What is left of the “people power” legacy in the Philippines?

Four decades ago, Filipinos and a global TV audience witnessed the dramatic overthrow of Ferdinand Marcos in the Philippines.  The February 1986 “people power” or “EDSA” uprising (after the thoroughfare at the centre of the protests) came to symbolise a peaceful, spontaneous revolt against an unbending and corrupt dictatorship. It served as model for other popular insurrections in Asia, particularly in Burma (now Myanmar), Pakistan and South Korea in the late 1980s, Nepal in 1990 (and again in 2006) and in Indonesia in 1998. Czech President Vaclav Havel said in a visit to Manila in 1995: "Your peaceful People Power Revolution was an inspiration to us for our own revolution."

Yet the landslide victory of Ferdinand Marcos Jr., the son of the toppled strongman, in the 2022 presidential election appeared to signal the death knell for the legacy of people power in the country. Since their return from exile in 1991, members of the Marcos political clan worked tirelessly to rehabilitate the reputation of Marcos Sr., portraying his rule as a “golden age” undermined by conniving elites who overthrew him. Despite well documented human rights violations and an economic collapse under Marcos Sr., many Filipinos became convinced – reinforced by social media disinformation - that the senior Marcos’s tenure was a time of peace and development, a classic case of authoritarian nostalgia.

The impact of “people power” reached its zenith after the 2009 death of Corazon “Cory” Aquino - the first post-Marcos president and widow of opposition politician Benigno “Ninoy” Aquino Jr. whose assassination had sparked mass protests.  Portrayed by her supporters as a kind of secular saint, her funeral sparked an outburst of national grief, which proved decisive in the victory of her son, Benigno “Noynoy” Aquino III, in the 2010 presidential race.

People power produced a “whiggish” narrative of democracy and good governance triumphing over dictatorship and kleptocracy. Yet the “official story” of EDSA de-emphasised ordinary Filipinos’ role in the overthrow of Marcos in favor of the “God given-miracle” in a predominantly Catholic country. Supposedly overcoming class differences in the Philippines, it became a divisive discourse. It was used to justify an elite-led overthrow of the movie star-turned populist president Joseph Estrada in 2001 who, while accused of corruption (hardly differentiating his presidency from many others), had been freely and fairly elected and remained popular among poorer Filipinos.

Major elite opponents of Estrada – big business, the Catholic Church hierarchy, and civil society activists - hoped his successor and vice president, Gloria Macapagal Arroyo, would prove a successful reformist in office like they believed Fidel Ramos, who had succeeded Cory Aquino and preceded Estrada, to have been. Yet Arroyo’s presidency was marked by vote fraud in the 2004 presidential elections and corruption scandals - an imbroglio which led to large protests and coup attempts.

Despite high hopes for major reforms under her successor, “Noynoy” Aquino, his administration mismanaged the aftermath of super typhoon Yolanda, was rocked by a major pork barrel scandal and bungled an anti-terrorist military operation. The final straw in the downfall of the people power legacy came shortly after Rodrigo Duterte’s surprise win in the 2016 presidential election when he granted a Marcos family request to bury their patriarch in the country’s  “hero’s cemetery”, despite the Duterte clan’s previously close ties to the Aquinos and earlier antagonism towards the Marcoses.

Marcos, Jr.’s successful presidential campaign six years later not only romanticised his father’s rule but also cast the post-Marcos democratic era as a failure. Yet, instead of repudiating the people power legacy as Duterte had, Marcos Jr. pursued what political scientist Julio Teehankee terms a “politics of redemption”. Marcos Jr. presented himself as a democratic president who stabilised the post-COVID economy and adheres to the rule of law. He noticeably slowed (though critics say did not completely stop) Duterte’s violent populist “war on drugs”. He also shifted Philippine foreign policy away from a pro-China orientation in defence of the country’s interests in the West Philippine Sea.

By 2024, the Marcos and Duterte dynasties’ feuding had become very public, with Vice President Sara Duterte using violent rhetoric to attack Marcos Jr. for betraying her family despite promises of a “UniTeam” during the campaign. The hostility between the clans peaked when Marcos agreed to extradite Rodrigo Duterte under an Interpol arrest warrant to face trial in the International Criminal Court (ICC) in The Hague for crimes against humanity. While the Duter-Ten senate slate battling the heavily favored pro-Marcos alliance to an electoral standoff was the big story of the 2025 midterm elections, it was also significant that two senators linked to the people power tradition won as well, including Paolo Benigno “Bam” Aquino IV, the nephew of Cory Aquino and cousin of her son, Noynoy Aquino.

In a strange historical twist, Marcos Jr. attempted to rebrand himself as a political reformer invoking good governance rhetoric characteristic of people power. Yet the junior Marcos opened a political pandora’s box by using his State of the Nation (SONA) address in July 2025 to accuse leading politicians of profiting from substandard or even “ghost” (i.e., unbuilt) flood control projects undertaken by corrupt contractors in a year in which typhoons caused particularly great damage. Unsurprisingly, accusations are now increasingly focused on members of his own ruling circle, particularly his cousin and former house speaker Martin Romualdez.

While in late 2025 over half of Filipinos expressed support for Sara Duterte, only just over a third still backed Marcos Jr. The younger Duterte remains the frontrunner in the 2028 presidential election, with reformists scrambling to find a common alternative candidate. Strikingly, nostalgia for her father’s presidency has eclipsed yearning for the reign of Marcos Sr. As proponents of people power had earlier discovered, appeals to democratic norms and good governance often have limited persuasive power when confronted by resurgent authoritarian nostalgia constructed around historical revisionism and fueled by grievance.

Mark R. Thompson is chair professor of politics, City University of Hong Kong. His most recent book is The Philippines: From “People Power” to Democratic Backsliding, Cambridge University Press, 2023.