One of the biggest reasons why presidential candidate Ferdinand Marcos Jr. is drawing a huge number of loyal followers is because he’s viewed as a lottery ticket to prosperity. The expectation is that a win by Marcos Jr. will both result in a tidy fortune for his supporters and a return to prosperity for our country.
It’s a tantalizing double bonanza of personal reward and national progress. And the belief is that it costs nothing for anyone who wants to get a piece of this lotto ticket. One only has to cast an election ballot with Marcos Jr. as choice for president, and that ballot becomes a lotto ticket. What do we have to lose, his supporters ask. We only need to give Marcos Jr. a chance to serve as president for one term, they add.
The belief that Marcos Jr. will make every supporter a lotto winner is fueled by rumors that his family has vast wealth that they’ll distribute if Marcos Jr. wins. There’s the tale that Marcos Sr. owned vast quantities of gold which he earned as lawyer for the Tallanos, a supposed pre-Spanish royal family of the Philippines. There’s also the story that Marcos Sr. got hold of the Yamashita treasures.
On the other hand, the expectation that Marcos Jr. will make our country prosperous again is fueled by belief that under his father’s reign, our country became one of the wealthy countries of Asia, and the imposition of martial law brought discipline and peace in our land.
These tales of wealth and past glory have been circulated under a social environment where so many of our people have been stuck in generational poverty. Not much has changed in the lives of the poor despite a succession of presidents. This has caused a simmering sense of hopelessness, and people are desperate for any kind of chance to escape from unending bleakness. By coincidence or design, a Marcos Jr. presidential candidacy—with all its myths of wealth and a prosperous past—has become a drop of water in the desert.
What if it’s true that the Marcoses will distribute their wealth to their poor supporters? There are so many TikTok and YouTube stories of how life was better during the Marcos dictatorship, so it must be true. It’s worth taking a chance by electing him to the presidency. These thoughts suffuse the minds of so many who are desperate for any kind of chance to break free from their despondent lives.
The inclination to gamble on Marcos Jr. in the coming elections is no different from what drives people to bet on jueteng or its laundered form. It gives them hope and a chance, no matter how tiny, to break free from a life of misery.
What’s tragic, however, is that making Marcos Jr. president will not make anyone get a share of the Tallano gold or Yamashita treasures because these are bogus stories. Marcos Jr. himself has denied that these treasures exist. But on the ground, there are stories that people are still encouraged to sign up for membership in Marcos-allied organizations which will supposedly be the basis of distribution for a share of the treasures. So people cling on to Marcos Jr.
Giving Marcos Jr. the presidency will also not bring us back to a prosperous past. The tale of our country’s “golden age” under Marcos Sr. is a hoax. Under Marcos Sr., our country went through a record of worse times—worse economic crisis, worse period of corruption, and one of the worse records of human rights violations.
If there’s anyone who will win the lottery big time if Marcos Jr. becomes president, it will be the Marcoses themselves. If Marcos Jr. wins, it will throw a humongous monkey wrench on efforts to collect from the Marcoses P203 billion in estate taxes, P125 billion in additional ill-gotten wealth, among others. These will all be at the expense of the Filipino people, including those who will vote for Marcos Jr.
Those intending to vote for Marcos Jr. are greatly mistaken if they think they’re getting a lottery ticket. With the hundreds of billions of pesos that our country may end up losing if he wins, his followers will unwittingly become instruments of what amounts to a virtual mother-of-all Ponzi schemes perpetrated in this country.