On 25 May 2022, Ferdinand “Bongbong” Marcos, Jr., son, and namesake of the late dictator, was proclaimed by Congress as the 17th president of the Republic of the Philippines. His landslide victory in the presidential election was astounding, coming 36 years after his family was ousted from the presidential palace in a military-backed people power uprising. He has also emerged as the first majority president in the post-Marcos period garnering a historic 31,629,783 (59%) votes, with a margin of almost 31% ahead of his closest rivals. His successful presidential campaign was built around the myth, propagated on social media, and actively embraced by a large segment of the public (both young and old) that the Marcos dictatorship was a “golden age” of peace and prosperity, as opposed to the long-held and well-documented accounts of a violent and corrupt rule that left the country poor. While it is possible to say that the rise of Rodrigo Duterte’s strongman populism in 2016 cleared the stage for the Marcos restoration in 2022, authoritarian nostalgia has been simmering in the public’s political preference since the mid-2000s. The inability to adequately address the legacies of authoritarianism has impacted the overall consolidation of democratic gains. This paper would like to address the following questions: First, what factors contributed to the erosion of the post-Marcos liberal reformist political order? Second, how did the Marcos dynasty succeed in staging a political comeback? Third, what are the prospects for Philippine democracy under a restored Marcos presidency
