COTABATO CITY (MindaNews / 12 July 2026) — There is a Duterte impeachment story that dominates front pages across Metro Manila — corruption, confidential funds, a Vice President dodging accountability. Travel south, to the region that has always been her political base, and a different reading takes hold: that this is not accountability at all, but a coordinated campaign to remove a political threat before 2028. The view is not fringe. An OCTA survey in April 2026 found Mindanao with the least support nationwide (61%) and the most opposition (38%) to the trial. The argument of this op-ed essay is the strongest case to be made for that skepticism, as an argument to be given weight, not as a settled fact.
Start with the sequence. This is Duterte’s second impeachment attempt in two years. The first was thrown out by the Supreme Court in July 2025 on a technicality: an earlier complaint had already invoked the constitutional one-year bar on repeat impeachments—a bar intended to prevent Congress from harassing an official until something sticks. The House’s decision to file again anyway points to a purpose beyond simply letting due process run.
Then there’s the collapse of the Marcos-Duterte alliance that won 2022 by a landslide. Duterte resigned as Education Secretary in June 2024, described the relationship as “toxic,” and made the remarks about violence against Pres. Marcos Jr, the First Lady and Former Speaker Romualdez that now form the foundation of Article IV of the complaint. Her camp’s argument is clear: this is a coalition breakup dressed in legal language, not newly discovered wrongdoing. Two Senate allies, Sen. Marcoleta and Sen. Estrada, were arrested on plunder charges in the weeks around the trial’s opening—thinning her support in the very chamber judging her. Senator Pia Cayetano’s on-record comment that colleagues were instructed to “call Malacañang” did not help the impression that the executive was steering, not just watching.
The persecution argument finds its firmest ground in the fight over who may even preside, now before the Supreme Court in formal petitions filed on Duterte’s behalf. Article XI, Section 3(6) provides that the Chief Justice shall preside “when the President is on trial” and is silent as to who presides otherwise. Petitioners led by Atty. Israelito Torreon cite the 1986 Constitutional Commission. Commissioner Hilario Davide, Jr. had once proposed language that “in all other cases, the President of the Senate shall preside,” but later withdrew it after the committee clarified that such was the intended meaning of the provision. The framers assumed that the Senate President would preside at every impeachment except the President’s own—not that the Senate could elect a more convenient chair on a case-by-case basis.
Yet on June 3, 2026, in a session petitioners say was attended by only twelve of the twenty-four senators—exactly half, short of a quorum, with none of the recognized justifications for excusing the rest. The Senate changed its rules to allow election of a presiding officer in cases such as Duterte’s. The Senate passed the amendment in its ordinary legislative capacity, not in the separately constituted Impeachment Court, and did not provide the required one-day notice. When Senator Alan Peter Cayetano raised this as a point of order on the very first day of the trial on July 6, the presiding officer, whose own authority was being questioned, simply ruled that the amendment was “duly approved.” Even senators defending it disagreed on why—one cited Congress’s rule-making power, another claimed later ratification cured it. If the officer’s authority is void, petitioners argue, no subsequent vote can manufacture a quorum that never existed, and the defect runs through every ruling made under his gavel. For Duterte’s supporters, the seat judging her was arguably filled through the same rushed manoeuvring the persecution narrative describes everywhere else.
The deeper claim is simple: senator-judges rule for survival, not evidence. That is institutional realism, not cynicism. Almost all the senator-judges are either facing re-election soon or looking toward 2028, a race Duterte may run herself. Convicting a popular figure from Mindanao risks angering her base; acquitting risks being cast as protecting corruption. Impeachment, everywhere it exists, fuses law and politics by design.
Honesty requires a pause here. This is not the majority view nationally: OCTA found 74% supporting the trial’s continuation, SWS 66%. The charges include flagged transactions of more than $110 million and a 257-25 House vote, not a close call. The framers anticipated political actors. They built in a safeguard in the form of a supermajority. The two-thirds conviction threshold is for this exact reason. Both are true at the same time: the process has real grounds for suspicion, and most Filipinos outside of Mindanao aren’t reading it that way. That regional gap is itself the story worth telling.
(MindaViews is the opinion section of MindaNews. Datu Al-Zahid Hanok Salik is a faculty member of the College of Arts and Sciences, Mindanao State University—Maguindanao. He is a Master’s student in Political Science, specializing in International Relations, at Universitas Islam Internasional Indonesia. His thesis is titled “The Unbroken Path: Imamanism and Historical Continuity in Bangsamoro Political Thought.”)
