CNN
 — 

In the southern Philippine city of Davao, a spirited mayoral election campaign is in full swing, with candidates and their supporters out canvassing for votes.

But one of the leading contenders is conspicuously absent from the stump. Instead he’s 7,000 miles away, languishing in the custody of the International Criminal Court (ICC) in the Netherlands.

Former Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte is awaiting trial at The Hague for crimes against humanity, over a brutal war on drug dealers that killed possibly thousands of people, including many innocents and bystanders, with barely any kind of due process.

None of this affects the 80-year-old’s eligibility for the role of mayor of Davao – a job he held, on and off, for two decades. Under Philippine election law, only a criminal conviction in a local court can keep a candidate off the ballot.

Duterte could well win Monday’s election, thanks to his enduring popularity in the region, where many credit his two-decade iron grip with tightening up law and order, before he took his brutal zero-tolerance policy nationwide as president from 2016 to 2022.

“I grew up here all my life and when I was younger it was very dangerous, killings and fighting everywhere,” said Ian Baldoza, 46, a native of Davao who remains a loyal Duterte supporter.

“But as I grew older, I started to understand that those who were killed were drug addicts, dealers and troublemakers.”

He praised Duterte for improving public safety, building infrastructure and strengthening law enforcement in the city of 1.8 million people, telling CNN: “You never see people spit on the street or leave trash behind, unlike in other cities.”

Many Davao voters feel similarly, said Cleve Arguelles, a political scientist and head of polling firm WR Numero.

“His ICC arrest doesn’t really shake their core of who Duterte is but rather, paradoxically, it only reinforces what Duterte stands for,” he said.

Baldoza, the Duterte voter, said he witnessed neighbors killed by hitmen under Duterte’s drug war, yet his Facebook profile is full of pro-Duterte posts.

“We’re not looking for a saint, we’re looking for a leader with political will, and the Duterte family has that, especially in the patriarch,” he said.

While he has not commented publicly on the race, Duterte’s daughter Sara, the Philippine vice president, thanked supporters on her father’s behalf at a rally on Thursday.

“President Rodrigo Duterte thanks you all for your love, your continued support, and your prayers that he will one day be brought back to our country,” she told a crowd in the capital Manila, under heavy rain.

Thousands of local posts are up for grabs in the midterm elections across the archipelago nation of about 120 million people, ranging from district councilors and mayors all the way up to legislators.

Three generations of the Duterte clan are fighting elections. Duterte’s son Sebastian, the incumbent Davao mayor, will be his father’s running mate, while his other son, Paolo, is seeking re-election to the national congress. Two of Paolo’s sons are running for local council seats.

While his popularity seems impervious to decline, Duterte is not politically immortal. His old age and frail health also raise questions on the succession for the dynasty, which has not been as solid as it once was, said Ramon Beleno, a political analyst and former professor from Ateneo de Davao University, who has observed elections in the Duterte clan’s bailiwick for more than a decade.

“The people of Davao have this perspective that a political dynasty is OK if it’s working,” Beleno said.

“But it’s only working as long as the patriarch, the person who established the political dynasty, is still strong.”

Opposition camps, in the elder Duterte’s absence from the country, are re-emerging across Davao, according to Beleno.

Among them are descendants of the late former national House speaker Prospero Nograles, reigniting a decades-old family rivalry that typifies the nation’s clan-tinged politics.

Karlo Nograles is running against Rodrigo Duterte for the mayoralty while his sister, Margarita, a lawyer and rising TikTok influencer, is challenging Paolo.

Scandal-hit political dynasty

And cracks in the Duterte family name are beginning to show.

Vice President Sara Duterte is in a long-running feud with President Ferdinand Marcos Jr., and faces calls for her impeachment for alleged corruption, which she denies.

“In the past months my name and my family name has been dragged through the mud,” she said at the recent rally.

“I have repeatedly said this before, and I will say it again now – I am not the problem of this country. The Dutertes are not the problem of the Philippines,” she said, in a vailed dig at the incumbent Marcos administration, the family’s allies turned enemies.

Marcos Jr. hails from perhaps the most famous political family in the nation – he is the son of the late Philippine dictator Ferdinand E. Marcos.

Paolo Duterte and his bodyguards were recently embroiled in a nightclub brawl, prompting a businessman to file a complaint against him. He said in a video statement that the clip of the melee circulating on social media was “taken a very long time ago.”

If Duterte wins the mayoral election, he can still be sworn in by proxy or in absentia – possibly by a Zoom call, if the ICC allows it, according to political scientist and pollster Arguelles. His day-to-day duties would be delegated to the vice mayor.

But if Rodrigo Duterte is not allowed to be sworn in virtually, the runner-up – projected to be Karlo Nograles – would ascend to the seat.

Duterte ran the Philippines for six turbulent years, during which his brutal crackdown on drugs – which he openly boasted about – killed many young men from impoverished shanty towns, shot by police and rogue gunmen.

According to police data, 6,000 people were killed – but rights groups say the death toll could be as high as 30,000.

Duterte’s tough approach on drugs prompted strong criticism from opposition lawmakers who launched a probe into the killings. Duterte in turn jailed his fiercest opponent and accused some news media and rights activists as traitors and conspirators.

The ICC has set his next hearing for September 23.

Pakistan does not want to respond to India’s attack until its allies have tried diplomacy, a senior Pakistani government source told CNN, as the US, Saudi Arabia and others engage with both sides to try to de-escalate tensions.

“Pakistan is giving space for diplomacy,” the source said, denying that Pakistan had struck India. Earlier, Indian officials said Pakistan fired missiles and drones at military sites in India and Indian-administered Kashmir.

On Thursday, Pakistan’s military accused India of creating a “hype” about Pakistan attacking 15 locations in India and Indian-administered Kashmir. “It’s such a fantastic and cooked-up story. You can just laugh about it,” spokesperson Ahmed Sharif Chaudhry told reporters.

“Pakistan has not fired missiles or sent drones in to India yet,” the source told CNN.

An Indian Army spokesperson told CNN earlier that explosions were heard in Jammu city, in Indian-administered Kashmir. Police in Pathankot, a city in India’s Punjab state, also received reports of explosions, according to a police source. Officials said air defenses were at work in both places.

The source said Pakistan had been urging the US to use its satellite analysis to verify or debunk India’s claims of attacks in Jammu, Pathenkot and missiles fired elsewhere.

Diplomacy efforts: World leaders, including the US, have urged the two sides to exercise restraint as tensions between the two escalate.

US Secretary of State Marco Rubio spoke with the Indian external affairs minister and Pakistani Prime Minister on Thursday. He expressed US support for “direct dialogue” between India and Pakistan and “encouraged continued efforts to improve communications,” according to State readouts of the calls.

There has so far not been direct contact between Pakistan and India, the source said, adding “circuitous channels” are relaying information between them.

Hong Kong
CNN
 — 

Chinese leader Xi Jinping hailed Russia and China’s “stable and resilient” ties as he began talks with counterpart Vladimir Putin on Thursday in Moscow, a show of solidarity in the face of global uncertainties unleashed by US President Donald Trump’s “America First” diplomacy.

Sitting across a table from Putin, Xi said the countries’ “political mutual trust has grown deeper” and “practical cooperation has strengthened.”

“In this new era, China-Russia relations are more composed and confident, stable and resilient,” he added.

Xi arrived Wednesday for a four-day state visit to Russia, where he’ll top a list of foreign leaders attending Putin’s heavily choreographed Victory Day military parade, which is taking place in the shadow of Russia’s ongoing war on Ukraine. This year’s events mark 80 years since the Allied victory over Nazi Germany, which ended World War II.

Putin welcomed his Chinese counterpart to the Kremlin, where they shook hands in a cavernous hall before posing for photos flanked by oversized Chinese and Russian flags. During opening remarks, each referred to the other as a “friend.”

Talks held over breakfast, as well as an informal, one-on-one tea on Thursday morning, are expected to cover their strategic partnership, the war in Ukraine and Russia’s relations with the United States, according to the Kremlin.

The two leaders have met more than 40 times over the past decade and steadily strengthened their partnership in recent years in the face of shared tensions with the West. Their diplomacy this week comes at a pivotal moment in each country’s relations with the United States.

China is now locked in an escalated trade war with Washington, sparked by Trump’s heavy tariffs on the world’s second-largest economy. Moscow, meanwhile, has found a more sympathetic America under Trump than it did during Joe Biden’s presidency, but is now warily eying recently warming ties between Washington and Kyiv.

Both Beijing and Moscow have appeared keen to use the gathering to showcase themselves as stable partners and reliable powers, part of a broader bid to reshape an international order they see unfairly dominated by the West.

“Currently, in the face of an international countercurrent of unilateralism and the hegemonic practices of the powerful, China together with Russia will take on our special responsibilities as major world powers and permanent members of the UN Security Council,” Xi said during his opening remarks, using language Beijing typically employs in veiled references to the US.

Putin noted that the two countries were developing their “ties for the benefit of the peoples of both countries and not against anyone” and said the two governments were working to implement “an entire array of practical agreements, including a detailed plan for economic cooperation until 2030.”

The meeting takes place hours after a three-day ceasefire in Ukraine — unilaterally declared by Putin last month — came into effect, coinciding with the parade. Russian state news agency Tass said the ceasefire began at midnight local time on Wednesday (5 p.m. ET Wednesday).

However, Ukraine’s air force claimed that, overnight, Russia launched guided bombs over the city of Sumy in northeastern Ukraine. CNN could not independently verify the claim.

Earlier this month, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky warned dignitaries traveling to the event that Kyiv “cannot be responsible for what happens on the territory of the Russian Federation,” amid the ongoing conflict, a statement the Kremlin said amounted to a threat.

Ukraine has launched multiple drone attacks on Moscow over the course of the war, including in recent days, prompting temporary closures of airports in the capital for several hours. Ukraine says its attacks are in response to Russia’s continued assault on Ukrainian territory, including residential areas and energy infrastructure.

More than two dozen leaders are expected to gather in the Russian capital for the Victory Day celebrations, while troops from 13 countries will march in the parade, according to the Kremlin. Leaders expected to attend include Brazil’s Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, Egypt’s Abdel Fattah el-Sisi and Belarussian leader Aleksandr Lukashenko.

The gathering, a key chance for Putin to project himself as a global power player, takes place amid an increasingly contentious global backdrop, including tensions between India and Pakistan which threaten to spiral into a full-blown conflict.

Russia’s May 9 Victory Day is one of the country’s largest celebrations. It marks Nazi Germany’s 1945 surrender to the Soviet Union, a day which has become increasingly important under Putin, who has falsely claimed his war in Ukraine is a “denazification.” In recent years the parade has seen a diminished supply of military hardware, as Russian tanks are instead mobilized on that war’s front lines.

Europe celebrates its VE Day, marking Germany’s surrender on all fronts, on Thursday.