Please register to participate in our discussions with 2 million other members - it's free and quick! Some forums can only be seen by registered members. After you create your account, you'll be able to customize options and access all our 15,000 new posts/day with fewer ads.
There are two things that are wrong with this thread:
1. The leader you voted for is not 100% right, the leader you did not vote for is not 100% wrong either.
2. One cannot use the same standards to judge or criticize other countries. The situation is different, there are things the media did not tell you. Please refrain from making judgments to those countries whose name you cannot even spell properly.
The Philippines does have a drug problem, and one cannot just believe the media about everything. That all the victims of this "war on drugs" are innocent. That they are all not involved in peddling drugs, but just merely addicts. Seriously? Since when did criminals freely admit that they were guilty? For the record, Duterte is also constructing a huge rehabilitation center, so he actually is starting to do some rehabilitation of addicts and not killing all of them.
Why does Duterte have a high approval rating? Because for the 1st time, the whole country has a working 911 number. And for the 1st time, people who are neither addicts nor pushers are feeling safer. I know someone in Manila who actually had to move to a new home because he didn't realize that he is neighbors with a druglord and he made the mistake of asking cars to move away from his driveway before dawn because he has an early morning flight and had to drive to the airport. That night, bullets rained in his house! No one died, but they have to move away. Such are the things that are happening in Manila without international media reporting, without the previous Philippine government doing anything, and since the druglords have more money than anyone, filing a case against them is asking for trouble in the Philippine judicial system. That someone is standing up to such guys offers a glimmer of hope.
I don't condone everything Duterte does, and while "war on drugs" is considered "right-wing" in Western politics, Duterte himself is not even considered center-right in other aspects. Actually right-wing or left-wing mean little in Philippine politics as it's a different spectrum, but Duterte himself is actually more "left" overall compared to his opponents or his predecessor.
Anyway, I just find it ridiculous to say that Italy is on the right track just because referendum outcome is more "right-wing" and that Austria is missing out because they did not vote for the far-right candidate. And then comes a comparison with Hitler! Seriously? Duterte meant to kill criminals, never members of any minorities! And yeah, Hitler was far-right, but Stalin, Pol Pot and Mao were far-left. What they have in common is their cults of personality rather than whether they were right- or left-wing. Their followers tend to believe they were 100% right, and just followed their orders or ideology without any further thinking themselves.