Philippine Senator Maria Josefa “Imee” Marcos-Manotoc has emerged as a tactically disruptive actor in the aftermath of the midterm elections held on 12 May. While her younger brother, President Ferdinand “Bongbong” Marcos Jr., faces a weakened mandate after his congressional allies underperformed relative to expectations, Imee is making calculated moves to distinguish herself and reposition the Marcos name in a way that bolsters her own ambitions.

When Bongbong won the 2022 presidential election—becoming the first president elected with a majority, as opposed to plurality, of the vote since the democratic restoration in 1986—political observers widely expected a consolidated effort from the Marcos kin to sanitise the family name at the government level. But that expectation was subverted with Imee’s explicit alliance with self-proclaimed “opposition” leader, Vice President Sara Duterte, positioning Imee as a more vocal counterweight to her brother’s political agenda.

The midterms are usually considered a referendum on a current administration and a proxy for public sentiment. On 12 May, discontent over the Marcos administration was apparent through the results. Of the administration-backed senatorial candidates, only a few won seats in the 12-member upper house: Erwin Tulfo (who finished 4^th), Ping Lacson (7^th), Tito Sotto (8^th), Pia Cayetano (9^th), and Camille Villar (10^th, with Villar also getting a last-minute endorsement from Sara Duterte).

The electoral outcome reflects a shifting political tide largely influenced by the rivalry between the Marcos and Duterte camps, which further crystallised with Sara Duterte’s impeachment pushed by a Marcos-backed House of Representatives, and the arrest of former president Rodrigo Duterte by the International Criminal Court. Both events also triggered an urgent regrouping in the Duterte support base. In the midterms, Sara Duterte-backed candidates performed relatively better than those of the Marcos administration: Bong Go (who finished 1^st), Ronald “Bato” Dela Rosa (3^rd), Rodante Marcoleta (6^th), Camille Villar (also from Marcos’s party list, who came 10^th), and Imee Marcos (12^th).

The new Senate composition will decide on politically critical matters like Sara’s impeachment which, if successful, will bar her from any public office. As Bongbong’s administration faces turbulence, Imee’s confrontational stance and steadfast alliance with Sara appear as a puzzle. Such mystery is particularly stark given the polarisation of political opinions in the public sphere, where the two juggernaut dynasties of the Marcoses in the north and the Dutertes in the south stoke growing fissures.

Imee branches out

Imee has aggressively positioned herself as outside of this Marcos–Duterte fissure. While professing familial concern for her brother, Imee has been vocal in her critiques of the current administration’s policies and actions. In her campaign materials, she also highlighted issues such as hunger, crime, and injustice, with the suggestion that those outside the administration’s circle such as the Dutertes face harassment.

The rift between the Marcos siblings has subsisted since Bongbong ascended to the presidency, though not always readily apparent. And a closer reading will show they have competed to claim their father’s legacy, which by itself is plagued with authoritarian excess.

For one, Imee highlighted serious lapses in Bongbong’s agricultural policy when he controversially took up the Department of Agriculture cabinet portfolio from June 2022 to November 2023. A month before the midterms in April 2025, Imee also raised concerns about the administration’s ₱20-per-kilo rice distribution effort, questioning why the administration has only implemented it so near the elections. She also specifically noted the effort to distribute rice mainly in Cebu, a region known to harbor many Duterte supporters, and flagged how it might be interpreted as vote buying.

Imee’s doubling down on issues including agricultural concerns must be taken against the backdrop of their father’s legacy, whose purported centrepiece is agrarian reform. In the past, Imee has also sprinkled references to agrarian reform in her electoral campaigns and speeches, showcasing a supposed agricultural agenda that take its cue from her father’s work.

Under her brother’s administration, Imee’s individual power within the Senate calls back to her father’s legacy. In 2023, she commemorated the 106th birthday of Ferdinand Marcos Sr. by promoting the implementation of the New Agrarian Emancipation Act, linking it to her father’s agrarian decrees. She also presided over the renewal of the National Housing Authority’s charter, originally founded by Marcos Sr. in 1975.

Imee’s efforts are part of a campaign to redirect the symbolic capital of the notorious Marcos legacy away from her brother’s embattled administration and toward her own political trajectory.

While Bongbong leverages the presidency and the prestige of his surname to strategically distance himself from Sara Duterte and her controversies, Imee actively fortifies her connections with the Duterte faction. This move not only counters her brother’s disavowal of the Dutertes, but also consolidates her political base amid mounting polarisation.

Imee’s confidence is rooted in the idea that she is the more adept politician. In her governorship of the Marcos family’s home province of Ilocos Norte,  constituents see her as the more hands-on and effective executive compared to her brother. While Bongbong has been criticised as absentee during his term as governor and congressman, Imee is cited in the province for promoting sustainability and tourism, boosting agriculture, and being accessible to constituents.

More than Bongbong, Imee arguably represents the family’s political strength in the region.

Such, too, was the case nationally in the lead up to the 2022 presidential elections. In 2022, it was Imee who brokered the UniTeam alliance between Bongbong Marcos and Sara Duterte. It was also Imee who led the charge against Bongbong’s opponents, particularly former vice president Maria Leonor “Leni” Robredo mainly through social media and funded film productions.

Imee claims to perform the role of the President’s “super ate,” or the commanding elder sister. This claim has since become clearer as that of sealing the Marcoses’ grip and dominance, rather than guiding her brother in governing nor in helping ensure the latter’s successful presidency.

Films such as Maid in Malacañang (2022) and Martyr or Murderer (2023), directed by Imee’s known associate Darryl Yap, served as tools to revise the historical narrative around the Marcoses’ exile and ousting from the Malacañang presidential palace. Importantly, however, these films also serve as veiled operations to elevate Imee’s public profile, featuring her savvy political acumen while portraying Bongbong as blundering and hesitant.

The films feature her more prominently as their father’s favourite, reinforcing her efforts to dominate the family narrative. The narratives have historical basis. Their father’s diaries included a citation of Imee’s achievements, along with the lament that “I wish she had been a boy.” In contrast, Marcos Sr’s diary refers to Bongbong as a “principal worry” as he is “too carefree and lazy.”

It shall be noted that Imee Marcos was implicated under her father’s term in the 1977 case involving the torture and death of student activist Archimedes Trajano. In 1992, a US court ruled that she was responsible for Trajano’s death by official torture, though the enforcement of the foreign judgment was unsuccessful in the Philippines due to a legal technicality.

In 2025, Imee went gloves-off, releasing a scathing social media video in which she claimed the presidency was controlled by an Araneta (particularly pointed at her sister-in-law Liza Araneta-Marcos) and a Romualdez (pointed at cousin Martin Romualdez), but not by a Marcos. In the same video, Imee answered Sara’s suggestion to drop the Marcos name by strongly asserting: “I’m me. Marcos ako (I am a Marcos).” This narrative allowed her to separate herself from the current administration while preserving the symbolic power of the Marcos name.

Imee Marcos’s campaign rhetoric bares itself as a calculated assertion of ownership over the Marcos legacy.

She does more than merely mention the family name; she saturates her speeches with it. Her lines like “Marcos ako; Marcos ti presidente tayo” (I am Marcos; Marcos is our president), “Marcos idi, Marcos ita, Marcos latta” (Marcos then, Marcos now, Marcos forever), and most notably, “Imee idi, Imee tatta, Imee latta” (Imee then, Imee now, Imee forever) deliberately appeal to her father’s loyalists.

Imee is not afraid to mention the skeletons in the family closet that her brother prefers to avoid. On the 50th anniversary of her father’s declaration of Martial Law in 2022, Imee defended her father’s regime by framing Martial Law as a necessary act of self-defence against national threats. While Bongbong insists he had no involvement in Rodrigo Duterte’s ICC arrest, Imee has repeatedly drawn parallels between Duterte’s situation and the ousting of their father during the People Power revolution, describing both events as pitiful.

And unlike her brother—whose attendance in debates costs him elections, while his absence in them is a strategy against self-sabotage—Imee relishes in debates. She commands a firmer control of the narrative amid historical record of her family’s kleptocracy and human rights abuses.

Imee also fortifies the family’s local base in Ilocos region through performing an Ilocano identity. She branded herself as the sole Ilocano candidate in the 2025 Senate elections, pitching her campaign as necessary for the continuation of long-promised Marcosian infrastructure like the Ilocano Highway connecting major towns in the region. Even the political moniker “Manang Imee” speaks volumes: manang means older sister in Ilocano. Bongbong, by contrast, has avoided such intimate invocations of their shared political base.

Looking towards 2028

The 2025 elections reaffirmed Imee’s political base amid exclusion from her brother’s senatorial slate. She clinched the 12th and last place in the Senate race, largely buoyed by votes from the Northern Philippines, where she placed top. Her performance was weaker in Mindanao, placing second to last in the winning circle, yet she retained political capital through her alliance with the Dutertes. Her campaign advertisement featured Sara Duterte endorsing Imee with the tagline “#ITIM (black) Inday Trusts Imee Marcos”. Imee’s ad also included the line “Ipaglaban ang Tama, Itama ang Mali” (Fight for what is right, Right what is wrong), framing Imee as a moral corrective to her brother’s failings.

The Marcos family remains a powerful dynasty occupying key posts in various levels of the government after the midterm elections. Yet the family’s cohesion is faltering, as Imee lays claim to the family’s political inheritance, by itself marked by loot and abuse.

Imee is performing an offensive strategy to secure her place in the political order, separate from yet contingent on the shortcomings of her brother. This was starkly evident during her proclamation as a senatorial winner, where she wore a barong styled exactly like her father’s, complete with the old presidential seal from the Marcos Sr era. In her speech, she thanked former president Duterte, but notably omitted her brother, claiming she “forgot.”

Imee is owning the family name. This will impact the Marcos administration’s strategy for political survival as mounting pressure comes from multiple directions in anticipation of the 2028 presidential elections.