There was no tension on the faces of the police officers guarding City Hall in Pasig City on Monday evening. The mood outside was festive: Working-class Filipinos in sandals, basketball shorts and tank tops were sharing snacks and joking as they watched on a large screen the returns for the national election held earlier that day. Nearby, several police officers sat in the white, plastic monobloc chairs endemic to Filipino bureaucracy, taking it easy.
The bloodshed that so often attends political changeovers in the Philippines was happening in other provinces. Somewhere else, gunmen had shot candidates and voters. Somewhere else, a grenade had been thrown at a market. Somewhere else, soldiers had been killed.
But in Pasig, a mixed-income city within Metro Manila with more than a half-million residents, a sense of celebration surrounded City Hall. The keepers of tin-roofed shops smiled; the drivers of motorcycle taxis called out to each other. It already seemed clear that the bellicose Rodrigo Duterte, whom the residents of Pasig favored, would become the Philippines’ next president.
Most candidates’ campaign posters bore their names or smiling faces, but Mr. Duterte had festooned the entire country with images of fists, his signature symbol. The fist appeared on walls, cars, motorcycles, T-shirts and bare wrists. Depending on your point of view, the fist seemed to promise companionable knuckle bumps, secrets clutched in the palm or the threat of bruises.
At one point on Monday evening, I stood by three Philippine National Police officers on the steps of City Hall. One of them, Peterson Yñigo, had a massive Tavor TAR-21 hanging from his shoulder. “Israeli,” he said, hefting the weight of his weapon in his hands.
I told him I was worried that a Duterte administration would usher in a new dictatorship, undermine civil liberties and even endorse death squads, as Mr. Duterte is said to have done while mayor of Davao City — all horrors that many Filipinos, including my family, had fled in the 1970s.
“Should I be scared?” I asked.
Mr. Yñigo smiled and pulled up a sleeve of his black SWAT uniform. He was wearing a red bracelet that said, “DUTERTE” in all caps.
I asked him about the pardon Mr. Duterte said he would grant any law enforcement official who killed criminal suspects. “Drugs are a real problem here,” Mr. Yñigo said. “The criminals move in and out. Even in jail they move freely and conduct their business. It’s always the same criminals. We can’t do anything.” The implication seemed clear: Mr. Duterte’s pardon was a welcome idea.
On Monday evening, it also looked as though Ferdinand Marcos, Jr., a.k.a. Bongbong, the son of the dictator who terrorized the Philippines in the 1970s and 80s, would win the separate, simultaneous race for the vice presidency. (As of Wednesday afternoon, however, Congresswoman Leni Robredo, an advocate for low-income citizens and women’s rights, was leading Mr. Marcos by a narrow margin.) Mr. Yñigo is 28 years old, and like many people of his generation who are too young to remember Ferdinand Marcos, Sr., and seem misinformed, he voted for Bongbong.
“If you have a santol tree, it will not produce caimito,” he said, referring to two local fruits. “If the father was good, the son will also be good.”
Earlier that night I had had dinner in a gated community guarded by armed men a few kilometers from City Hall. The house had high ceilings and white floors; a maid served a multicourse Filipino meal and green tea. Alberto Gatmaitan Romulo, the 82-year-old former secretary of foreign affairs under presidents Gloria Macapagal Arroyo and Benigno Aquino III, sat at the head of the table. We were in the home of one of Mr. Romulo’s daughters, and the mood was somber: Both she and a younger brother had lost races of their own, for seats in the House of Representatives and the Senate, respectively.
Still, Mr. Romulo said he understood the country’s frustration and shared voters’ hopes. Citizens were angry at the outgoing Aquino administration, Mr. Romulo explained, because it had seemed impervious to their pleas for economic equality.
During Mr. Aquino’s six years in power, the poverty rate had remained stubbornly fixed, even as the net worth of the top 40 families in the country had tripled. “The administration did not invest enough in infrastructure, roads and communications, the things that would make the lives of the people better,” Mr. Romulo added.
I asked him the question I would put to Mr. Yñigo later that night: Should we fear a return to martial law, as under Ferdinand Marcos, Sr., when thousands of political dissenters, student activists, journalists and everyday citizens were killed, tortured or disappeared?
Mr. Romulo and his family had had to go into hiding for a time during that period. “I don’t think the bad old days will return,” he said. “I have hope this new president can make some good changes that will really help the people.”
Although divided by age, class and power, Mr. Romulo and Mr. Yñigo shared a similar outlook. They were like so many of the taxi and tricycle drivers, the shopkeepers and the overseas Filipino workers I’d talked to in recent days, who kept saying matapang: Tagalog for bold or brave, and shorthand for Mr. Duterte’s unique audacity, which they believe will bring security and prosperity to the Philippines.
Unlike other Duterte supporters, Mr. Romulo wasn’t taken with his crassness — the upturned middle fingers, the rape jokes, the threat of extrajudicial killings. But he readily discounted it as a populist tactic in the inevitable theater of an election campaign.
I’m not so sanguine. And I’m not alone in my unease. On Monday night, some of my friends were making grim jokes about sharing a nightcap before military-style curfews are imposed again. Others were trading tips on Facebook and Twitter about which countries Filipinos can travel to without visas.
Elections are human events, but they can feel like natural disasters. In the Philippines elections are like typhoons. They regularly sweep over the country, inevitable and overwhelming. Some alter its routine for a moment. Others scar its landscape and the lives of its citizens forever.
Laurel Fantauzzo is an instructor at the Writers’ Center of Yale-NUS College, in Singapore, and the author of the forthcoming The First Impulse.