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Marcos Jr. Sworn In as President Decades After Father Fled
(Bloomberg) -- Incoming Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos Jr., son of the nation’s ousted dictator, said he will focus on food sufficiency and pandemic recovery in an inaugural speech that paid tribute to his late father.
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“The role of agriculture cries for urgent attention,” Marcos said in Manila on Thursday after taking his oath of office. “An agriculture damaged and diminished by unfair competition will have a harder time, or will have no prospects at all of recovery.”
The new leader, who’s appointed himself agriculture chief, said he would rebuild the nation’s economy to regain its position as a growth leader in the region. He pledged to fix shortcomings in pandemic response, and come up with plans to transform the economy and boost infrastructure.
The former senator returns to the presidential palace where he spent his youth before his family fled in 1986, driven out by a popular uprising. His father’s two-decade rule was marred by thousands of killings by the military regime and by the clan’s accumulation of billions of dollars in ill-gotten wealth.
Marcos Jr. won the presidency by a landslide with a campaign that promised unity and measures to spur the economy after the pandemic, even as opponents accused him of misportraying the dictatorship as a golden era for the Philippines.
Marcos said he will draw inspiration from the leadership of his father.
“I once knew a man who saw what little had been achieved since independence,” Marcos said. “But he got it done, sometimes with the needed support, sometimes without. So will it be with his son.”
Other highlights from Marcos’s inaugural address:
Marcos said the Philippines will boost energy supply amid the war in Ukraine. “Surely, a free world awash with oil can assure supplies or we will find a way. We are not far from oil and gas reserves that have already been developed,” he said
There’s a need to rethink the materials taught in schools, “‘and I’m not talking about history,” he said, adding he’s referring to basic education, sciences and language. Alongside the national language, there must be “equal emphasis and facility in a global language, which we had and lost”
He also advocated giving migrant Filipino workers “all the advantages” needed for them to thrive. “We are condemning the future of our race to menial occupations abroad, then they are exploited by traffickers”
The new president said he will seek partners to help those vulnerable to the impact of climate change, while pledging to also clean up the nation’s plastic wastes
He said he will complete on schedule the infrastructure projects that have been started. “I am not interested in taking credit, I want to build on success that’s already happening,” he said.
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(Updates with detail from Marcos speech.)
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