Political positions of Rodrigo Duterte

The political positions of Rodrigo Duterte, the 16th President of the Philippines, have been difficult to define coherently into what some analysts have attempted to package as "Dutertism" due to numerous policy shifts during his presidency. PDP-Laban describes itself as a democratic socialist party, and Duterte has nominally identified as a socialist, making appeals to left-leaning sectors. He has also stressed that he was not a communist. He was once a member of the national democratic Kabataang Makabayan during the 1970s, and was himself a student of José María Sison, founder of the Communist Party of the Philippines (CPP). Earlier in his presidency, he had shown favor to the left in a series of speeches: on one occasion he proclaimed himself as the first "leftist President"; called the CPP a "revolutionary government"; ordered his officials to file petitions in court for the release of about 20 jailed communist leaders, which led to their subsequent release; and appointed several cabinet members from the CPP. The collapse of the peace talks with the CPP, New People's Army (NPA) and NDF led to the falling-out between Duterte and the CPP. The dismissal of cabinet members, most of whom were dropped by the Commission on Appointments or by Duterte himself, led to his erstwhile progressive allies disowning him. Some in the mainstream news media have labeled Duterte as a right-wing populist and authoritarian. He has been likened to other nationalist figures in the 2010s including Donald Trump and Jair Bolsonaro. The fallout between Duterte and the CPP has also been followed by the expansion of a historical and religiously informed cultural hostility toward left-wing politics in the Philippines, which had been previously reserved for the CPP but which has now spread to the left-liberal and national democratic organizations, such as the Makabayan party. Some national democrats and others who identify with the left have refuted Duterte's self-proclaimed socialist credentials given his inability to concretely and seriously tackle the economic aspects of liberalism.