A video posted in 2020 to YouTube claims the French astrologer Nostradamus predicted the outcome of this week’s presidential election in the Philippines.
“Ferdinand ‘Bongbong’ Marcos Jr is destined by fate and prepared by time to continue the great plan of his father for the Maharlika country,” the Tagalog-language film claims, referring to the Philippine’s pre-colonial warrior class. “He is the most qualified to become the president of the country.”
While no record exists for such a prophecy, this week Marcos won a landslide victory in an election likely to entrench the power of two families seen by many as bywords for authoritarian rule.
Marcos is now set to follow in the footsteps of his late father, the dictator Ferdinand Marcos. And when he is sworn in for a six-year term in July, he will do so alongside vice-presidential running mate Sara Duterte, daughter of the departing populist head of state Rodrigo Duterte, whose term has been marked by reversals in democratic accountability and human rights.
Analysts said Marcos’s comeback to the Malacañang palace, which his family fled by helicopter in 1986 in the face of a “People Power” revolt, was helped by a carefully curated campaign of online disinformation and revisionism aimed at whitewashing his father’s dictatorship.