The Philippines Constitution says that if a president dies, sustains a permanent disability, is removed from office or resigns, the vice president takes over and serves the rest of the term.

Marcos ran with Duterte as his vice-presidential running mate in the May 2022 elections and both won with landslide victories after a campaign calling for national unity.

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The two leaders and their camps, however, rapidly had a bitter falling-out over key differences, including in their approaches to China’s aggressive actions in the disputed South China Sea. Duterte resigned from the Marcos cabinet in June as education secretary and head of an anti-insurgency body.

Like her equally outspoken father, former president Rodrigo Duterte, the vice president became a vocal critic of Marcos, his wife Liza Araneta Marcos and House Speaker Martin Romualdez, the president’s ally and cousin, accusing them of corruption, incompetence and politically persecuting the Duterte family and its close supporters.

Her latest tirade was set off by the decision of House members allied to Romualdez and Marcos’ to detain her chief of staff, Zuleika Lopez, who was accused of hampering a congressional inquiry into the possible misuse of her budget as vice president and education secretary. Lopez was later transferred to a hospital after falling ill and wept when she heard of a plan to temporarily lock her up in a women’s prison.

In a pre-dawn online news conference, an angry Sara Duterte accused Marcos of incompetence as a president and of being a liar, along with his wife and the House speaker in expletives-laden remarks.

When asked about concerns over her security, the 46-year-old suggested there was an unspecified plot to kill her. “Don’t worry about my security because I’ve talked with somebody. I said, ‘If I’m killed, you’ll kill BBM, Liza Araneta and Martin Romualdez. No joke, no joke,’” the vice president said without elaborating and using the initials many use to call the president.

“I’ve given my order, ‘If I die, don’t stop until you’ve killed them’. And he said, ‘Yes’,” the vice president said.

Amid the political divisions, military chief General Romeo Brawner issued a statement assuring that the 160,000-member Armed Forces of the Philippines would remain non-partisan “with utmost respect for our democratic institutions and civilian authority”.

“We call for calm and resolve,” Brawner said. “We reiterate our need to stand together against those who will try to break our bonds as Filipinos.”

Rodrigo Duterte, Marcos’ predecessor and the vice president’s father, was behind a police-enforced anti-drugs crackdown as a city mayor and later as president that left thousands of mostly petty drug suspects dead in killings that the International Criminal Court has been investigating as a possible crime against humanity.

The former president denied authorising extrajudicial killings under his crackdown but has given conflicting statements. He told a public Senate inquiry last month that he had maintained a “death squad” of gangsters to kill other criminals when he was mayor of southern Davao city.

AP