Triumphant Marcos Faces High Expectations From Philippines Poor

Despite his Oxford education and jet-set lifestyle, the Philippines's president-elect Ferdinand Marcos Junior sailed to victory this week as a champion of the poor

Manila, (APP - UrduPoint / Pakistan Point News - 11th May, 2022 ) :Despite his Oxford education and jet-set lifestyle, the Philippines's president-elect Ferdinand Marcos Junior sailed to victory this week as a champion of the poor.

Now they expect him to deliver.

Residents of the impoverished Baseco neighbourhood in Manila do not think of 64-year-old Marcos, nicknamed Bongbong, as the mega-rich scion of a political dynasty famed for extorting billions, stockpiling designer shoes and treating public coffers like an all-you-can-eat buffet.

In this thick lattice of roads, lanes and alleyways jam-packed with street kids, push trikes and hawkers, Marcos means hope.

"A lot of change will happen when he becomes president," 30-year-old JR Foras says matter-of-factly, as he waits for customers in a stuffy port-side barbershop brightened by a florescent striplight and posters of K-Pop hair models.

He predicts that by the end of Marcos Jr's six-year term "there will be a lot of jobs", enough to go around.

"Maybe I'll get another job. Maybe -- I'll become a security guard," he says while admitting he lacks the necessary training.

Like many young Filipinos, Foras has bought into the torrent of misinformation that has reinvented the Marcos family image.

For believers, Marcos senior's bloody decades-long rule has been transformed into a gilded age for the Philippines, making Bongbong the obvious choice to restore those imagined glories.

"I voted for him because of what his father accomplished," says Foras. "We were number one in Asia. I just feel like he would do it again."The Marcos rebranding was so successful that, according to initial results, Baseco voters narrowly backed him as president over Isko Moreno, an actor-turned-politician who grew up in the poverty of a nearby slum.