Presidential elections in the Philippines were held on May 9, 2016, as part of the 2016 general election. This was the 16th direct presidential election in the country since 1935 and the fifth sextennial presidential election since 1992.
Incumbent president Benigno Aquino III was ineligible for re-election, pursuant to the 1987 Philippine Constitution. Incumbent vice president Jejomar Binay was eligible for re-election but chose to run for the presidency instead. Therefore, this election determined the 16th president and the 14th vice president. The position of president and vice president are elected separately, thus the two winning candidates could come from different political parties.
Rodrigo Duterte was elected President of the Philippines with 38.5% of the vote. Congress met in late May to canvass the results and issued an official result with Duterte and Leni Robredo emerging as the winners of the presidential and vice presidential races, respectively. They were proclaimed on May 30 in the House of Representatives.
On the other hand, Robredo narrowly won the vice presidential election over Bongbong Marcos, son of former president Ferdinand Marcos. Bongbong Marcos filed an electoral protest through the Presidential Electoral Tribunal, but was later dismissed in 2021.
Electoral system
According to the Constitution of the Philippines, the election is held every six years after 1992, on the second Monday of May. The incumbent president is term limited. The incumbent vice president may run for two consecutive terms. The plurality voting system is used to determine the winner: the candidate with the highest number of votes, whether or not one has a majority, wins the presidency. The vice presidential election is a separate election, is held on the same rules, and voters may split their ticket. Both winners will serve six-year terms commencing on the noon of June 30, 2016, and ending on the same day six years later.
Background
Senator Benigno Aquino III of the Liberal Party, who ran on an anti-corruption platform, won the 2010 election with 42.08% of the votes defeating Joseph Estrada, a former president who was deposed in 2001 after scandals of massive corruption, and several others. Meanwhile, Estrada's running mate, Makati Mayor Jejomar Binay of the Partido Demokratiko Pilipino-Lakas ng Bayan (PDP–Laban), defeated Aquino's running mate, Senator Mar Roxas of the Liberal Party and several others, in the vice presidential election. Roxas eventually accused Binay of electoral fraud in the Presidential Electoral Tribunal, citing that some of his votes were recorded as null votes.
Both Binay and Roxas were subsequently appointed by Aquino to his cabinet, with Binay heading the Housing and Urban Development Coordinating Council, and Roxas first being given the Transportation and Communications portfolio, then finally named as Secretary of the Interior and Local Government, after the ban of appointing losing candidates expired a year after Aquino took office on June 30, 2010. As of 2014, the tribunal had still not yet acted upon the preliminary motions of both parties and on Binay's counter-protest; the suit is expected to still not have been resolved by the time President Aquino's term expires.
For the midterm 2013 Senate election, Aquino and Roxas formed the Team PNoy coalition; Estrada's PMP and Binay's PDP–Laban forged an electoral alliance, the United Nationalist Alliance (UNA). Team PNoy won nine Senate seats against UNA's three. Former Movie and Television Review and Classification Board chairwoman Grace Poe, daughter of defeated 2004 presidential candidate Fernando Poe Jr. topped the senatorial election.
In March 2014, PDP–Laban withdrew from UNA, a week after Binay resigned as party chairman, due "to differences with its leaders". Party president Aquilino Pimentel III had a public quarrel with Binay over Migz Zubiri's inclusion in UNA's 2013 senatorial slate, whom Pimentel had accused of cheating in the 2007 Senate election. In Pulse Asia survey released in April 2014, the first opinion poll for the presidential election, it showed Binay leading aspiring candidates, with 40% of those surveyed with Grace Poe a far second at 15%.
Several other stalwarts of UNA, such as senators Juan Ponce Enrile and Jinggoy Estrada, who had manifested his intention to run as Binay's running mate, and others such as Senator Bong Revilla of Lakas–CMD, who was planning to run for president, were detained due to their involvement in the pork barrel scam. No personalities linked with the Liberal Party involved in the scam were investigated. These actions by the government, which it said was part of its anti-corruption drive, were cited by UNA as "political persecution".
In July 2014, Renato Bondal, a defeated mayoral candidate in the 2013 Makati mayoral election, filed plunder cases against Makati mayor Jejomar Binay, Jr. and his father, the vice president, to the Ombudsman. By the next month, a subcommittee of the Blue Ribbon Committee composed solely of Pimentel, along with Nacionalista Party members Alan Peter Cayetano and Antonio Trillanes IV, began Senate hearings against Binay on his alleged corruption while serving as mayor of Makati, beginning with the alleged overpriced annex building of the Makati City Hall. It was followed by hearings on alleged corruption on deals supplying Makati senior citizens with birthday cakes, an agricultural estate in Rosario, Batangas that Binay allegedly owns, the allegedly overpriced Makati Science High School, and the relocation of Makati residents to Calauan, Laguna in a community without basic necessities.
Binay had consistently denied any wrongdoing, and from owning the Rosario estate, but had never appeared at the Senate. UNA Secretary General JV Bautista branded the investigations as part of the "Operation Plan Stop Nognog", insinuating on Binay's dark skin, with Roxas, Cayetano and Trillanes allegedly behind it to prevent Binay from becoming president. He accused billionaire businessman Salvador Zamora as its financier. In May 2015, the Court of Appeals ordered the 242 bank accounts belonging to Binay to be frozen for six months, when it granted the petition of the Anti-Money Laundering Council and of the Ombudsman. Binay's camp had alleged certain people from the Liberal Party to be behind the freeze order, a charge President Aquino, in a Bombo Radyo interview, himself denied.
By late May 2015, the subcommittee report recommending the filing of a plunder (corruption worth more than 50 million pesos) complaint against Binay was signed by all three subcommittee members and Grace Poe. By early June, ten senators had already signed the subcommittee report, making it official and available to be debated upon in the Senate floor. A Pulse Asia presidential survey taken at the time the hearings were done showed Grace Poe overtaking Binay, with her getting 30% of the respondents, over Binay's 22%. A month later, Binay sued Cayetano, Trillanes and several others for 200 million pesos in damages at the Makati Regional Trial Court for "well-organized and orchestrated effort" to damage his reputation and worsen his chances of becoming president.
Meanwhile, Aquino held several meetings with Roxas, Poe and Francis Escudero on who should be the standard bearer of the Liberal Party. While none of them had announced their preferences at that time, Aquino was expected to announce his preferred candidate after his final State of the Nation Address late in July. Congressional heads Franklin Drilon and Feliciano Belmonte, Jr. denied that Liberal Party members had been dissatisfied with Aquino's indecision, saying that the party was still united.
On early July, Binay launched his party, the United Nationalist Alliance. Later that month, Aquino endorsed Roxas for president, which the latter accepted. In August, Rodrigo Duterte, the Davao City mayor who had been a subject of a strong online following urging him to run, announced his intention to retire from politics after his mayoral term ends in 2016. Poe announced her intention to seek the presidency by mid-September, followed by Escudero's announcing that he'll be her running mate a day later. Several days later, Cayetano announced his vice presidential candidacy, preferring to be Duterte's running mate.
On October 3. Trillanes formally announced his vice presidential campaign as an independent, supporting Poe's presidential campaign. Days later, Leni Robredo, the representative from Camarines Sur and widow of former Secretary of the Interior and Local Government Jesse Robredo who died in a plane crash in 2012, accepted the offer of the Liberal Party to be Roxas' running mate. Also on that day, Senator Bongbong Marcos announced his candidacy as vice president. A week later, after being nominated by UNA, Senator Gregorio Honasan announced that he would be Binay's running mate. A day later, on the launch of her new book, Senator Miriam Defensor Santiago announced her presidential candidacy; a couple of days later, she announced that Marcos would be her running mate.
At the final day of the filing of candidacies, Duterte did not show up; instead, the PDP–Laban nominated Martin Diño, chairman of the Volunteers Against Crime and Corruption. At the end of the day, more than a hundred people registered as presidential candidates, after a 5-day long filing period. These include current OFW Family Club representative Roy Señeres running under the Partido ng Manggagawa at Magsasaka, former representative from Iloilo Augusto Syjuco, who is running as an independent, and Engineer Juanita Mendoza Trocenio under the Partido Bagong Maharlika (PBM). For the vice presidency, nineteen people manifested their intention to run, including former assemblyman from Ifugao Zosimo Jesus Paredes II, who is also running under the Partido Bagong Maharlika.
AC Nielsen Philippines showed on its monitoring report between Jan 1 and Nov 30 that presidential candidate Binay spent 595 million pesos for campaign advertisements on television (before the campaign period). Vice presidential candidate Cayetano led the spenders in the race, spending 398 million pesos worth of TV advertisements. Binay, denied the claim. An article from The Manila Times reported also that the administration's bet, Mar Roxas, led the list of the biggest ad spenders in the country with 774 million peso in television advertisement expenses from January to December, in a survey also conducted by AC Nielsen.
Candidates
Under the Constitution of the Philippines, the President and Vice President are elected separately. An initial list of eight presidential candidates were uploaded on the certified candidates list in the commission's database on January 21, 2016. But only trimmed down to five, due to the declaration by the commission en banc of Dante Valencia as a nuisance candidate and the withdrawal of certificates of candidacies of Romel Mendoza and Roy Señeres.
This is the final and certified list of candidates for the elections to be included in the ballots: Jejomar Binay, Miriam Defensor Santiago, Rodrigo Duterte, Grace Poe, and Mar Roxas. Although Señeres withdrew his candidacy and later died, his name was still included on the printed ballots.
Notes:
Jejomar Binay (UNA)
When questioned by the media at the Coconut Palace in September 2011, Vice President Jejomar Binay (PDP–Laban) confirmed his plans of running as president.
By May 2014, Binay began his search for a running mate. As his potential running mate Senator Jinggoy Estrada was in jail due to his implication in the PDAF scam, Binay's offers were declined by JV Ejercito, Manny Villar (via wife Cynthia Villar), Vilma Santos (via husband Ralph Recto), Mar Roxas, Grace Poe, Rodrigo Duterte and Joseph Estrada. Binay's daughter Abigail, also the Representative from Makati, said that Binay would accept anyone as his running mate except for Antonio Trillanes, and that she preferred Grace Poe, however Sen. Bongbong Marcos was the most preferred by UNA officials to be his running mate. On June 12, Independence Day, speech in Iloilo, President Aquino said that he could only offer Binay the conduct of a clean and honest election, but not an outright endorsement.
On June 22, Binay resigned from the Aquino cabinet, both as presidential adviser on Overseas Filipino Workers' concerns and as chairman of the Housing and Urban Development Coordinating Council, but did not say why. Two days later, Binay addressed the public from his Coconut Palace office, branding the current administration as "manhid at palpak" (insensitive and bumbling), but did not mention Aquino by name. His running mate was confirmed to be Gregorio Honasan.
Gringo Honasan (UNA)
Senator Gregorio Honasan (United Nationalist Alliance) denied that he was going to be Jejomar Binay's running mate in September 2015. By the next month, however, he said that his team-up with Binay was possible. On October 12, 2015, Honasan announced that he will be running with Binay as the latter's vice president.