Of the four major presidential candidates in the elections to be held on May 9, former Davao City Mayor Rodrigo R. Duterte is now widely considered the front-runner and most likely winner because he has topped all the major polls in April, performed well in presidential debates, and has gathered the biggest and most enthusiastic public meetings in all the regions of the Philippines.

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He has surpassed his political rivals by strongly calling for change and castigating the Aquino government for corruption and condoning criminality, particularly the spread of prohibited drugs all over the country,  down to the village level. He has impressed the public with his successful record of stamping out organized crime and delivering social services in his home city. He has endeared himself with his audiences by using populist street language and cursing the worst of the oligarchs.

He has surmounted accusations of having violated human rights in the course of suppressing criminal syndicates and having been too close to the Communist Party of the Philippines and the New People's Army which are strong in his home province. He has fended off the anti-communist attacks by asserting that he is a socialist and that he can be relied upon to negotiate and forge a just peace with the revolutionary forces as well as with the Muslim rebels within the framework of federalism.

He enjoys a high reputation for being clean and honest and for shunning corruption. But in the homestretch of the electoral campaign, Senator Antonio Trillanes, an attack dog of the corrupt Aquino government and a former naval officer and mutineer used fabricated bank records to misrepresent him as having accumulated hundreds of millions of pesos. The concerned Bank of the Philippine Islands as well as the Central Bank of the Philippines and the Anti-Money Laundering Council denied the authenticity of the forged documents.

Senator Grace Poe used to be the front-runner in the presidential campaign up to March. Her Independent Party was seen as critical of the Aquino government. It gained the support of the Rightist Nationalist People's Coalition and the Left Makabayan (Patriotic) Coalition. But Poe has not gone beyond criticizing only a few subordinates of the incumbent President Benigno S. Aquino III.

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A number of times she has expressed the wish to continue the long-discredited hypocritical “straight path” policy of Aquino and to even make him her anti-corruption adviser should she win the presidency. Thus, Duterte was able to seize the initiative in categorically and vigorously opposing the Aquino government for its corruption, condoning of criminality and aggravation of unemployment and poverty in the Philippines.

Long before the electoral campaign period began on January 9, Vice President Jejomar Binay was the front-runner in poll surveys but eventually was weighed down by charges of corruption against him and other members of his immediate family in the government. He has gone down to the level of No. 3 in poll surveys. His political decline has been engineered by President Aquino himself to favor his friend and cabinet member Mar Roxas, previously head of the Department of Interior and Local Government.

But in the poll surveys and in terms of crowd attendance, Roxas has been a poor fourth place. He suffers from the traditional kiss of death of an outgoing discredited president. He is known for incompetence and mismanagement of the police forces. He is widely ridiculed for having himself photographed clumsily mimicking workers, like carrying a sack of rice or driving a pedicab, and for having no program to solve social and economic problems.

He boasts of having a high political pedigree, being the grandson of Manuel Roxas, the founder of the Liberal Party and the first president of the current Philippine puppet republic which was established in 1946 through grant of nominal independence by the US. The late Roxas had been a notorious puppet of the Japanese fascist invaders but was reinvented by General Douglas MacArthur as a double agent of the U.S. at the end of World War II in 1945.

Mar Roxas is also a scion of the big comprador and landlord Araneta family. He takes pride in having taken his economics degree from Wharton School. He is a dogmatic exponent of the neoliberal economic policy and like the current President Aquino wants to perpetuate the dominance of US multinational firms and U.S. military forces over the Philippines.

Despite the fact that Roxas rates low in major poll surveys and in gathering crowds, both he and President Aquino are confident of winning the presidential elections through electronic fraud. They can have the fake electoral results and there are fears of tampering of vote count machines in the country. The Commission on Elections is composed of Aquino appointees and headed by Andres Bautista, a cousin of Aquino and a former electoral campaign planner of Roxas.

While it is easy for Aquino, Roxas and the CIA to cheat in the presidential elections, they are playing with fire that can run out of their control. The electoral fraud will certainly ignite the outrage and resistance of the broad masses of people who are already suffering from severe exploitation and oppression and are desirous of revolutionary change. Armed resistance will arise from the millions of Duterte followers and are likely to ally themselves with the growing revolutionary forces and the Moro armies in Mindanao.

Prof. Jose Maria Sison is Chairperson of the International League of Peoples' Struggle.