THE DUTERTE PLAN B AND THE ROBIN PADILLA TRAP

While watching one of Richard Heydarian’s programs, I heard Sir Ronald Llamas, retired Justice Antonio Carpio and Prof. Richard discuss a question that bothered me long after the episode ended. What happens to the Duterte movement if Sara Duterte is convicted and the Senate judgment disqualifies her from holding future public office, and who becomes their Plan B?

Prof. Richard has devoted an episode to Baste Duterte as a possible replacement for Sara, while discussions involving Sir Ronald Llamas, retired Justice Antonio Carpio and Prof. Richard have also touched on Bong Go, Robin Padilla and the changing loyalties inside the Senate.

Sara has not been convicted, the Senate has not delivered its verdict, and no one can say how every senator-judge will vote. But the possibility of a Duterte succession fight is no longer something I can dismiss as idle speculation.

There was a time when the Dutertes treated impeachment like another annoyance. They laughed, taunted critics and acted as though accountability itself was proof that powerful enemies were out to get them. That swagger is still there, but it no longer looks as effortless.

The impeachment trial is underway. Witnesses have appeared, documents have been presented, and the Senate has heard allegations involving confidential funds and unexplained wealth. Sara continues to hold substantial political support, including strong numbers in recent national surveys, but the family now has to face a possibility it once seemed too confident to take seriously: its strongest presidential prospect could be removed from office and disqualified from holding public office. Once that happens, the choices behind her are not reassuring.

PLAN A IS STILL SARA

The Duterte camp’s real Plan A remains preventing Sara’s conviction. The Constitution requires the concurrence of two-thirds of all members of the Senate for conviction. The impeachment court is now considering arguments over how that requirement should operate when some senators may not be able to participate in the final vote.

Sara does not have to convince every senator-judge that she is innocent. Her defense only needs enough votes to stop the prosecution from reaching whatever number the impeachment court ultimately determines is constitutionally required for conviction. That is why every rally, every claim of persecution and every display of continued support has political value.

The message to senators is obvious enough: the Duterte base is still here, it is still angry, and it will remember who voted against her.

That is the real firewall.

If Sara survives, she can claim vindication and continue toward 2028. If she does not, the family suddenly has a problem it cannot solve with one surname alone.

THE SUCCESSION PROBLEM

Baste Duterte is the obvious family substitute because he carries the surname. He is now Davao City mayor and has moved further into national party politics through his leadership roles in PDP and the RAGE Coalition.

The family logic is easy to see. Sara falls, Baste steps forward, and voters are expected to transfer their loyalty from one Duterte sibling to another. That sounds neat on paper. Politics rarely behaves that neatly.

Baste has yet to show that he can build Sara’s national political identity or match the political force Rodrigo Duterte brought into the 2016 race. Rodrigo spent more than two decades as Davao City mayor before seeking the presidency and arrived nationally with a persona millions of voters could understand immediately: the provincial strongman who promised punishment, order and a government willing to do what conventional politicians supposedly could not.

What followed was brutal and destructive in ways that should never be romanticized. But as political packaging, Rodrigo knew exactly what he was selling.

Baste seems to have copied the easiest parts: the aggression, profanity, swagger and constant confrontation. What he has not shown is whether he possesses his father’s timing, political instincts or national command. He has also not shown Sara’s ability to build an electoral identity that can stand on its own.

My less polite description is that Baste sometimes looks like the Temu version of Rodrigo Duterte: familiar packaging, familiar branding, and no guarantee that the product inside carries the same political force.

He may meet the constitutional qualifications for the presidency in 2028. That tells us very little about whether he is ready to govern a country.

Bong Go presents a different problem. He has now won two Senate elections and has performed strongly in early vice-presidential polling. But his political roots run overwhelmingly through Rodrigo Duterte.

Go's association with Rodrigo goes back to 1998. He served for years as his executive assistant, later became his special assistant in Malacañang, and has repeatedly described Rodrigo as his mentor and political inspiration.

The relationship between Go and Sara is more complicated than simply calling them enemies or allies. Sara publicly denied holding a grudge against Go in 2021, and she later supported his 2025 reelection. Yet Baste publicly attacked Go in 2024, prompting Senator Ronald “Bato” dela Rosa to acknowledge an internal disagreement that needed to be resolved inside the Duterte camp.

That record does not establish that Sara and Go are political enemies. It does show that the Duterte camp has contained real internal tensions despite their ability to cooperate when their interests coincide.

A conviction could therefore create space for Go to become a separate center of Duterte-aligned power while Sara and Baste protect the family line. That is a possibility, not an established split. Then there is Robin Padilla, who brings something neither Baste nor Go can easily reproduce: a mass audience that already knows how to listen to him.

Robin topped the 2022 Senate election with 26,612,434 votes. Celebrity recognition, Rodrigo Duterte’s endorsement and his populist appeal all helped put him at the top of a national ballot. Anyone still treating him as political comic relief is ignoring the election result in front of them.

The July 2026 Pulse Asia survey placed Bong Go at 27 percent and Robin at 21 percent in a hypothetical vice-presidential race. These are early numbers and they can change dramatically before 2028, but they are already enough to kill the comforting idea that Robin Padilla can simply be laughed out of national politics.

He has said he would be willing to become Sara’s running mate if Rodrigo asked him, although he later said he had no plan to seek the vice presidency. Even that answer says something about where he places his political loyalty.

Robin’s value to the family may lie less in succession than in his ability to carry Duterte grievance outside the Senate to people who already know him from popular culture. That becomes clearer once you stop listening only to what he says inside the chamber and start asking who else he is talking to.

ROBIN IS TALKING PAST THE SENATE

I think many of Robin’s critics are missing something because they are too busy laughing at him.

When Robin uses the Senate floor to remind people that he is not a lawyer, that he has spent time answering cases and that he is an ex-convict, those lines can sound ridiculous to a professional audience listening for legal reasoning. But I do not think the senators sitting in front of him are always his most important audience.

In 2025, during the dispute over convening the impeachment court, Robin said: “Hindi po ako abogado, ako po ay madalas akusado. Ako po ay ex-convict kaya ako po ay sanay sa korte.” During the trial this year, he joked that he had studied criminology at “UP,” meaning “University of Prison.” On September 8, while the impeachment court debated the voting threshold, he again described himself as an ex-convict and someone without a high level of formal education before saying he would defend the Constitution.

It is easy to laugh at that. I think that is exactly where his critics, me being one of them, become careless.

Political communication researchers describe this kind of ordinary-people-versus-elite appeal as populist identity framing. The politician places ordinary people inside one group while portraying an elite group as distant, arrogant, corrupt or hostile. Robin adds self-deprecation by saying the damaging thing first.

He tells you he is the ex-convict. He tells you he is not the lawyer. He tells you he did not come from the world of polished professionals.

Once he has said those things himself, ridicule does not necessarily weaken him. It can reinforce the identity he is presenting.

Whether this is planned by advisers or simply political instinct, the effect can be the same. Robin turns weaknesses into identification points. He places himself outside the world of lawyers, elite schools and polished professionals, then speaks from that position as someone who knows what it feels like to be judged by people with more education, more status and better English.

To an educated Filipino, this may sound absurd. To someone who has spent years being told that people like him do not belong in rooms where decisions are made, it can sound very different.

The Senate microphone gives Robin far more than speaking time. A speech can be clipped for Facebook, replayed on television, uploaded to YouTube and repeated by supporters. Every appearance becomes another chance to send a message far beyond the Senate floor.

I am one of you.

That is the message I hear underneath much of this performance.

Robin has already publicly lashed out at people attacking his credentials and level of education. He asked where the supposed arrogance of highly educated people had brought the Philippines and blamed people he described as arrogant and their oligarch masters for poverty, debt, flooding and dirty politics.

Once he frames the argument that way, ridicule over his grammar, education, acting career or prison record becomes useful material. He can turn a criticism of Robin Padilla into an accusation against the people making the criticism.

They look down on me because I am not one of them. Maybe they look down on you too.

That is far more dangerous than the joke his critics think they are making.

THE ROBIN PADILLA TRAP

I understand why people get angry with Robin. Some of his statements during the impeachment trial raise serious questions about his grasp of constitutional duties and the standard expected from a senator-judge. What bothers me is how easily justified anger turns into the exact kind of contempt he can use.

Call him “bobo” and you have given him an easier argument than defending his reasoning. Mock his accent and the debate moves away from competence. Attack his education and he gets another opportunity to portray expertise itself as arrogance.

Robin does not need to win an argument about constitutional law if he can turn the argument into a fight over who gets to look down on whom.

That is the trap.

A voter does not have to believe Robin is highly qualified. Electing him can become a rebuke to people who have spent years treating voters like them as ignorant. That is the political middle-finger vote, where the satisfaction comes from upsetting the people who did the sneering.

This is also why I reject the lazy idea that Filipinos simply love incompetence. That argument insults the same voters Robin is trying to claim.

Everyday work requires intelligence in forms that formal credentials do not capture. Farmers calculate weather, debt and market risk. Drivers make constant decisions about safety and money. Market vendors live inside changing prices, inventory and cash flow. Overseas workers adapt to foreign systems while supporting families across borders.

Intelligence does not belong to elite universities, and competence is not measured by polished English.

Robin’s acting background is irrelevant to the real question. His accent is irrelevant. His grammar is irrelevant.

The question is whether his public record shows the independence, judgment and institutional understanding expected from someone who could become president without warning.

That is where his critics should stay.

Ask what he believes the constitutional duty of the vice president requires. Ask whether he can make decisions independently of Rodrigo Duterte. Ask what his Senate record says about judgment under pressure. Ask whether he can defend his constitutional positions without turning criticism into a fight over education and social class.

Those are hard questions. They also respect the voter.

The greatest gift Robin Padilla’s critics can give him is their contempt.

If the family chooses Baste as its presidential candidate, Robin could bring national celebrity, an existing mass audience and the emotional language of Duterte grievance. I do not find that combination amusing.

There is an even stranger possibility. Robin could prove more nationally attractive than the presidential candidate beside him, leaving Baste to carry the surname while the supposed supporting candidate carries much of the emotional energy of the campaign.

A DYNASTY WITHOUT A SUCCESSOR

Sara Duterte’s impeachment has exposed a weakness in the Duterte succession plan. The family built its immediate national future around one expected successor, and nobody behind her has shown the same combination of surname, national following and presidential viability.

If Sara survives the trial and remains eligible, she remains the movement’s strongest apparent presidential prospect. Behind her, the choices get weaker and more unpredictable.

Baste has the name but has not yet demonstrated comparable national appeal. Go has organization and a proven national electoral base, but his deepest political ties run through Rodrigo and could put him in competition with Sara’s family faction. Robin has celebrity, mass recognition and militant loyalty, but serious questions remain about whether he is prepared for executive power.

A conviction and disqualification could therefore produce more than a replacement search. It could fracture the Duterte bloc.

Sara and Baste may try to keep the political inheritance inside the family. Rodrigo’s old network has Go. Robin has enough personal popularity to possess bargaining power of his own.

What looks like one solid bloc from the outside could become several groups fighting over the same angry electorate.

The Baste-Robin possibility is especially troubling because it combines two assets the family may badly need: the Duterte surname and Robin’s proven ability to command mass attention. Dismissing it because the pairing sounds ridiculous would be exactly the kind of mistake I am warning about.

THE WARNING

The discussion that started this piece bothered me because the Duterte Plan B question is not just about who replaces Sara. It exposed how easily Robin Padilla could become more politically useful every time his critics humiliate him.

They may believe every viral mistake weakens him. Some will laugh, call him ignorant and circulate clips meant to embarrass him. Robin can take those attacks and fold them into the identity he keeps presenting: the ex-convict who never went to law school, came from acting and does not speak like the professionals correcting him.

If enough voters see themselves in that position, an insult aimed at Robin can feel like an insult aimed at them.

That is where this stops being funny.

A politician who successfully presents himself as the ordinary person being attacked by elites can turn resentment into political identification. Research on populist communication has found that anti-elite and people-centered appeals can activate precisely that kind of division between an in-group of ordinary citizens and an out-group portrayed as distant or hostile.

Criticism therefore has to stay on competence, record, judgment and readiness for office. Challenge his constitutional arguments. Examine his Senate record. Ask whether his declared willingness to follow Rodrigo Duterte’s political instructions fits the independence expected from a national leader.

The vice presidency places its holder one constitutional step from the presidency. Anyone asking for that office should be able to show Filipinos that he or she can carry that responsibility from the first day.

Robin’s critics can demand that without attacking his grammar, accent, profession or background. If they turn the choice into one between dignity and the approval of people who look down on them, they may discover too late how powerful resentment can become at the ballot box.

And millions of voters may answer with the political equivalent of: “Fine. Then he is our vice president now.”

That possibility is what bothered me when the discussion ended.

It still does.