Rodrigo Duterte will be inaugurated as the 16th Philippine president next month. It is the culmination of an extraordinarily intense campaign period, but also the beginning of something else. Precisely what is anybody's guess.
I avoided commenting on the campaign, not least because it left me bewildered. I could not get a grip on Duterte's popularity.
I know and respect many people who support him. These aren't the uneducated, low-income conservatives that Donald Trump has galvanised, though the two men are often compared. I've been known to compare them, too. It's too easy to do.
I was also disturbed. The things Duterte represents — vigilantism, unilateralism and violence — aren't these the same things that Filipino human rights activists had fought against? Is this now the preferred template for imposing order across the country?
What does it even mean for Ferdinand Marcos' son to get this close to being back in Malacañan Palace as vice-president? Does this not defy memory and reason — the ultimate insult against many survivors of torture and incarceration under martial law?
I parsed post after post on social media, trying to working out what I was missing. For months I asked myself, what the hell went wrong?
It is only lately that I'm beginning to accept that I got the wrong end of the question. What went wrong? Everything.
For many, the promise of equity, security and justice that came with a renewed democracy in 1986 remains unfulfilled. The Philippines keeps being touted as a fast-growing Asian economy, but such gains do not trickle down to rural towns and provincial cities.
"Visitors and residents are emphatic about Davao being safe and orderly; that its infrastructure and public and emergency services are world-class."
Transport infrastructure in urban areas has decayed. Rampant development has come at cost to liveability. Quality healthcare is far from universal. The best-paying jobs are still overseas.
Whether or not it is fair, the perception of gross incompetence at the highest levels hardened after Typhoon Haiyan and the fatal Mamasapano police operation. Certain officials were kept in roles based on tenuous things like presidential favour. Corruption in both houses of Congress and municipal councils routinely led to scandal. Meanwhile, farmers go hungry and indigenous peoples continue to be displaced.
One reading of Duterte's victory is that it came via protest vote, the same anti-establishment movement we see elsewhere but with a distinctly Filipino flavour. There is no doubt that people have had enough of