Election Holds Key to Future for Foes Marcos, Duterte

The Philippines votes Monday in a ballot that will decide half the Senate's seats, thousands of local posts and quite possibly the political future of impeached Vice President Sara Duterte.

- AFP

More than 160,000 national police have been deployed to secure polling stations, escort election officials and guard checkpoints in a country where hotly contested provincial postings are known to erupt in violence.

But it is the Vice President's feud with President Marcos that has dominated national politics heading into the mid-term election.

The rift between the two former allies came to a head in the wake of the Vice President's February impeachment and her father Rodrigo Duterte's subsequent arrest and transfer to the International Criminal Court (ICC) to face charges over his deadly drug war while he was president.

The 12 senators elected Monday, and 12 others already in office, will serve as jurors in an impeachment trial—tentatively set for July—that could see her permanently barred from public office.