MANILA, Philippines – President Ferdinand Marcos Jr.‘s son, House Majority Leader Sandro Marcos, claimed that the camp of former president Rodrigo Duterte sought control over key posts in exchange for endorsing his father in the 2022 presidential elections.

The younger Marcos shared the story in a rare sit-down interview on Saturday, August 8, with PRTV, a media outlet owned by the company founded by the President’s cousin, former speaker Martin Romualdez.

The House leader said that during the campaign period in the 2022 elections, his father was summoned to Malacañang after he tried seeking the endorsement of Duterte.

“We got a call asking us to come to the Palace. We waited there for about two hours, just sitting around. Then we were finally ushered into the presidential guest house. I’ll never forget it. At the time, there was still no official endorsement from Malacañang,” Sandro recalled in a mix of English and Filipino.

“We were supposed to meet the President but instead we were made to face three people. I won’t say who they were. They essentially asked us, ‘What’s your plan? What can you do for us?’” he added.

Sandro did not disclose the identity of the three men, but said one of them is a sitting government official.

“He told the President (Marcos), ‘Fine, we’ll support you on the condition that we get to choose the executive secretary, we get to choose the House speaker, we get to choose the Senate president, we get to choose the secretaries…’ They demanded a lot of things,” Sandro said.

“When we left the Palace, my father looked at me and said, ‘Alam mo, kulang na lang, papatayin na nila ako e (The only thing left was for them to kill me),’” he added.

The Duterte patriarch never endorsed Marcos Jr. in the 2022 presidential race, which Marcos had won in a landslide against then-vice president Leni Robredo. The old man from Davao City had even called the late dictator’s son a “weak leader” and a “spoiled child” in the run-up to election day. The then-president had backed the presidential bid of his loyal aide, Bong Go, who later withdrew from the race.

Duterte was reported to have been dismayed after her daughter, then-Davao City mayor Sara Duterte, slid down to vice president for Marcos. The tandem — called UniTeam — was believed to have been brokered by former president Gloria Macapagal Arroyo.

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The alliance started showing cracks in the early days of the Marcos Jr. administration, and a breakup was predicted especially after the Vice President did not get the defense portfolio that she had demanded from Marcos, who appointed her as education chief instead.

“Part of me kind of saw it coming, not because of any one person, but because there were so many different parties around them, so many of them…. It was a power struggle,” Sandro said on Saturday.

In 2024, the Vice President resigned from the Marcos Jr. administration, while her father publicly accused his successor of drug addiction.

The Marcos government enforced the arrest warrant issued by the International Criminal Court against Duterte over his bloody drug war. He has been detained in The Hague since March 2025.

The Vice President, meanwhile, is facing an impeachment trial at the Senate that could disqualify her from public office if she gets convicted. – Rappler.com