As Marcos and Sara Duterte devotees began to celebrate outside their campaign headquarters in Manila on Monday night, Marcos said he was waiting for the final count but thanked supporters.

“If I win, I expect that your help and trust will not fade. We have a lot of things to do for our future,” he said.

On Tuesday, about 400 activists and students were met by police as they protested outside the election commission office about what they claimed were irregularities with counting.

Election day in the Philippines had earlier been affected by malfunctioning vote-counting machines in some precincts as tens of millions of voters took to polling stations at schools, braving scorching heat and hours-long queues to vote in what was cast as the most consequential leadership contest in the south-east Asian archipelago for decades.

Marcos himself voted at the Mariano Marcos Memorial Elementary School, named after his grandfather, in his hometown of Batac in Ilocos Norte province.

Among his supporters were Cherie DeAsis, an online casino dealer, and her mother Maria Leonara, a housewife, who cast their votes in the Tondo district of Manila, an area that featured heavily in the deadly war on drugs undertaken by Duterte, whose constitutionally limited single six-year presidential term ends next month.

They live with another family in a 42-square metre tenement in a poor area of the capital that was built when Marcos snr ran the country under martial law.

His brutal dictatorship was marred by rights abuses such as torture, killings and forced disappearances as well as plundering of as much as $US10 billion ($14 billion) in state funds.

Critics have denounced disinformation networks on social media they say have gloried his legacy. Yet as successful as they might have been, the results also reflect a wider disillusionment with the efforts of post-Marcos governments associated with elites.

Maria Leonara, the housewife, said she remembers martial law as a time in Philippines history when the poor was looked after and “everything was more disciplined”.

“Life was better at the time,” she said. “After 36 years [since Marcos snr ruled] nothing has happened.”

In a nation where 23 per cent of people are categorised as poor, her daughter Cherie hopes Marcos jnr governs like his father: “He’s a visionary man,” she said. “Normally, people like me inherit part of the character of our mum. So, we believe Bongbong Marcos inherits a part of his parents.”

In more affluent Makati in central Manila, Helen Austria, a building administrator in Makati, said she was supporting Marcos because he was on the same ticket as Sara Duterte.

The early count indicates Marcos will avenge his loss to Robredo in the 2016 vice-presidential election, a narrow defeat by just 200,000 votes that he sought unsuccessfully to overturn.

The two have a bitter rivalry and embody a political chasm that has existed more than four decades, with Robredo allied with the movement that toppled the elder Marcos.

About 65 million Filipinos were eligible to cast ballots on Monday to decide on the successor to Duterte, plus thousands of other posts, from lawmakers and governors to city mayors and councillors.

COMELEC declared the election to have been “relatively peaceful” and documented 15 security incidents, including what police said was the killing of three members of a peacekeeping force near a polling station in the south.

with Reuters

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