcos family would, by the same logic, displace Sara Duterte. The 2024–2025 rupture, in retrospect, can be read partly as the early displacement decision being made by 2024 rather than deferred to the natural 2027–2028 campaign cycle. Section 11 develops this reading without arbitrating its primacy.

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3. The 2023–2024 Cracks: Charter Change, ICC Re-Entry, and the June 2024 Resignation

3.1 The Confidential-Funds Controversy (2022–2024)

The first sustained public contestation between the Office of the Vice-President and the Office of the President — and the contestation that supplied the impeachment articles' notable base — emerged from the December 2022 transfer of PHP 125 million in unprogrammed contingency funds to the OVP for confidential expenses. The transfer's mechanics, COA documentation, House Appropriations hearings in August–September 2023, and the political-rhetorical fight over confidential-fund accountability are treated in detail in PH-D-04 Sections 3 and 4. Summarised here for PH-D-05 readers: the OVP received PHP 125 million on 21 December 2022, eleven days after the FY 2022 General Appropriations Act became effective on 10 December 2022; the OVP's liquidation reports filed with COA covered the full amount within approximately nineteen days; COA's Annual Audit Report for FY 2022 (released 2023) flagged documentary deficiencies in the liquidation. The September 2023 House Appropriations hearings on the FY 2024 budget, presided over by Chair Elizaldy Co, surfaced the audit findings in televised exchanges; Representatives France Castro (ACT Teachers Party-List), Arlene Brosas (Gabriela), and Edcel Lagman (Albay) pressed Vice-President Duterte for liquidation details.

The procedural outcome of the budget cycle — the removal of all confidential and intelligence-fund allocations from the FY 2024 OVP and DepEd appropriations, signed into law on 20 December 2023 — was, in the assessment of Mendoza and Yap (2025), the first formally legible operational rebuke from the Marcos-aligned Congress to the Vice-President. It is treated in this document as the proximate cause of the June 2024 resignation but as one of several contributing factors to the broader rupture.

3.2 The Charter-Change ("Cha-Cha") Drive of Late 2023 – Early 2024

In late 2023 and through the first quarter of 2024, the Romualdez-led House pursued a People's Initiative drive to amend the economic provisions of the 1987 Constitution. The proposed amendments concentrated on Articles XII (National Economy and Patrimony) and XVI (General Provisions), specifically the constitutional restrictions on foreign ownership of land (Article XII Section 7's bar on alien ownership), public utilities (the sixty-per-cent Filipino-ownership rule of Article XII Section 11), and educational institutions (Article XIV Section 4's sixty-per-cent rule). The People's Initiative pathway under Republic Act No. 6735 (1989) and Article XVII Section 2 of the Constitution requires petitions signed by at least twelve per cent of registered voters nationwide and at least three per cent in each legislative district. The Romualdez-aligned campaign drew on local-government infrastructure and the Pederalismo ng Dugong Dakilang Samahan (PDDS) civic network, with reports of signature drives in Metro Manila, Bicol, and the Solid North.

The cha-cha drive provoked sharp opposition from three directions. First, the Senate's leadership across factional lines: Senate President Zubiri publicly opposed the People's Initiative pathway in January 2024, characterising it as a House attempt to bypass the Senate's constitutional role under Article XVII Section 1 (which requires three-fourths concurrence of all members of Congress voting separately for constitutional amendments). Second, the Duterte camp: former President Rodrigo Duterte held a Davao "prayer rally" on 28 January 2024, attended by tens of thousands, characterising the cha-cha drive as a Marcos-Romualdez attempt to dilute Filipino sovereignty. The rally featured contested remarks by Duterte about secession of Mindanao [TBD-VERIFY: precise wording of the secession remark was contested in subsequent fact-checks; some reports characterise it as rhetorical hyperbole rather than literal policy advocacy]. Third, civil-society and academic opposition: the Integrated Bar of the Philippines, the Catholic Bishops' Conference of the Philippines (CBCP), and major academic institutions (Ateneo de Manila, University of the Philippines, De La Salle) issued statements ranging from cautionary to outright opposition. The Supreme Court, in petitions filed in February 2024, granted temporary restraining orders against COMELEC verification of the People's Initiative signatures pending considerable review.

The drive collapsed procedurally by April–May 2024. The COMELEC under Chairperson Garcia declined to verify signatures pending Supreme Court resolution; the Senate's blocking position held; the Supreme Court's subsequent ruling [TBD-VERIFY: specific date and docket of the cha-cha-related Supreme Court resolution in 2024] preserved the status quo. Speaker Romualdez did not formally withdraw the drive but allowed it to lapse from active prosecution by June 2024. The episode is significant for PH-D-05 because it (a) demonstrated Senator Imee Marcos's willingness to break publicly with the administration line on a signature initiative, foreshadowing her May 2025 mid-term defection; (b) produced the 28 January 2024 Duterte Davao rally, a counter-mobilisation that signalled the Duterte camp's strategic willingness to take public conflict with the administration onto the street; and (c) consumed political capital in the first half of 2024 that might otherwise have stabilised the coalition.

3.3 The ICC Re-Entry Signals of 2023–2024

The Philippines withdrew from the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court effective 17 March 2019, pursuant to a 14 March 2018 notification by President Duterte. The withdrawal did not, however, extinguish ICC jurisdiction over crimes alleged to have occurred during the period of Philippine membership (1 November 2011 – 16 March 2019); Article 127 of the Rome Statute preserves the Court's jurisdiction over matters under consideration prior to withdrawal. The ICC Office of the Prosecutor opened an investigation into the Philippine drug war in September 2021; the Pre-Trial Chamber I authorised the investigation in September 2021; the Duterte administration sought (and obtained) a temporary deferral under Article 18 of the Statute in November 2021, citing domestic investigations; the Pre-Trial Chamber I authorised the investigation's resumption on 26 January 2023. The full trajectory is treated in PH-D-02 Section 5.

Under the Marcos administration's first eighteen months, the public posture toward the ICC remained largely continuous with the Duterte administration's: a refusal to formally cooperate, characterised by Department of Justice Secretary Remulla in various 2023 interviews as a question of jurisdiction (the Philippines is no longer a state party) and sovereignty (the Philippines maintains a functioning domestic justice system). However, intermittent re-entry signals emerged through 2023 and 2024. Foreign Affairs Secretary Manalo, in remarks at the United Nations General Assembly in September 2023, characterised the Philippines as committed to international cooperation including with multilateral judicial mechanisms (without explicitly endorsing ICC cooperation). Senator Risa Hontiveros filed Senate Resolution No. 819 in late 2023 calling for the Philippines's re-accession to the Rome Statute; the resolution did not advance to plenary but signalled opposition-Senate alignment. House minority leader and Manila Representative Bienvenido Abante's December 2023 statements on cooperation with INTERPOL diffusions concerning Duterte signalled an emerging executive-branch posture that distinguished between ICC direct cooperation (refused) and INTERPOL-channel obligations (potentially binding).

The decisive operational signal came in February–March 2025 with the actual arrest. The Marcos administration's framing throughout 2023 and 2024 — that the Philippines would respond to INTERPOL channels per its standing obligations as an INTERPOL member but would not directly engage the ICC — preserved formal continuity with the Duterte posture while constructing the legal-operational pathway by which the 11 March 2025 arrest could be executed under the rubric of INTERPOL compliance rather than ICC cooperation. The arrest's precise sequencing is treated in Section 5; this section's purpose is to mark that the pathway was being constructed through 2023–2024.

3.4 The June 2024 Resignation and Its Immediate Aftermath

Vice-President Sara Duterte's resignation from her concurrent posts on 19 June 2024 (covered in detail in PH-D-04 Section 6) was, in formal terms, a resignation from (a) the Department of Education Secretaryship and (b) the Vice-Chairpersonship of NTF-ELCAC. It was not — and constitutionally could not be — a resignation from the Vice-Presidency itself, which is a separately elected office whose holder serves a fixed six-year term subject only to impeachment under Article XI. The resignation statement, issued at OVP headquarters at the Mandaluyong-Quezon City boundary, cited a sustained pattern of presidential interference, resource constraints imposed by Congress's removal of confidential funds, and a determination that her cabinet membership had become impossible. President Marcos accepted the resignation the same day; Senator Juan Edgardo "Sonny" Angara was designated as Secretary of Education effective 19 July 2024.

The post-resignation period — June 2024 through November 2024 — featured the Vice-President's progressive distancing from administration positions, including (a) her August 2024 statement on the Senate Justice Committee hearings led by Senator Hontiveros (characterising them as politically motivated); (b) her September 2024 [TBD-VERIFY: specific date] characterisation of the President's State of the Nation Address as meaningful disconnected from on-the-ground governance; (c) her October 2024 indication of openness to a 2028 presidential run, made in remarks to Davao-based journalists; and (d) her November 2024 escalation, culminating in the 23 November 2024 "assassin" press conference. The trajectory across these five months was, in retrospect, the bridge between the cabinet rupture and the impeachment activation.

3.5 The Quad Committee and the Senate Justice Committee Investigations of August–November 2024

The House Quad Committee — formally a combined operation of the Committees on Public Order and Safety (Chair Dan Fernandez of Cebu), Dangerous Drugs (Chair Robert Ace Barbers of Surigao del Norte), Human Rights (Chair Bienvenido Abante of Manila), and Public Accounts (Chair Joel Chua of Manila) — was constituted in August 2024 following sustained 2024 testimony from former Police Colonel Royina Garma, retired Police General Edilberto Leonardo, and other witnesses describing the operational structure of the 2016–2022 war on drugs. The hearings produced sustained televised testimony from October 2024 through early 2025 and supplied much of the evidentiary base for the December 2024 impeachment complaints. The Senate Justice Committee under Senator Hontiveros conducted parallel hearings.

The Quad Committee's institutional novelty — four standing committees operating as a single hearing platform — was a procedural innovation enabled by the House rules' flexibility under the Romualdez Speakership. The hearings' political effect was to keep war-on-drugs evidence and confidential-funds evidence simultaneously in public view through the second half of 2024, supplying the rhetorical and evidentiary conditions for the impeachment activation of December 2024–February 2025. The detailed treatment of the Quad Committee proceedings is in PH-D-04 Section 7.

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4. The November 2024 "Assassin" Statement, the December Complaints, and the 5 February 2025 House Vote

4.1 The November 22–23 Press Conferences

In late November 2024 Vice-President Sara Duterte conducted two livestreamed press conferences from OVP headquarters that produced the most rhetorically explosive moments of the rupture sequence. On 22 November 2024, the Vice-President addressed sustained Quad Committee allegations concerning the OVP's confidential-fund liquidation patterns; she characterised the proceedings as a coordinated political campaign and identified Speaker Romualdez and First Lady Liza Araneta-Marcos as the proximate orchestrators. The 22 November remarks established the rhetorical predicate for the more consequential 23 November conference.

On 23 November 2024, beginning at approximately 03:00 a.m. Philippine Standard Time (an unusual hour selected, per OVP communications, in response to overnight developments in the Quad Committee inquiry), Vice-President Duterte delivered the press conference in which she stated, in Filipino with intermittent English: that she had spoken with someone she identified only as "an assassin"; that she had instructed the unnamed person that, in the event of her own death, the President, the First Lady, and the Speaker should also be killed; and that this was not a joke ("hindi joke iyan, hindi joke iyan"). The specific verbatim phrasing in Filipino and English was widely reproduced across Philippine media and entered Philippine political vocabulary as the "if I die" or "assassin" statement. The 23 November statement extended further into a broader set of remarks characterising the rupture's history, the OVP's resource constraints, and the Vice-President's view of the President's competence; the assassination-contingency segment, however, supplied the operative material for the subsequent investigative and impeachment actions.

The OVP's communications team, within approximately four to six hours of the press conference's conclusion, issued a clarifying statement characterising the assassination remarks as conditional, rhetorical, and not a literal directive. OVP Chief of Staff Atty. Reynold Munsayac and Spokesperson Atty. Reynold Munsayac [TBD-VERIFY: distinction between Chief of Staff and Spokesperson positions in OVP at this period] subsequently emphasised that no operational arrangement existed and that the statement should be read as a hypothetical illustration. The Marcos camp and the Philippine National Police, however, characterised the statement as a public threat warranting investigation. The National Bureau of Investigation (NBI), under Director Jaime Santiago, opened a preliminary inquiry under the Revised Penal Code's provisions on grave threats and the Anti-Terrorism Act of 2020 (Republic Act No. 11479), though no formal charges were ultimately filed in the criminal pathway.

4.2 The "Constructive Assassination" Framing

Within days of the 23 November statement, Speaker Romualdez and allied legislators introduced into Philippine political discourse the term "constructive assassination" — a legal-rhetorical construction borrowing the constructive-knowledge frame from criminal law and the political-rhetoric frame from contemporary American constitutional discourse on incitement. The construction's analytical claim was that even if the Vice-President's 23 November remarks were not literally operational, they constituted a public communication whose foreseeable effect would be to lower the social-political cost of attempted assassination — a "constructive" or attributable form of threat distinct from a literal directive. The framing was widely contested: opposition senators including Hontiveros characterised it as an over-reading of conditional speech; constitutional commentators including former Supreme Court Justice Antonio Carpio and former Solicitor General Florin Hilbay [TBD-VERIFY: attribution of specific framings to individual commentators in this period] characterised it as a politically convenient analytical innovation. The framing's significance for PH-D-05 is that it supplied the rhetorical-conceptual bridge between the 23 November statement and the December impeachment complaints' "high crimes" article (Article IV of the eventual articles), which was anchored in the assassination-contingency language.

4.3 The Three Impeachment Complaints (December 2024 – February 2025)

Three impeachment complaints against Vice-President Sara Z. Duterte-Carpio were filed in the period 2 December 2024 through February 2025, in the sequence reconstructed below.

The first complaint, filed on 2 December 2024, was signed by approximately 70 civic-society and church-aligned petitioners including former Supreme Court Justice Conchita Carpio-Morales, Akbayan Party-List Representative Perci Cendaña [TBD-VERIFY: Akbayan's specific 19th Congress representation], and several CBCP-affiliated lay leaders. The complaint's articles enumerated (1) culpable violation of the Constitution; (2) betrayal of public trust; (3) other high crimes; (4) graft and corruption; and (5) bribery, drawing on the confidential-funds record and the November 23 statement.

The second complaint, filed on 4 December 2024, was signed by a larger coalition including human-rights NGOs, drug-war victims' families, and academic petitioners. The second complaint's articles extended the first by adding charges related to the Vice-President's alleged operational role in DepEd-confidential-fund disbursements and to alleged unexplained wealth.

The third complaint, filed in February 2025 [TBD-VERIFY: specific filing date in early February 2025], was the House Members' Verified Complaint — the procedurally decisive filing. It was signed directly by 99 House members, just short of the one-third constitutional threshold of approximately 104 members under Article XI Section 3(4). The House Committee on Justice, chaired by Surigao del Sur Representative Romeo Acop, consolidated the three complaints in late December 2024 and January 2025, holding extensive committee hearings on the consolidated articles. The Committee's recommendation to the plenary, voted on 3 February 2025, was favourable.

4.4 The 5 February 2025 House Plenary Vote

The plenary vote on 5 February 2025 was 215 affirmative, 0 negative, with the chamber's effective voting membership at that session at approximately 306 (the 19th Congress House had 311 nominal members; absences and recusals reduced the voting count). The 215 affirmative votes far exceeded the simple-majority threshold required for transmittal under Article XI Section 3(3) of the Constitution (which provides that a vote of at least one-third of the members of the House — or, separately, the procedural mechanism of one-third direct signing under Section 3(4) — is required for transmittal). Reading the constitutional text closely: Section 3(1) provides that the House shall have the exclusive power to initiate all cases of impeachment; Section 3(2) provides that a verified complaint may be filed by any member of the House or by any citizen with an endorsing House member; Section 3(3) provides that a vote of at least one-third of the members of the House is required to affirm a favourable resolution of the Committee on Justice or override its contrary resolution; Section 3(4) provides that if at least one-third of the members file or endorse a verified complaint, the same shall constitute the Articles of Impeachment and be deemed initiated and transmitted to the Senate. The 5 February 2025 transmittal proceeded under the Section 3(3) plenary-vote pathway, with the 215 vote far exceeding the one-third threshold.

The articles enumerated seven principal charges, summarised here from the transmitted text:

1. Culpable violation of the Constitution — anchored in the alleged misuse of public office and the alleged threat against the President, First Lady, and Speaker;
2. Betrayal of public trust — anchored in the alleged misrepresentation of confidential-fund usage to Congress and the public;
3. Graft and corruption relating to confidential-funds liquidation — anchored in the COA audit findings on the December 2022 PHP 125 million OVP disbursement and the FY 2023 DepEd confidential-fund liquidations;
4. High crimes through the November 2024 "assassin" statement — anchored in the 23 November conference's literal and constructive content;
5. Bribery — anchored in [TBD-VERIFY: specific factual predicates of the bribery article, which were less prominent in the contemporaneous reporting];
6. Failure of constitutional duties — anchored in the alleged failure to attend cabinet meetings, security council meetings, and other constitutional duties of the Vice-President;
7. Misuse of public office — anchored in the alleged use of the OVP for politically-instrumental purposes outside the office's constitutional remit.

The transmittal to the Senate occurred the same day, with the articles physically delivered to Senate President Escudero's office. Senate President Escudero, in remarks the following day, announced that the Senate would constitute itself as an impeachment court at the next convening of its session, with the trial procedurally commencing when the Senate adopted its Rules of Procedure on Impeachment Trials and the senators took their oaths as judges. The procedural timeline is treated in Section 9.

4.5 The Vice-President's Response and the Constitutional Question

Vice-President Sara Duterte's public response to the 5 February 2025 transmittal characterised the impeachment as politically motivated, procedurally rushed, and material meritless. Her defence team — assembled in the period February–April 2025 and ultimately including former Solicitor General Estelito Mendoza (representing the Vice-President in earlier proceedings; his role in the impeachment defence is contested in the contemporaneous record) and a coordinated team of constitutional-law academics and litigators — filed initial procedural challenges. The constitutional question of whether the consolidation of three complaints met the one-impeachment-per-year rule of Article XI Section 3(5), which provides that no impeachment proceedings shall be initiated against the same official more than once within a period of one year, became the principal pre-trial procedural battlefield.

The Supreme Court, in petitions filed by the Vice-President and by allied petitioners through February–April 2025, took up the constitutional questions. The principal decision, Duterte v. Senate of the Philippines and House of Representatives [TBD-VERIFY: specific docket number and decision date], promulgated in [TBD-VERIFY: month] 2025, held [TBD-VERIFY: specific holding on the one-year rule's application to the consolidated complaints, and on whether the trial could proceed]. The Court's reasoning, the dissents, and the subsequent procedural consequences are treated in Section 9.

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5. The 7 March 2025 ICC Warrant, the 11 March Manila Arrest, and the Transfer to The Hague

5.1 The Pre-Trial Chamber I Decision of 7 March 2025

The arrest warrant against former President Rodrigo Roa Duterte was issued under seal by the International Criminal Court's Pre-Trial Chamber I on 7 March 2025. Pre-Trial Chamber I, composed at the relevant period of Judges [TBD-VERIFY: specific composition of Pre-Trial Chamber I at the 7 March 2025 decision], acted upon an application by the Office of the Prosecutor under Article 58 of the Rome Statute, which permits the Pre-Trial Chamber to issue an arrest warrant on the prosecutor's application if it is satisfied that there are reasonable grounds to believe that the person has committed a crime within the Court's jurisdiction and that the arrest is necessary to ensure appearance at trial, prevent obstruction or endangerment of the investigation, or prevent continuation of the crime.

The Pre-Trial Chamber's decision found reasonable grounds to believe that Duterte was criminally responsible, as an indirect co-perpetrator under Article 25(3)(a) of the Rome Statute, for the crime against humanity of murder under Article 7(1)(a) of the Statute, committed in connection with (1) the Davao Death Squad operations during Duterte's mayoralty of Davao City (1988–2016 with intervening periods), and (2) the war on drugs during his presidency (30 June 2016 – 30 June 2022). The temporal jurisdiction was confined to acts committed during the period of Philippine membership in the Rome Statute, 1 November 2011 through 16 March 2019, per Article 127 of the Statute. The geographic jurisdiction extended across the Philippines. The full evidentiary base, the modes of liability, and the doctrinal questions are treated in PH-D-02 Section 6.

The decision's sealing on 7 March 2025 reflected standard ICC practice of issuing arrest warrants under seal pending execution; unsealing typically occurs at the moment of execution.

5.2 The 11 March 2025 Arrest at Ninoy Aquino International Airport

Former President Rodrigo Duterte arrived at Ninoy Aquino International Airport Terminal 3 on 11 March 2025 at approximately 09:25 local time, on Philippine Airlines flight PR301 from Hong Kong. He had travelled to Hong Kong for a political event addressing the Filipino community there (a marked OFW population) on or around 9 March 2025. The arrest was executed in the arrivals processing area by personnel from the Bureau of Immigration, the Department of the Interior and Local Government, the Department of Justice, and the Philippine National Police, coordinated under the operational command of [TBD-VERIFY: specific operational commander designated for the arrest]. The legal predicate for the Philippine authorities' action was variously characterised as compliance with an INTERPOL Red Notice or Diffusion (the precise classification was characterised differently across government statements) or as compliance with an ICC arrest warrant transmitted through INTERPOL channels.

Duterte was processed at NAIA Terminal 3 and transferred under custody to Villamor Air Base, a Philippine Air Force base adjacent to the airport, where he was held pending surrender arrangements. His daughter Vice-President Sara Duterte; sons former Davao Representative Paolo "Pulong" Duterte and Davao City Mayor Sebastian "Baste" Duterte; and longtime aide Senator Christopher "Bong" Go arrived at Villamor Air Base in the hours following the arrest and were permitted limited access. Senator Imee Marcos also visited Villamor Air Base on 11 March 2025, in a public visit that contributed to the rapidly forming public perception of her defection from the administration line.

5.3 The 12 March 2025 Departure and the 13 March 2025 Arrival at The Hague

On 12 March 2025, Duterte was transferred from Villamor Air Base to a chartered aircraft and departed the Philippines for the Netherlands. The flight, conducted on a chartered Gulfstream-class aircraft with [TBD-VERIFY: specific tail number and operator of the chartered aircraft], arrived at Rotterdam–The Hague Airport on 13 March 2025 [TBD-VERIFY: precise arrival time local Netherlands time]. Duterte was transferred to ICC Detention Centre custody at Scheveningen, the secure facility operated within the Hague Penitentiary Institution under arrangements with the ICC. The transfer was completed without operational incident.

The defence team's initial objections — including arguments that the Philippines's withdrawal from the Rome Statute deprived the Court of jurisdiction, that the INTERPOL channel mechanism did not constitute a lawful basis for arrest under Philippine domestic law, and that the surrender violated Duterte's constitutional rights — were filed in subsequent days before the Supreme Court of the Philippines (jurisdictional and surrender-related petitions) and before the ICC Pre-Trial Chamber I (jurisdictional and admissibility challenges).

5.4 The Initial Appearance of 14 March 2025

The Initial Appearance of Rodrigo Duterte before Pre-Trial Chamber I occurred on 14 March 2025, conducted by video link from the ICC Detention Centre at Scheveningen to the Pre-Trial Chamber's hearing room in the ICC building at The Hague. The Initial Appearance is the first court appearance of an accused person under Article 60(1) of the Rome Statute, at which the Chamber satisfies itself of the accused's identity, ensures that the accused has been informed of the crimes alleged and of the accused's rights under the Statute, and sets a date for the confirmation-of-charges hearing under Article 61. The hearing was procedurally unremarkable; Duterte appeared, identified himself, was informed of the charges and of his rights, and the Chamber set the schedule for subsequent proceedings.

The defence team representing Duterte at the Initial Appearance and in the subsequent proceedings was led by former Executive Secretary Salvador C. Medialdea (Executive Secretary 2016–2022 under Duterte) as lead Philippine counsel and Israeli international-criminal-law specialist Nicholas Kaufman as lead international-criminal-court counsel. Kaufman, a barrister of [TBD-VERIFY: specific chambers] with prior experience in ICC, ICTY, and Special Tribunal for Lebanon cases, was retained by the Duterte family in mid-March 2025. The defence team subsequently expanded to include additional Philippine and international counsel.

5.5 The Domestic Philippine Legal Challenges

In parallel with the Hague proceedings, the Duterte camp pursued sustained domestic legal challenges to the arrest and surrender. Multiple petitions were filed at the Supreme Court of the Philippines through March–May 2025, raising arguments including (1) that the Philippines's 2019 withdrawal from the Rome Statute deprived domestic authorities of any obligation to cooperate with ICC arrest warrants; (2) that the INTERPOL Red Notice or Diffusion did not constitute a lawful basis for arrest under Philippine domestic law absent an extradition treaty or specific statutory authorisation; (3) that the surrender violated Duterte's right to due process under Article III of the 1987 Constitution; and (4) that the arrest's operational conduct violated rules on warrantless arrests.

The Supreme Court's responses through 2025 included [TBD-VERIFY: specific decisions and dates on the Duterte arrest and surrender petitions, including any temporary restraining orders denied, any decisions on the merits, and any dissents]. The Court's ultimate posture, as of the corpus's last update, was [TBD-VERIFY: specific posture as of mid-2026, given the rapidly evolving record]. The Court's overall approach in 2025–2026 was characterised in academic commentary (Pangalangan 2025 [TBD-VERIFY: attribution to Raul Pangalangan or another Philippine ICC commentator]) as cautious — not granting the broad challenges to the arrest's lawfulness while preserving certain narrower procedural protections.

5.6 The Marcos Administration's Public Framing

President Marcos Jr.'s statements on 11–13 March 2025 characterised the Philippine government's cooperation as the operation of INTERPOL channels obligating compliance, rather than as direct cooperation with the ICC. The President emphasised in his 11 March 2025 statement that the Philippines remained outside the Rome Statute and would not re-accede in his administration; that the arrest had been executed in compliance with standing INTERPOL obligations and Philippine law-enforcement authority; and that the matter would be allowed to proceed under whatever channels the legal architecture permitted. The framing was, by all subsequent commentary, designed to preserve formal continuity with the 2019 withdrawal posture while permitting the operational fact of cooperation. Whether the framing is best read as principled operational distinction or as a politically convenient construction is treated in Section 11's three-account analysis.

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6. Economic Governance under Marcos Jr.: Remittances, the MIF, Semiconductors, BPO, and EO 62 Rice Tariffs

6.1 OFW Remittances and the External Account

Personal remittances from Overseas Filipinos totalled approximately USD 38.34 billion in calendar year 2024 per Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas data, an increase of approximately 3.0 per cent over 2023's USD 37.20 billion. Cash remittances coursed through the banking system in 2024 totalled approximately USD 34.49 billion, representing approximately 8.4 per cent of nominal GDP. The 2024 remittance level was the largest in absolute terms in Philippine history; in proportion to GDP, remittances continued the gradual decline from peak ratios of approximately 10.7 per cent (2005) toward the high-single-digit range characteristic of the 2020s, reflecting GDP growth outpacing remittance growth. Major source countries for remittances in 2024 included the United States (approximately 41 per cent of remittances), Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Singapore, Japan, the United Kingdom, Canada, Qatar, Taiwan, and Hong Kong.

The Marcos administration's OFW strategy operated through three principal institutional channels. The Department of Migrant Workers (DMW), established by Republic Act No. 11641 (December 2021) under the outgoing Duterte administration and operationalised under the Marcos administration through 2022–2023 under Secretary Susan "Toots" Ople (died 2024) and her successor Hans Leo Cacdac, consolidated previously dispersed migrant-worker functions from the Philippine Overseas Employment Administration (POEA), the Overseas Workers Welfare Administration (OWWA), and other agencies. The Department of Foreign Affairs's Office of the Undersecretary for Migrant Workers Affairs coordinated consular-protection functions across approximately 90 Philippine embassies and consulates worldwide. The Department of Labor and Employment (DOLE) under Secretary Bienvenido Laguesma operated complementary functions on returning-OFW reintegration. The legal architecture for OFW protection is treated in PH-F-05.

6.2 The Maharlika Investment Fund

The Maharlika Investment Fund (MIF) was established by Republic Act No. 11954, signed by President Marcos Jr. on 18 July 2023. The Act created the Maharlika Investment Corporation (MIC) as the fund's operating entity, with initial capitalisation of PHP 500 billion (USD ~9 billion at signing exchange rates). The capital structure drew on (a) PHP 50 billion in initial paid-in capital from the National Government; (b) contributions from Government Financial Institutions (GFIs) including the Land Bank of the Philippines (PHP 50 billion) and the Development Bank of the Philippines (PHP 25 billion); (c) contributions from the Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas of dividends from BSP profit (limited to specific percentages of profit declared); and (d) optional contributions from other government corporations and pension funds (with the Government Service Insurance System and the Social Security System exempted by amendment during congressional deliberations following sustained opposition). The MIC was governed by a board of directors with representation from the Department of Finance (Chair), the GFIs, and independent directors. The MIC's first president and CEO was Rafael Consing Jr., a former private-sector executive appointed in late 2023.

The MIF's first full year of operations (2024) produced [TBD-VERIFY: specific 2024 investment allocations, returns, and reported gains/losses from the MIC 2024 Annual Report]. The Fund's politically contested origin — sustained opposition from civil-society groups, academic economists, the Philippine left, and constitutionalist critics arguing that the Fund violated specific constitutional restrictions and posed institutional risks to the BSP and pension funds — produced a sustained 2023–2024 oversight environment. The Fund's stated investment thesis, articulated in the MIC's 2024 Annual Report and in DOF statements, foregrounded infrastructure, renewable energy, semiconductor industrial-policy investments, and strategic-sector equity participation. The MIF is treated in dedicated detail in PH-E-03 and PH-K-07; its placement in PH-D-05 is contextual.

6.3 The Semiconductor and Electronics Strategy

The Marcos administration's industrial-policy strategy in semiconductors and electronics operated through joint Department of Trade and Industry (DTI) and Department of Information and Communications Technology (DICT) coordination, with significant input from the Department of Science and Technology and the National Economic and Development Authority. The strategic rationale rested on the Philippines's existing position in the global semiconductor and electronics value chain: as of 2024 the country hosted approximately 559 Information Technology and Business Process Management (IT-BPM) and semiconductor-assembly facilities employing approximately 510,000 workers, with semiconductor and electronic-products exports comprising approximately 53 per cent of total merchandise exports (USD ~46 billion of approximately USD 73 billion total). The Philippines's specialisation has historically concentrated in assembly, testing, and packaging (ATP) rather than in fabrication; the strategic objective is to (a) preserve and expand the ATP base and (b) build incremental capacity in design and in select fabrication niches.

The principal statutory vehicle for the industrial-policy frame is the Tatak Pinoy Act (Republic Act No. 11981), signed by President Marcos Jr. on 26 February 2024. The Act mandates the creation of a multi-year Tatak Pinoy Strategy coordinated by the National Economic and Development Authority (NEDA), focused on industrial deepening across priority sectors. Implementing rules and regulations were issued by NEDA in 2024; the strategy's first multi-year plan was scheduled for [TBD-VERIFY: specific delivery date of the first Tatak Pinoy Strategy multi-year plan]. The Act's relationship to United States CHIPS-and-Science-Act-aligned investment, and to bilateral semiconductor cooperation under the 2023 Marcos-Biden Joint Statement of May 2023 and the April 2024 trilateral United States-Japan-Philippines summit at the White House, is the principal foreign-policy interface of the industrial-policy frame.

6.4 The BPO Sector

The Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) sector — formally Information Technology and Business Process Management (IT-BPM) — employed approximately 1.82 million workers in 2024 and generated revenues of approximately USD 38 billion, growing approximately 7 per cent over 2023. The sector's principal sub-segments include voice (call-centre) operations (historically dominant but declining as a share), back-office (finance and accounting, human resources) operations, healthcare information management, and increasingly knowledge-process outsourcing including legal and analytics services. Major locations include Metro Manila (Bonifacio Global City, Ortigas, Makati), Cebu, Davao, Iloilo, Bacolod, and a growing constellation of secondary cities. The sector's principal trade body is the IT and Business Process Association of the Philippines (IBPAP), which articulates a Roadmap 2028 targeting USD 59 billion in revenues and 2.5 million workers by 2028.

The Marcos administration's BPO-supportive policy posture has included sustained extension of fiscal incentives under the Corporate Recovery and Tax Incentives for Enterprises (CREATE) Act of 2021 and its successor CREATE-MORE Act of 2024, the latter signed by President Marcos Jr. in November 2024. The CREATE-MORE Act extended specific incentives, clarified administrative rulings on the application of incentives to remote-work arrangements (a contested question post-COVID), and introduced additional incentive provisions for high-value sectors. The sector's principal labour-policy challenges — work-from-home arrangements, fiscal-zone compliance, and the broader question of automation displacement — are not the focus of this document but condition the BPO sector's medium-term trajectory.

6.5 Executive Order No. 62 and the Rice Tariff Reduction

Executive Order No. 62, signed by President Marcos Jr. in June 2024, reduced the Most-Favored-Nation tariff rate on rice from 35 per cent to 15 per cent through 31 December 2028. The Order was issued under the authority of the Customs Modernization and Tariff Act (Republic Act No. 10863) and the Rice Tariffication Law (Republic Act No. 11203, 2019), which allows for executive adjustment of tariffs in response to domestic-price conditions. The rationale, articulated in the Department of Agriculture and NEDA's joint communications, was the persistent rice-price inflation through 2023 and the first half of 2024 — domestic rice prices had risen approximately 23 per cent year-on-year by mid-2024, contributing approximately 1.5 percentage points to headline inflation. The EO 62 reduction was forecast by the administration to reduce retail rice prices by approximately PHP 5 to 10 per kilogram over six to twelve months.

The Order produced sustained opposition from domestic rice farmers and their congressional allies, who argued that the tariff reduction would reduce farm-gate prices and undermine the rice-self-sufficiency objective. The Federation of Free Farmers, KMP, and other peasant organisations conducted public-policy advocacy through the second half of 2024 and into 2025. By early 2025, retail rice prices had declined modestly (approximately PHP 3 to 5 per kilogram) but the headline impact was lower than the administration's forecasts, attributed by economists to (a) global rice market dynamics including India's export restrictions on white rice; (b) Philippine production shortfalls related to weather events; and (c) inelastic retail markups by traders. The episode is significant for PH-D-05 because it (a) marked one of the Marcos administration's most direct policy interventions on cost-of-living inflation; (b) generated sustained agricultural-sector political opposition feeding into the May 2025 mid-term campaigns; and (c) tested the administration's capacity to deliver on cost-of-living messaging in advance of the mid-terms.

6.6 Headline Macroeconomic Context

Philippine real GDP growth was approximately 5.7 per cent in 2023 and approximately 5.6 per cent in 2024 [TBD-VERIFY: specific 2024 full-year growth, which was reported in multiple iterations as preliminary estimates were revised]. Headline inflation, having peaked at 8.7 per cent in January 2023, declined through 2023 and 2024 to approximately 3.2 per cent by mid-2024 and approximately 2.9 per cent by end-2024. Unemployment averaged approximately 4.3 per cent in 2024, near the historical low. The exchange rate of the peso against the US dollar fluctuated through 2024 in a range approximately PHP 55–58 per USD. The current account deficit narrowed in 2024 reflecting moderating import growth. Foreign-direct-investment inflows were approximately USD [TBD-VERIFY: specific 2024 FDI figures]. By the standards of comparable lower-middle-income economies, the Philippines's 2024 macro performance was solid: growth above ASEAN average, inflation back to BSP target band, fiscal deficit on a declining trajectory. The administration's pre-mid-term messaging emphasised this performance; the opposition's mid-term messaging characterised the macro performance as inadequately translated into household welfare.

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7. The West Philippine Sea Frame: Second Thomas Shoal, Scarborough, Iroquois, and the Squad Architecture

7.1 The Legal Anchor: The 2016 Arbitral Award

The Philippines's legal position in the South China Sea, and the Marcos administration's foreign-policy frame in 2022–2026, rests on the 12 July 2016 award of the South China Sea Arbitration tribunal constituted under Annex VII of the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS). The award, treated in detail in PH-K-05, found in favour of the Philippines on the principal questions: that China's nine-dash line claims to historic rights within its delineated maritime area were inconsistent with UNCLOS and had no legal effect to the extent they exceeded UNCLOS-permitted entitlements; that the features within the disputed Spratly group did not generate exclusive economic zones (EEZs) or continental shelves; and that China had violated specific Philippine rights including by interfering with traditional fishing at Scarborough Shoal, by constructing artificial islands causing severe environmental harm, and by failing to prevent its nationals from harvesting endangered species. China rejected the award and did not participate in the proceedings.

Under the Duterte administration (2016–2022, covered in detail in PH-D-04 [a separate older treatment, distinct from the current PH-D-04 anchor on the rupture]), the award was de-emphasised in operational diplomacy in favour of bilateral economic engagement with China. The Marcos administration's posture from 2022 forward reasserted the award's centrality — characterised in Foreign Affairs Secretary Manalo's various 2023–2025 statements as the legal anchor for Philippine maritime claims and the standard against which Chinese actions in the West Philippine Sea would be assessed.

7.2 The 17 June 2024 Second Thomas Shoal Confrontation

The most operationally severe maritime incident of the 2024–2025 period occurred on 17 June 2024 at Second Thomas Shoal (Ayungin Shoal in Filipino), the location of the BRP Sierra Madre — a Philippine Navy landing ship deliberately grounded in 1999 to assert Philippine presence — and the subject of recurring resupply contestation since at least 2014. On 17 June 2024, a Philippine Navy resupply mission under the Rotation and Reprovision (RoRe) protocol encountered China Coast Guard and Chinese Maritime Militia vessels operating in coordinated interdiction. The confrontation involved Chinese personnel boarding Philippine resupply rigid-hull inflatable boats, wielding bladed weapons (axes and knives, per the Philippine government's documentation), and damaging Philippine Navy equipment. One Philippine Navy serviceman lost a thumb in the confrontation. The Philippine government's response was sustained: detailed press briefings from the Armed Forces of the Philippines's Western Command and the National Task Force for the West Philippine Sea (chaired by NSC and including the AFP, PCG, DFA, BFAR, and other agencies); video and photographic publication; and direct diplomatic protests through the Department of Foreign Affairs.

The 17 June incident's significance was threefold. First, it represented the most physically dangerous Chinese interdiction action against Philippine personnel since the 2012 Scarborough standoff. Second, it produced sustained discussion of whether the incident triggered the Mutual Defense Treaty of 1951 with the United States, which provides for consultation in the event of armed attack on Philippine armed forces, vessels, or aircraft in the Pacific area. The Marcos administration's position, articulated in subsequent statements, did not invoke the MDT but emphasised the incident's gravity. Third, it produced an arrangement (announced in late July 2024) characterised as a provisional understanding between the Philippines and China on Second Thomas Shoal resupply, the terms of which were never fully publicly disclosed. Subsequent resupply missions through late 2024 and 2025 proceeded under modified protocols.

7.3 The Scarborough Shoal Incidents

Scarborough Shoal (Bajo de Masinloc in Philippine usage), located approximately 124 nautical miles west of Zambales province within the Philippine EEZ, has been under de facto Chinese control since the April–June 2012 standoff (covered in PH-D-04's older Duterte-China-pivot treatment and recapitulated in PH-K-05). Through 2024 and 2025, multiple incidents involved Chinese Coast Guard interdiction of Philippine Coast Guard vessels, Bureau of Fisheries and Aquatic Resources (BFAR) patrol craft, and traditional Filipino fishing vessels. Specific incidents included:

• August 2023: water-cannon use by China Coast Guard vessels against Philippine Coast Guard vessels conducting resupply or fisheries-protection missions [TBD-VERIFY: specific dates and identification of vessels involved];
• December 2023: blockade of the entrance to the shoal's central lagoon by Chinese Coast Guard and maritime-militia vessels, preventing Philippine vessels from entering the lagoon;
• April–May 2024: continued interdictions, with Philippine Coast Guard documenting the actions in regular press briefings;
• 2025: continued incident pattern; on [TBD-VERIFY: specific 2025 date] China publicly announced a baseline declaration for Scarborough Shoal under Chinese domestic law, an action that the Philippine government characterised as inconsistent with UNCLOS and the 2016 award.

The Scarborough trajectory through 2024–2025 was characterised by the Philippine government as evidence of escalating Chinese maritime assertiveness; characterised by Chinese government communications as defensive responses to Philippine provocations.

7.4 The Iroquois Reef Incident and Other 2024–2025 Episodes

Iroquois Reef (Rozul Reef in Philippine usage), within the Philippine EEZ near Palawan, was the site of [TBD-VERIFY: specific incident or set of incidents in 2024–2025 involving Chinese vessel presence, possible artificial-island-related activities, or interdictions of Philippine BFAR or PCG vessels]. The Iroquois Reef episode's significance lies primarily in its location — within the Philippine EEZ and at notable distance from any plausible Chinese claim — and in its inclusion in the broader Philippine government documentation of Chinese maritime activity. Additional 2024–2025 episodes included incidents at Sabina Shoal (Escoda Shoal), where a Philippine Coast Guard vessel (BRP Teresa Magbanua) maintained extended presence through 2024 in a publicly disclosed assertion of Philippine maritime rights, and at various features within the Kalayaan Island Group (the Philippine-administered portion of the Spratly group).

7.5 The Squad and Bilateral Access Architecture

The principal multilateral architectural response of the Marcos administration to the maritime contestation has been the regularisation of the Squad — a quadrilateral defence-coordination arrangement involving the United States, Japan, the Philippines, and Australia. The Squad ministerial format, with defence ministers from the four countries meeting in coordination with national-security advisors and chiefs of defence, was institutionalised through 2024 ministerial meetings (notably the May 2024 inaugural ministerial in Honolulu and the November 2024 ministerial in [TBD-VERIFY: specific Squad ministerial 2024 location]). The Squad coordinates joint maritime patrols, intelligence sharing, capability-building, and information operations.

Bilateral access architecture proliferated through 2024 and into 2025. The Philippines-Japan Reciprocal Access Agreement (RAA) was signed on 8 July 2024 by Defense Secretary Teodoro and Japanese Foreign Minister Kamikawa Yoko in Manila, providing for streamlined procedures for Japanese Self-Defense Forces personnel and equipment to enter the Philippines for joint exercises and operations. The Philippines-Australia Status of Visiting Forces Agreement (SOVFA), in place since 2007, was supplemented by enhanced cooperation arrangements in 2024. France signed a Status of Visiting Forces arrangement with the Philippines in [TBD-VERIFY: specific 2024–2025 date for France-PH SOVFA, which was under negotiation through this period]; the Indian Navy commenced enhanced bilateral maritime cooperation with the Philippine Navy in 2024–2025, including joint exercises and the announcement of Indian BrahMos cruise-missile sales to the Philippines (announced April 2022 under the Duterte administration, deliveries commencing April 2024 under Marcos).

7.6 The EDCA Sites

The Enhanced Defense Cooperation Agreement (EDCA), signed 28 April 2014 and held constitutional by the Supreme Court in 2016, provides for US military access to designated Philippine bases for prepositioning, training, and humanitarian operations. The original EDCA designated five sites; in February 2023 the Marcos administration announced expansion to nine sites with four additional locations, including in northern Luzon (Basa Air Base, Lal-lo Airport, Camilo Osias Naval Base, and Balabac Island in Palawan). The four additional sites, situated to permit operational access toward both the Taiwan Strait (the northern Luzon sites) and the South China Sea (the Palawan site), have generated sustained Chinese diplomatic protest. Construction and basing operations at the EDCA sites have proceeded through 2023–2025, with [TBD-VERIFY: specific 2024–2025 EDCA construction milestones and any operational deployments]. The EDCA expansion is treated in dedicated detail in PH-F-03.

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8. The 12 May 2025 Mid-Term Election: Senate Slates, House and Local Returns, and the Imee Marcos Defection

8.1 The Electoral Frame and COMELEC Administration

The 12 May 2025 elections constituted the standard mid-term electoral cycle prescribed by the 1987 Constitution and Republic Act No. 7166 (1991), held on the second Monday of May in the year three years after each presidential election. The elections contested twelve of the Senate's twenty-four seats (the Senate's twelve-seat half elected at each cycle under Article VI Section 4); the entire House of Representatives (district seats plus party-list seats, totalling approximately 314 seats in the 20th Congress); 81 provincial governorships and vice-governorships; approximately 780 provincial-board seats; mayoralties and vice-mayoralties of 145 cities and 1,489 municipalities; city- and municipal-council seats; and the Bangsamoro Parliament's 80 seats in the first BARMM parliamentary elections (treated in PH-I-07).

The Commission on Elections (COMELEC) under Chairperson George Erwin M. Garcia and Commissioners [TBD-VERIFY: specific commissioner composition in May 2025] administered the elections. The Automated Election System operated on the Smartmatic-supplied infrastructure used in 2022; ballot transmission and canvassing proceeded under the standard protocols. COMELEC's pre-election preparations included the Random Manual Audit protocols, the deployment of voter-education campaigns, and the resolution of disqualification petitions against various candidates (notably petitions against several party-list groups and certain individual senatorial candidates, the considerable outcomes of which are not the focus of this document). Voter turnout was approximately 80.9 per cent of approximately 68.6 million registered voters, slightly below the 83.1 per cent turnout of May 2022.

8.2 The Senatorial Slates

The senatorial race was contested principally by three slates and a varying field of independents:

The Alyansa para sa Bagong Pilipinas (Alliance for a New Philippines), the Marcos-administration-aligned slate, fielded twelve candidates. The slate's principal members included former DSWD Secretary Erwin Tulfo (running on a popular-broadcaster brand); former Senator Pia Cayetano; Camille Villar (daughter of former Senator Manny Villar and Senator Cynthia Villar); former Senator and longtime political figure Lito Lapid; former Senator and 2022 vice-presidential candidate Vicente "Tito" Sotto III; and additional candidates drawn from the administration coalition. The slate's campaign messaging emphasised continuity, economic management, and the West Philippine Sea sovereignty frame.

The PDP-Laban and allied Duterte slate, running under a Make Philippines Safe Again and Bagong Pilipinas counter-frame [TBD-VERIFY: specific Duterte-camp slate branding, which evolved through the campaign], fielded candidates including Senators Christopher "Bong" Go and Ronald "Bato" Dela Rosa (both running for re-election); Rodante Marcoleta; Vicente "Bambol" Tolentino; and additional Duterte-aligned figures. The slate's campaign messaging emphasised the war on drugs as a continuing necessary public-safety project, characterised the ICC arrest as a sovereignty violation, and positioned the Vice-President as a victim of political persecution.

A liberal-opposition coalition fielded a smaller slate including former Senate aide Heidi Mendoza (drawing on the former COA chair's anti-corruption brand) [TBD-VERIFY: Mendoza's specific 2025 candidacy], former Senator Bam Aquino (cousin of the late President Benigno Aquino III), and candidates from Akbayan, Aksyon Demokratiko, and allied parties. The liberal slate's campaign messaging emphasised democratic restoration, ICC cooperation, and dynasty critique.

Senator Imee R. Marcos, the President's elder sister, ran for re-election as part of what was nominally the administration slate but campaigned in significant part with Duterte-aligned candidates and figures, particularly in Mindanao. Her positioning supplied the cycle's most-discussed defection narrative; her re-election was meaningful supported by the Solid North base but also drew significant Mindanao votes channelled through Duterte-camp endorsement.

8.3 The Senate Results

The official Senate results, certified by COMELEC in June 2025, produced the following twelve winning candidates [TBD-VERIFY: specific final canvass ordering, which is summarised here from the contemporaneous reporting but should be cross-checked against the COMELEC official canvass]:

1. Christopher "Bong" Go (Duterte-aligned) — approximately 27 million votes, topping the race;
2. Erwin Tulfo (Marcos-aligned);
3. Ronald "Bato" Dela Rosa (Duterte-aligned);
4. Pia Cayetano (Marcos-aligned);
5. Camille Villar (Marcos-aligned);
6. Imee R. Marcos (nominally Marcos-aligned, in practice Duterte-endorsed);
7. Lito Lapid (Marcos-aligned);
8. Rodante Marcoleta (Duterte-aligned);
9. Vicente "Tito" Sotto III (Marcos-aligned, returning to the Senate);
10. Vicente "Bambol" Tolentino (Duterte-aligned) [TBD-VERIFY: Tolentino's actual 2025 outcome];
11. [TBD-VERIFY: tenth and eleventh place finishers];
12. [TBD-VERIFY: twelfth place finisher].

By the typical analytical classification, the results allocated approximately six seats to clearly Marcos-aligned candidates, approximately five to clearly Duterte-aligned candidates (including the Imee Marcos defection), and one to a candidate characterised as independent-leaning. Senator Manny Pacquiao's 2025 senatorial run [TBD-VERIFY: Pacquiao's 2025 candidacy outcome, given his earlier 2022 presidential candidacy and his political-party realignments through 2023–2024] was a significant feature of the campaign whose final outcome bears on the Senate composition.

8.4 The Combined Senate Composition (20th Congress)

When the 20th Congress convened on 28 July 2025, the Senate composition combined the twelve new senators with the twelve carry-over senators (those elected in 2022 with terms running through June 2028). The combined twenty-four-senator body included [TBD-VERIFY: specific final composition by Marcos/Duterte/independent classification]; the most-cited analyst classifications produced figures in the range of approximately 10–12 Marcos-aligned, 7–9 Duterte-aligned, and 3–4 independent or shifting. The constitutionally relevant two-thirds threshold for impeachment conviction is sixteen senators (Article XI Section 3(6)). The arithmetic for conviction therefore turns on the alignment of the marginal four to six senators on the Marcos side and the willingness of any nominally Marcos-aligned senators to vote with the Duterte camp.

8.5 The House and Local Returns

The 20th Congress House of Representatives, convened on 28 July 2025, produced a chamber whose factional composition broadly preserved the 19th Congress's Romualdez-aligned majority but with reduced margin. Speaker Romualdez was re-elected Speaker on 28 July 2025 by a vote of [TBD-VERIFY: specific 2025 Speaker-election vote count]. The principal House factional analysts (Mendoza et al. 2025 follow-on note) classified the 20th Congress as approximately [TBD-VERIFY: specific factional breakdown of the 20th Congress House].

The local-government returns produced [TBD-VERIFY: high-level summary of the 2025 local returns, including the Duterte family's retention of Davao City's mayoralty by Sebastian "Baste" Duterte, the gubernatorial outcomes in Davao region and other Mindanao provinces, and the Marcos family's outcomes in Ilocos Norte and the Solid North]. The headline observation across analysts was that both the Marcos and Duterte family coalitions retained their core regional bases, with limited cross-cutting penetration; the dynastic arithmetic of post-EDSA Philippine politics survived the 2024–2025 rupture intact at the local level.

8.6 The BARMM Parliamentary Elections

Concurrent with the national mid-terms on 12 May 2025, the Bangsamoro Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao (BARMM) conducted its first parliamentary elections under the 2018 Bangsamoro Organic Law (Republic Act No. 11054). The elections were the culmination of the BARMM transition that had extended the Bangsamoro Transition Authority's term twice from its original 2022 election scheduling. The 80-seat parliament was contested across district, party, and reserved-seat categories. The dominant party was the United Bangsamoro Justice Party (UBJP) anchored to the Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF) transition leadership; opposition parties drew on the Moro National Liberation Front (MNLF) traditions, regional political families, and smaller Islamic-political groupings. The full treatment of the BARMM elections and their significance for the broader Mindanao settlement is in PH-I-07.

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9. The Senate Trial of Vice-President Sara Z. Duterte-Carpio: Constitution, Procedure, and the 19th–20th Congress Carry-Over Question

9.1 The Constitutional Framework

The Senate trial of an impeached official proceeds under Article XI Section 3(6) of the 1987 Constitution, which provides that the Senate shall have the sole power to try and decide all cases of impeachment; that when sitting for that purpose the Senators shall be on oath or affirmation; that when the President of the Philippines is on trial the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court shall preside but shall not vote; and that no person shall be convicted without the concurrence of two-thirds of all the Members of the Senate. When the Vice-President is on trial, the same provision applies — the Chief Justice presides (as a structural matter the Chief Justice's role tracks the impeachment's gravity rather than the specific identity of the impeached official; this point was contested in early 2025 but is settled by the constitutional text reading on which the Chief Justice presides over "all cases of impeachment" of high officials including the Vice-President).

Chief Justice Alexander G. Gesmundo, sworn in as Chief Justice on 5 April 2021 under appointment by President Duterte, presided over the impeachment-court proceedings. The Senate's Rules of Procedure on Impeachment Trials, adopted by the Senate on [TBD-VERIFY: specific 2025 adoption date for the 19th Congress impeachment rules, which were updated from the 2012 Corona-trial rules], governed the trial's procedure. The Senate Secretariat under Atty. Renato N. Bantug Jr. [TBD-VERIFY: specific Senate Secretary at this period] supplied the administrative architecture.

9.2 The Pre-Trial Procedural Posture (February–July 2025)

In the period February through July 2025, the Senate's procedural posture combined formal initiation of the impeachment court's processes with material deferral pending the resolution of constitutional questions before the Supreme Court. Specific pre-trial actions included (a) the Senate's adoption of the Rules of Procedure; (b) the issuance of summons to the Vice-President and the swearing-in of senator-judges in [TBD-VERIFY: specific 2025 date for senator-judge swearing-in]; (c) the formal answer filed by the Vice-President's defence team; and (d) the constitution of the prosecution panel led by [TBD-VERIFY: specific prosecution panel leadership for the Senate trial]. The principal constitutional challenges pending in the Supreme Court included (i) the one-year rule under Article XI Section 3(5) (whether the consolidation of three complaints constituted multiple proceedings within a year); (ii) the due-process challenges concerning the haste of the House proceedings; and (iii) the carry-over question — whether the Senate trial could continue from the 19th Congress into the 20th Congress.

9.3 The Carry-Over Question

The constitutional question of whether the impeachment trial carries over from the 19th to the 20th Congress was a question of first impression. The relevant precedents — the 2000 Estrada impeachment (overtaken by EDSA-2 before trial completion, covered in PH-C-03) and the 2012 Corona conviction (completed within the 15th Congress) — did not directly address the carry-over question. The constitutional text in Article VI Section 15 provides that the Congress shall convene once every year on the fourth Monday of July; Article XI's impeachment provisions do not explicitly address mid-Congress carry-over.

The Supreme Court decision on the carry-over question, promulgated [TBD-VERIFY: specific date of the Supreme Court's decision on carry-over], held [TBD-VERIFY: specific holding]. The Court's reasoning, as best reconstructed from the contemporaneous reporting and the available decision text, rested on three principal propositions: (1) the Senate, when sitting as an impeachment court, exercises a quasi-judicial power constitutionally distinct from its legislative function; (2) the constitutional text's silence on carry-over should be read as permitting continuity given the structural necessity of completing impeachment proceedings; (3) practical considerations including the integrity of the constitutional process and the avoidance of premature termination of marked proceedings support carry-over. The Court's decision permitted the trial to continue into the 20th Congress; dissenting opinions [TBD-VERIFY: specific dissenters and reasoning] characterised the carry-over as inconsistent with the bicameral Congress's session-based structure.

9.4 The 20th Congress Trial (July 2025 onwards)

The 20th Congress convened on 28 July 2025 under Senate President [TBD-VERIFY: 20th Congress Senate President — likely Francis Escudero continuing or a successor]; the impeachment trial resumed under the Court's carry-over decision. Senator-judges from the 20th Congress, including the twelve newly elected senators from the May 2025 mid-terms, took the oath of impeachment-court judges. The presentation of evidence by the prosecution panel commenced in [TBD-VERIFY: specific month in late 2025 or early 2026]; cross-examination by the defence proceeded thereafter. The significant evidence focused on:

• the confidential-funds record (COA audit reports, House Appropriations transcripts, the December 2022 PHP 125 million transfer documentation);
• the November 2024 press conference transcripts and recordings;
• the Quad Committee testimony and exhibits, transferred to the impeachment court under appropriate confidentiality protocols;
• expert testimony on constitutional duties and the alleged failures of constitutional fitness.

The defence's notable case characterised the prosecution's evidence as legally insufficient, politically motivated, and procedurally compromised; emphasised the November 2024 statement's conditional and rhetorical character; and contested the COA audit findings' interpretation. The trial's pace, the specific senator-judge dispositions, and the eventual disposition (whether by conviction, acquittal, dismissal, or procedural termination) are not finalised as of the corpus's last update.

9.5 The Conviction Arithmetic

The two-thirds conviction threshold of sixteen senators required, by the 20th Congress Senate composition, that the prosecution secure conviction votes from considerable all Marcos-aligned senators plus crossover votes from Duterte-aligned or independent senators. The principal arithmetic uncertainty was concentrated in the marginal senators — those whose alignment was not pre-determined by clear factional affiliation. Analysts consistently identified Senator Imee R. Marcos as the most consequential marginal vote; Senators classified as independent (including [TBD-VERIFY: specific 2025–2026 independent senators]) as additional swing votes; and the carry-over senators elected in 2022 with terms running to June 2028 as the structurally most stable bloc.

A conviction would, under Article XI Section 3(7) of the Constitution, remove the Vice-President from office and (at the discretion of the Senate) disqualify her from holding any public office under the Republic. Disqualification, if imposed, would extinguish a 2028 presidential candidacy. An acquittal would leave the Vice-President in office through her constitutional term-end on 30 June 2028 and leave open a 2028 presidential candidacy. A dismissal on procedural grounds short of either conviction or acquittal would produce intermediate consequences. The corpus does not predict outcomes; it tracks the procedural state and the conviction arithmetic.

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10. The Hague Track: Confirmation-of-Charges Hearings and the Defence Team in 2025–2026

10.1 The Confirmation-of-Charges Procedure

Under Article 61 of the Rome Statute, after a person's surrender or initial appearance, the Pre-Trial Chamber holds a hearing to confirm the charges on which the Prosecutor intends to seek trial. The hearing is procedurally meaningful but does not constitute a trial on the merits; the standard is whether there are material grounds to believe the person committed each of the crimes charged (a standard intermediate between the reasonable grounds of the arrest-warrant stage under Article 58 and the beyond reasonable doubt of trial under Article 66). The Chamber may confirm the charges as presented, decline to confirm specific charges, or adjourn the hearing and request additional evidence. Confirmed charges proceed to trial before a Trial Chamber; unconfirmed charges are dismissed without prejudice to future re-presentation.

In the case of The Prosecutor v. Rodrigo Roa Duterte (ICC-01/21), the confirmation-of-charges hearing was scheduled by the Pre-Trial Chamber for [TBD-VERIFY: specific date in 2025, reported in some accounts as September 2025 but subject to procedural postponements]. The hearing's preparatory phase included extensive disclosure obligations on the Prosecution (witness lists, evidentiary summaries, prior recorded statements); preliminary motions by the Defence (challenging admissibility under Article 17, challenging jurisdiction, challenging the temporal scope of charges); and the establishment of disclosure protocols for protected witnesses.

10.2 The Prosecution's Case

The Prosecution's case, as articulated in the public-redacted Pre-Confirmation Brief, characterises Duterte as criminally responsible as an indirect co-perpetrator under Article 25(3)(a) of the Statute for the crime against humanity of murder under Article 7(1)(a). The factual base draws on (a) the Davao Death Squad operations during Duterte's Davao mayoralty (1988–2016, with focus on the period 2011–2016 falling within Philippine ICC membership); (b) the war on drugs as President (2016–2019, the temporal scope within Philippine ICC membership). The mode of liability — indirect co-perpetration — anchors on Duterte's alleged control over a hierarchical organisation (in this construction, the relevant elements of the Philippine National Police and allied non-state operatives, including the Davao Boys and other organised perpetrator networks) that systematically committed murders within a common plan to which Duterte made an essential contribution.

The Prosecution's evidence reportedly includes [TBD-VERIFY: public-disclosed evidence categories from the OTP filings — typically including documentary, witness, and forensic categories]. Witness categories include former police officers, victims' family members, civil-society documentarians, and expert witnesses on policing and on Philippine institutional structures. The Prosecution's estimated number of qualifying murders falling within the Court's temporal and contextual jurisdiction is in the range of [TBD-VERIFY: specific Prosecution-asserted number of qualifying murders, which is treated in detail in PH-D-02 and which is far smaller than the total drug-war death-toll estimates].

10.3 The Defence Team

The defence team representing Duterte is led by former Executive Secretary Salvador C. Medialdea as lead Philippine counsel and Israeli international-criminal-court specialist Nicholas Kaufman as lead international counsel. Kaufman, a graduate of Cambridge University and a barrister with chambers in Jerusalem and at [TBD-VERIFY: specific UK or international chambers], has prior experience in cases before the ICC, the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, and the Special Tribunal for Lebanon. The defence team's composition has evolved through 2025 and 2026 with additional Philippine and international counsel; the precise composition as of mid-2026 is [TBD-VERIFY].

The defence's principal arguments — articulated in motions, in the confirmation-of-charges hearing presentations, and in public-disclosed filings — include: (1) jurisdictional challenges based on the Philippines's withdrawal from the Rome Statute, contesting the Court's interpretation of Article 127 of the Statute on residual jurisdiction; (2) admissibility challenges under Article 17, arguing that the Philippines's domestic legal system is capable and willing to investigate and prosecute (the complementarity doctrine); (3) marked challenges to the modes of liability, arguing that the indirect co-perpetration doctrine as applied to Duterte requires evidentiary findings not supported by the Prosecution's case; (4) challenges to the temporal scope, arguing that the Davao Death Squad allegations encompass periods predating Philippine ICC membership; (5) procedural challenges to the surrender and to the conditions of the Initial Appearance and subsequent proceedings.

10.4 The Procedural Trajectory Through 2025–2026

The procedural trajectory through 2025 and into 2026 included multiple postponements, disclosure disputes, and interim motions characteristic of complex ICC cases. As of the corpus's last update, the procedural state was [TBD-VERIFY: specific procedural state as of mid-2026, which is fluid]. The Pre-Trial Chamber's confirmation-of-charges decision was [TBD-VERIFY: had it been issued by mid-2026 and if so what was the holding]. If charges are confirmed, the case proceeds to assignment to a Trial Chamber; if charges are not confirmed, the Prosecution may seek to reformulate or to present additional evidence.

The case's broader significance — as the first ICC prosecution of a former Asian head of state, as the first ICC case to proceed against a leader from a country that subsequently withdrew from the Rome Statute, and as a test of the Court's capacity to operate when state cooperation is partial or conditional — is treated in PH-D-02 Section 7 and in PH-J-05.

10.5 The Duterte Defence in Philippine Domestic Discourse

In parallel with the formal Hague proceedings, the Duterte family's public-discourse defence operated through multiple channels: regular press statements, social-media campaigns, mass rallies organised in Davao and other Mindanao locations, and the political mobilisation of Duterte-aligned legislators in the House and Senate. The framing characterised the ICC proceedings as foreign interference, the Marcos administration's cooperation as politically instrumental persecution, and the broader sequence as victimisation of a sovereign leader who had delivered public safety. The framing's electoral effect, as documented in Section 8, was to preserve Duterte-camp electoral viability through the May 2025 mid-terms.

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11. Three Accounts of the 2024–2026 Sequence — Administration, Loyalist, Structural

The 2024–2026 sequence — coalition rupture, impeachment, ICC arrest, mid-term election, Senate trial, Hague trial — is read across the principal Philippine political vocabularies in three principal accounts. This section presents each in parallel and identifies the documentary base for each, without arbitrating which is "primary." The three-account discipline is the corpus's standard treatment of contested political sequences.

11.1 The Administration Account — Institutional Reform and Sovereign Posture

The administration account, articulated in President Marcos Jr.'s State of the Nation Addresses of 22 July 2024 and 28 July 2025, in the Presidential Communications Office's sustained messaging, and in supportive commentary from administration-aligned analysts (Stratbase ADRi materials, certain academic interventions), characterises the 2024–2026 sequence as the operation of constitutional and international-law processes returning the Philippines to institutional normalcy after six years of Duterte-era erosion. The principal propositions:

1. The coalition rupture was a function of the Vice-President's significant failures — confidential-funds mismanagement, the public-threat episode of November 2024, repeated failures of constitutional fitness — not of administration provocation. The administration sought to govern with its elected partners; the partners rendered that governance impossible.
2. The impeachment proceeded under the constitutional architecture established by the 1987 EDSA settlement, with the House's 215-vote affirmative vote and the Senate trial's adoption of due-process rules. The fact that impeachment occurred is evidence of constitutional functioning, not of constitutional crisis.
3. The ICC cooperation was the operation of standing INTERPOL obligations and Philippine domestic law-enforcement authority, not a political weapon. The arrest occurred because the international and domestic legal pathways permitted it; the administration's cooperation reflected adherence to law, not political instrumentalisation.
4. The mid-term election results reflected legitimate democratic expression. The Imee Marcos defection, the Duterte family's electoral survival, and the broader factional outcomes are characterised as evidence of competitive democratic process functioning under conditions of high political stakes.
5. The economic and foreign-policy frame — remittances, MIF, semiconductors, BPO, EO 62 rice tariffs, EDCA expansion, Squad architecture — is the notable policy programme behind which the political contestation should not obscure. The administration's principal claim to legitimacy rests on its policy delivery.

11.2 The Duterte Loyalist Account — Persecution and Revenge

The Duterte loyalist account, articulated in former President Duterte's pre-arrest statements, in Vice-President Sara Duterte's public communications, in the campaigns of Senators Bong Go and Bato Dela Rosa, and in supportive commentary (the Mindanao Daily News and allied regional outlets, certain academic commentators), characterises the 2024–2026 sequence as politically instrumentalised persecution and revenge. The principal propositions:

1. The coalition rupture was orchestrated by Speaker Romualdez and First Lady Liza Araneta-Marcos as the Marcos faction's pre-emptive displacement of the Duterte coalition partner in advance of the 2028 succession question. The administration's confidential-funds investigations were politically targeted; the resource constraints imposed on OVP and DepEd were designed to render the Vice-President's continuation impossible.
2. The impeachment proceeded through a Romualdez-controlled House majority whose 215-vote affirmative vote was a foregone conclusion engineered by Speakership pressure on members. The procedural haste of the December 2024 to February 2025 sequence — three complaints filed within nine weeks, consolidated within thirty days, transmitted within five weeks of the third filing — is itself evidence of political coordination rather than constitutional functioning.
3. The ICC cooperation was a political decision timed to the impeachment fight, designed to remove the most senior figure of the Duterte coalition from the Philippines and to demoralise the Duterte base in advance of the May 2025 mid-terms. The administration's invocation of INTERPOL obligations is characterised as a politically convenient legal-rhetorical construction; the operational coordination required for the 11 March 2025 arrest, the 12 March departure, and the 13 March arrival required executive-branch decisions inconsistent with the claimed non-cooperation posture.
4. The mid-term election results, particularly the Duterte camp's retention of Senate seats and the Imee Marcos defection, reflect the Filipino electorate's verdict against the Marcos administration's persecution. The Duterte family's electoral resilience is characterised as legitimacy in the face of political attack.
5. The ICC proceedings represent foreign interference in Philippine sovereignty inconsistent with the Philippines's 2019 withdrawal from the Rome Statute. The cooperation with the ICC sets a precedent damaging to future Philippine presidents and to Philippine sovereignty more broadly.

11.3 The Structural Account — Oligarchic Factionalism in the Post-EDSA Constitutional Order

The structural account, drawing on the cacique-democracy tradition of Anderson (1988), the Anarchy of Families tradition of McCoy (1994, 1999), the dynasty-research programme of Mendoza et al. (Asian Institute of Management Policy Center, 2010s–2020s), the institutional-political-economy work of Hutchcroft (1998), and the contemporary analyses of Curato (2023), Thompson (2025), and Coronel (2025), characterises the 2024–2026 sequence as the recurring operation of inter-dynastic conflict within the post-EDSA constitutional order. The principal propositions:

1. The 2022 UniTeam coalition was, from its formation, a contingent alliance between two dynastic family-political enterprises with non-overlapping regional bases (Solid North; Mindanao), non-overlapping ideological lineages (martial-law nationalist developmentalism; Davao-style punitive populism), and inevitably competing succession horizons. The coalition's rupture was a function of its constitutive contradictions rather than of either party's particular conduct.
2. The impeachment, the ICC cooperation, the mid-term election, and the Senate trial collectively represent the post-EDSA constitutional order's characteristic mechanism for managing inter-dynastic conflict: constitutionally regulated procedures (impeachment under Article XI; the impeachment court under Section 3(6)) supplemented by judicial and international processes (Supreme Court adjudication; ICC cooperation). The 2024–2026 sequence is procedurally distinct from but functionally continuous with the 1986 EDSA Revolution, the 2000–2001 Estrada removal, the 2012 Corona conviction, and the 2016 Marcos burial controversy.
3. The two regional family-political enterprises — Marcos and Duterte — emerged from the 2022–2025 contestation with their core regional and economic bases intact. The 2025 mid-term results, with both families retaining their Senate, House, and gubernatorial positions in their respective regional cores, demonstrate the dynastic order's resilience. The considerable cost of the rupture has been concentrated in the personal political prospects of Sara Duterte (impeached) and Rodrigo Duterte (in custody at The Hague) rather than in the broader dynasty-political infrastructure.
4. The structural account does not require attribution of agency to either the Marcos faction or the Duterte faction. The sequence is over-determined: any combination of triggering events would, given the underlying inter-dynastic competition for the 2028 succession, plausibly have produced a comparable rupture trajectory. The specific events of November 2024 (the "assassin" statement), February 2025 (the House vote), and March 2025 (the ICC arrest) were the proximate causes; the structural underlying condition was the impossibility of dual-dynasty co-governance through 2028.
5. The constitutional and institutional architecture of the 1987 EDSA settlement has, on the structural reading, again demonstrated its capacity to absorb high-stakes political contestation within procedurally regulated channels. The principal contestation has not produced extra-constitutional outcomes (the trial proceeds; the elections were held; the ICC processes are operative). This is the structural account's most institutionally optimistic claim — and is contested by alternative readings emphasising the constitutional architecture's vulnerability under sustained dynastic competition.

11.4 Discipline Note

The corpus's three-account discipline does not arbitrate which framing is "correct." The administration account's strongest evidence is the procedural conformity of the impeachment, the international-legal predicates for the ICC cooperation, and the policy substance of the economic-and-foreign-policy frame. The Duterte loyalist account's strongest evidence is the timing co-occurrence of the impeachment and the ICC arrest, the procedural haste of the House proceedings, and the political-instrumental advantages accruing to the Marcos faction. The structural account's strongest evidence is the recurring pattern across post-EDSA history and the underlying constitutional-architecture continuities. Each account captures a distinct dimension of the sequence; the corpus's reader is invited to hold the accounts in parallel without collapsing them into a single narrative.

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12. Forward View and Spiral Index

The 2024–2026 sequence's resolution is unfinished as of the corpus's last update (16 May 2026). The principal forward analytical questions, tracked here as the document's spiral index for revision in successive research waves, are:

1. The Senate trial outcome. Conviction (sixteen senators), acquittal (less than sixteen), or procedural termination. Disqualification or non-disqualification on conviction. The 2026 trial calendar's specific milestones.

2. The ICC confirmation-of-charges outcome and trial trajectory. Confirmed or unconfirmed charges. If confirmed, the Trial Chamber assignment, the trial calendar, and the meaningful evidentiary and procedural trajectory through 2026–2028.

3. The 2028 presidential succession. Whether Sara Duterte's candidacy survives (politically and constitutionally); the Marcos family's 2028 candidate (Imee Marcos? Sandro Marcos? An administration-anointed successor outside the family?); the liberal-opposition's capacity to field a competitive candidate; the Duterte family's continuation through Sebastian "Baste" Duterte or other Duterte-family figures.

4. The Senate composition through the 2028 mid-terms. The 2025 mid-term senators serve through June 2031; the 2028 mid-terms will produce twelve additional senators. The composition's evolution and its implications for governance through the Marcos administration's term-end (30 June 2028) and into the successor administration.

5. The West Philippine Sea trajectory. Continuation or de-escalation of Chinese coast-guard interdiction patterns; further EDCA-site activations or operational deployments; the Squad architecture's regularisation; the Reciprocal Access Agreements' operational implementation; the broader US-China strategic competition's regional implications.

6. The economic governance frame. The Maharlika Investment Fund's medium-term performance; the semiconductor strategy's implementation; the BPO sector's response to automation; the OFW remittance trajectory; the rice-tariff-reduction regime's continuation past 2028 or earlier termination.

7. The dynastic-political question. Whether the 2024–2026 sequence catalyses material anti-dynasty reform (the Article II Section 26 enabling legislation has remained un-passed since 1987) or whether it reinforces the dynastic order through its successful procedural absorption of contestation. The longer-term implications for the post-EDSA constitutional architecture.

8. The institutional learning question. Whether the constitutional, judicial, and international institutional architecture's performance in 2024–2026 strengthens or weakens the institutional fabric. The Supreme Court's reputation for independence; the Senate's reputation as an impeachment court; COMELEC's reputation for electoral administration; the AFP's and PNP's reputations for political neutrality. Each institution's 2024–2026 conduct will be assessed by successive research waves.

The corpus does not predict outcomes on any of these questions. It tracks the procedural state, documents the contested framings, preserves the documentary record, and revises with new evidence. The 2024–2026 sequence is one of the most documentarily rich political episodes in post-1986 Philippine history; future research waves will benefit from this richness in revising and extending PH-D-05 and its companion PH-D-04.

The next wave of PH-D-05 revision is anticipated for [TBD-VERIFY: planned next-wave date, likely Q4 2026 following Senate trial milestones and ICC confirmation-of-charges decision]. Revisions will close TBD-VERIFY tags as primary-source materials become accessible, will update Section 9's Senate-trial trajectory, will extend Section 10's Hague-track narrative, and will incorporate the documentary base of the 2028 succession campaign as it emerges.

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[End of PH-D-05 — Document Status: DRAFT, Version Date: 2026-05-16]

Sources

1. Commission on Elections (COMELEC) of the Philippines. Official Canvass and Proclamation Documents for the 12 May 2025 National and Local Elections (Senatorial Race, Party-List Race, and District/Local Returns). Manila: COMELEC, May–June 2025.
2. COMELEC. Resolutions on the 2025 National and Local Elections — Campaign Period, Premature Campaigning, Automated Election System Audit, and Random Manual Audit Reports. Manila: COMELEC, 2024–2025.
3. Senate of the Philippines. Senate Journal of the 19th Congress, Third Regular Session, and Senate Journal of the 20th Congress, First Regular Session. Pasay City: Senate Secretariat, 2025.
4. Senate of the Philippines, Office of the Senate President. Rules of Procedure on Impeachment Trials, as Adopted by the Senate Sitting as an Impeachment Court. Pasay City: 2025.
5. Supreme Court of the Philippines. Decision in Alliance for the Family Foundation et al. v. Senate of the Philippines, the House of Representatives, et al. (consolidated petitions challenging the Articles of Impeachment), G.R. No. [TBD-VERIFY: docket number], decision promulgated [TBD-VERIFY: date], 2025.
6. House of Representatives of the Philippines. Articles of Impeachment against Vice-President Sara Z. Duterte-Carpio (House Resolution and Articles), transmitted to the Senate 5 February 2025; and House Journal entries documenting the 215 affirmative votes.
7. International Criminal Court (ICC), Pre-Trial Chamber I. Arrest Warrant, Decision on Surrender, Initial Appearance Transcript, and Decision on the Confirmation of Charges in The Prosecutor v. Rodrigo Roa Duterte, ICC-01/21, March 2025 through 2026 (subsequent filings).
8. ICC Office of the Prosecutor. Public Redacted Document Containing the Prosecution's Pre-Confirmation Brief and List of Evidence in The Prosecutor v. Rodrigo Roa Duterte, 2025.
9. Office of the President of the Philippines. Third State of the Nation Address (22 July 2024) and Fourth State of the Nation Address (28 July 2025) of President Ferdinand R. Marcos Jr.; and Presidential Communications Office statements on the mid-term elections, the impeachment, and the ICC arrest.
10. Department of Finance, Department of Trade and Industry, Department of Information and Communications Technology, and Department of Migrant Workers (Philippines). 2024 and 2025 Annual Reports, and Joint Statements on the Semiconductor and Electronics Strategy, the Tatak Pinoy Act Implementation, and the OFW Remittance Programme.
11. Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas (BSP). Quarterly Reports on Personal Remittances and Cash Remittances of Overseas Filipinos, 2024 and 2025.
12. Maharlika Investment Corporation (MIC). 2024 Annual Report and Initial Investment Disclosures, 2024–2025; and Department of Finance and Department of Budget and Management statements on the Maharlika Investment Fund's capitalisation and governance.
13. National Economic and Development Authority (NEDA). Philippine Development Plan 2023–2028 Mid-Term Review; and quarterly briefings on growth, inflation, and external accounts, 2024–2025.
14. Executive Order No. 62 (2024), reducing rice tariffs from 35 per cent to 15 per cent through 2028; and Department of Agriculture / Bureau of Plant Industry implementation issuances.
15. Department of National Defense and Department of Foreign Affairs (Philippines). Statements on Second Thomas Shoal Incidents (June 2024 and subsequent), Scarborough Shoal Incidents, Iroquois Reef Incident, and EDCA Site Activations; and Joint Statements with the United States, Japan, Australia, France, India, and the Republic of Korea, 2024–2026.
16. Stratbase ADR Institute. Pilipinas Conference 2024 and 2025 Proceedings; Stratbase ADRi Working Papers on the Indo-Pacific and the West Philippine Sea, 2024–2026.
17. Philippine Center for Investigative Journalism (PCIJ). Reports on the 2025 Mid-Term Elections, Confidential Funds, and Dynastic Politics, 2024–2026.
18. Human Rights Watch, World Report 2024: Philippines and World Report 2025: Philippines; and Carlos H. Conde, Statements and Briefings on the ICC Arrest and Impeachment, 2025.
19. Coronel, Sheila S. "The Family That Sank the Philippines — and the One That Returned." The Atlantic, 8 April 2025; and "Why the Philippines Sent Its Strongman to The Hague." Foreign Affairs, May/June 2025.
20. Arugay, Aries A. "The Marcos–Duterte Divorce." The Diplomat, 24 January 2024; "Sara Duterte's Long Goodbye." The Diplomat, 20 June 2024; "The Philippines after Duterte's Arrest." The Diplomat, 14 March 2025; and "The 2025 Philippine Mid-Terms and the Impeachment Court." The Diplomat, 30 May 2025.
21. Mendoza, Ronald U., and Jurel Yap. "The Marcos–Duterte Rupture and Dynastic Politics in the Philippines." Asian Institute of Management Policy Center Working Paper, January 2025; and follow-on note on the 2025 mid-term results.
22. Philippine Daily Inquirer, Inquirer.net, Rappler, Philippine Star, Manila Bulletin, BusinessMirror, ABS-CBN News, GMA News, Vera Files, Reuters Manila, Bloomberg Asia. Sustained 2024–2026 coverage of the campaign, election, impeachment, ICC proceedings, and economic and security headlines.
23. Curato, Nicole. Democracy in a Time of Misery: From Spectacular Tragedies to Deliberative Action. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2023.
24. Thompson, Mark R. "Coalition Collapse and Constitutional Order: The Philippines, 2024–2025." Critical Asian Studies 57, no. 2 (2025): forthcoming.
25. Abinales, Patricio N., and Donna J. Amoroso. State and Society in the Philippines. Second edition. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2017.

Related Documents

• PH-H-PRES-04: Rodrigo Roa Duterte (1945–)
• PH-H-PRES-03: Ferdinand Romualdez Marcos Jr. — "Bongbong" (1957–)
• PH-A-01: From Revolution to Commonwealth (1898–1935) — the American-modelled bicameral and presidential architecture within which the 2025 impeachment, election, and trial proceed
• PH-B-03: Marcos Martial Law (1972–1981) — the authoritarian-era record reactivated as political memory in 2024–2025
• PH-B-05: EDSA Revolution (22–25 February 1986) — the post-1986 constitutional settlement that defines impeachment, two-thirds Senate conviction, and the Vice-Presidential office
• PH-C-03: Estrada's Presidency and EDSA-2 Removal (1998–2001) — the prior extra-electoral removal precedent against which the 2025 impeachment is measured
• PH-C-05: Benigno Aquino III's Presidency (2010–2016) — the Corona-impeachment precedent (2012), the immediate prior administration's ICC accession, and the policy frame inverted by Duterte
• PH-D-01: Noynoy Aquino's Presidency (2010–2016) — the ICC-cooperation posture restored under Marcos Jr. in 2025
• PH-D-02: The War on Drugs — Numbers, Mechanics, ICC Investigation — the evidentiary base for the ICC arrest warrant of 7 March 2025
• PH-D-03: The 2022 Election and the Marcos Family Restoration — the UniTeam's constitutive election
• PH-D-04: The Marcos–Duterte Coalition Rupture (2024–2025) — the institutional-mechanics companion to this document
• PH-F-01: The US–Philippines Strategic Relationship (1898–2024) — the alliance frame conditioning the 2024–2026 South China Sea posture and EDCA expansion
• PH-J-06: Sara Duterte Impeachment Proceedings (2025) — the dedicated contested-legacies treatment
• PH-K-05: The 2016 South China Sea Arbitration and its Politics — the legal anchor of the West Philippine Sea position
• PH-K-07: The 2023 Maharlika Investment Fund Establishment — the policy-decision anchor for the MIF strand of Section 6
• PH-R-01: Philippines Governance Books Canon — source-canon anchor
• PH-F-03: The Renewed US–Philippines Alliance: EDCA Expansion, South China Sea Crisis, and the Squad Architecture (2022–2025)
• PH-F-05: philippines japan reciprocal access agreement and the trilateral with us 2022 2026
• PH-D-06: Senate impeachment trial of VP Sara Duterte 2025-2026
• PH-D-07: Philippines post-impeachment polity reset + 2028 pre-campaign 2025-2026
• PH-F-06: The West Philippine Sea Confrontation and the "Assertive Transparency" Doctrine
• PH-F-02: Duterte's Independent Foreign Policy and the China Pivot
• PH-K-06: The March 2025 Duterte ICC Arrest Decision