The election of Rodrigo "Digong" Duterte to the Philippines' presidency says a lot about the state of an Asian country which despite recent modest strides is still missing out on the economic boom that has embraced the rest of the region. In choosing Duterte, voters have plumped for a man who, like Donald Trump in America, appears to have simple and straightforward solutions for the country's ills. However, unlike Trump, Duterte has already put some of his tough policies into practice. As mayor of Davao, the former state prosecutor took on a city which was once a byword for criminality of every kind. He waged an actual war on the gangs. Judging the police and courts to be corrupt or inefficient or both, Duterte formed and armed vigilante groups and unleashed them on the criminals. There was no due process. No formal arrest. The criminals were at best beaten up or knee-capped but many were shot and killed. Within months the gangs shipped out of the city. During the 22 years that Duterte has been mayor, Davao has become a safe and peaceful place to live. Not for nothing did he earn the nickname "The Punisher". Duterte made no secret of his methods. On the presidential campaign stump, he vowed to shoot drug dealers dead. He only put one foot wrong when he joked about raping an Australian missionary who had been murdered in a prison riot. His key platform was law and order and it clearly reverberated with the electorate. Common or garden crime remains a serious problem in many parts of the country. Duterte has said that he is the man to fix it. It has to be of great concern, however, if the new president intends to deploy the same vigilante tactics across the Philippines. These may have worked in the single community of Davao but creating vigilante groups everywhere is surely a recipe for anarchy. But the crime that most Filipinos would really like to see Duterte tackling is that of corruption which lies at the heart of the country's economic failures. In the single six-year term that constitutionally he was allowed, outgoing President Benigno "Noynoy" Aquino did take some steps to clean up the dominant elite kleptocracy. But Aquino himself was a scion of one of the top families. No one ever believed his anti-corruption drive would go very far. The 71-year-old Duterte is not part of the elite. The clear hope is that his ruthless campaign methods against common criminals will be equally effective against the powerful clique that controls so many of the economic and political levers. It would appear that there was no lever to control the coarse and bombastic Duterte. Power it seems has, for the time being at least, escaped the powerful. But this has happened before. In 1998, Joseph Ejercito Estrada a TV actor won the presidency on a tidal wave of support for his common-man credentials, lack of elite connections and promise to combat corruption. Estrada's rule quickly became a disaster. Within 31 months, he had been impeached and forced from office, for corruption. Not a clever man, Estrada had been seduced by the power of his office. Presidential functionaries may have had much to do with this and the subsequent corruption charges. The elite bided their time then. They will doubtless do the same with President Duterte.
