The President Wrote His Own Constitution to Stay in Power Forever — Then a Different One Wrote Him Out of the Country Entirely
Philippines — Constitution Profile
| 📅 Current Constitution | Ratified February 2, 1987 |
| 🏛️ Government | Unitary Presidential Republic |
| 🌍 Capital | Manila |
| 📄 Drafted In | Just 133 days, by a 48-member commission |
| 🪖 Preceded By | 14 years of martial law under Ferdinand Marcos |
| ✏️ Built-In Safeguard | Martial law capped at 60 days, reviewable by the Supreme Court |
It's rare for a country to have a constitution written specifically as a rebuttal to a different constitution. The Philippines has exactly that. Its current charter exists largely because the one before it had been twisted into a weapon, and the people who wrote the replacement spent four months making sure no president could ever hold that weapon again.
He Declared an Emergency the Night Before Anyone Could Stop Him
By September 1972, Ferdinand Marcos was running out of road. He'd already served two terms as president — the constitutional maximum — and the only way to keep going was to make sure the rules themselves changed before anyone could vote him out. Opposition figures of the time accused Marcos of exaggerating threats from communist insurgents and using them as an excuse to consolidate power and extend his tenure beyond the two presidential terms allowed by the 1935 constitution.
The move he made was almost surgical in its timing. Marcos signed Proclamation No. 1081 on September 21, 1972, marking the beginning of a fourteen-year period of one-man rule. But the public didn't even know yet. Implementation began sometime before midnight on September 22, with the arrest of the two main opposition leaders — Ninoy Aquino, who had held a Congress speech to denounce impending martial law, and Jose Diokno, who'd held a rally with 50,000 people just that same day. The country went to sleep under one government and woke up under another, and most people didn't find out until the next evening, when Marcos announced on television at 7:15 p.m. that he had placed the Philippines under martial law.
The Old Constitution Wasn't Abandoned — It Was Rewritten From the Inside
What makes the Marcos period constitutionally strange isn't that he ignored the law. It's that he rewrote the law to match what he was already doing, then claimed he'd been following it the whole time. He manipulated an ongoing Constitutional Convention and caused the drafting of a new constitution — the 1973 Constitution — which allowed him to rule by decree until 1978, when the presidential system of the 1935 Constitution was replaced with a parliamentary one.
Even the new system he installed wasn't one he actually followed. Under this new parliamentary system, Marcos held on to power and continued to govern by decree, suppressing democratic institutions and restricting civil freedoms. A constitution had been redesigned around a parliament — and the man who designed it never bothered convening it properly, governing by decree instead, parliament or not.
The Law Said It Ended in 1981. The Power Never Actually Left.
If you only read the official record, Philippine martial law lasted nine years. The lived reality told a different story entirely. Even though the formal proclamation was lifted on January 17, 1981, Marcos retained virtually all of his powers as dictator until he was ousted by the EDSA Revolution.
The mechanism behind that quiet continuation was written directly into the amended constitution itself. Amendment No. 6 to the new 1973 constitution allowed him to continue making laws, and the decrees issued during martial law were carried forward after the lifting of Proclamation No. 1081. Lifting martial law turned out to be mostly theater. The legal scaffolding that had let him rule alone simply stayed standing, repainted as ordinary government.
One Assassination on an Airport Tarmac Set the Ending in Motion
Every dictatorship has a moment that historians later point to as the beginning of the end, even if nobody recognized it at the time. For the Marcos regime, that moment happened in broad daylight at an airport. Corazon "Cory" Aquino became president. She was the widow of Marcos' staunch critic and archrival, Senator Benigno "Ninoy" Aquino, who was assassinated on August 21, 1983, on the tarmac of the Manila International Airport.
The years that followed were not calm ones. Increasing unrest springing from the economic collapse of the Philippines in the years after the assassination of Senator Benigno Aquino came to a head in February 1986, when something that had felt unthinkable just months earlier finally happened in the streets of Manila.
Two People Took the Same Oath of Office on the Same Day, in Different Buildings
The four days of protest that became known as EDSA produced one of the strangest split-screen moments in modern political history — two rival inaugurations, hours apart, each insisting it was the only legitimate one. On Feb. 25, 1986, Marcos conducted an inauguration ceremony at Malacañang Palace. On the same day, Corazon Aquino took her oath of office at Club Filipino in San Juan, alongside her vice president, Salvador Laurel.
Within hours, only one of those two inaugurations still mattered. Later that evening, as military support eroded and civilian crowds continued to gather in the capital, U.S. officials facilitated Marcos' departure from Malacañang Palace. He and his immediate family were flown from Clark Air Base to Hawaii, where they lived in exile. Marcos died there in 1989. The man who had rewritten a constitution to extend his own rule left the country the same day he'd tried to swear himself in for another term under it.
The New Constitution Was Built, Almost Sentence by Sentence, to Make Sure It Couldn't Happen Twice
What Aquino's government produced afterward wasn't just a fresh legal document — it was a direct, deliberate reply to everything the previous fourteen years had demonstrated could go wrong. This new constitution was drafted in 133 days by an appointed Constitutional Commission of 48 members and ratified by the people in a plebiscite held on February 2, 1987.
Every safeguard reads like a direct response to a specific Marcos-era abuse. The 1987 Constitution retains the grant of the power to declare martial law with the President, but it narrows the grounds for its imposition and gives to both Congress and to the Supreme Court the power to review and revoke the President's proclamation. Under the 1987 charter, the president can suspend the privilege of the writ of habeas corpus only for a period not exceeding 60 days. Within 48 hours from such suspension or from declaration of martial law, the president is mandated to submit a written report to Congress.
The drafters even reached for the language of a foreign court ruling more than a century old to make their intent unmistakable. The 1987 Constitution provides that a state of martial law does not suspend the operation of the Constitution, nor supplant the operation of the courts or of the legislature, nor deprive the courts of jurisdiction — a deliberate echo of the language of the Supreme Court of the United States' ruling in Ex Parte Milligan.
The Test Came in 2009 — And the System Held
A constitution's safeguards mean very little until they're actually put under real pressure. The 1987 charter's martial law provisions got their first genuine test decades after they were written, in the aftermath of one of the deadliest political massacres in Philippine history. There has been only one instance since the ratification of the 1987 Constitution when the new martial law provisions were put to the test, following the Maguindanao massacre.
More than two decades after EDSA, a constitution written specifically to prevent another Marcos-style abuse of emergency powers was finally tested under fire — and unlike its 1973 predecessor, this one had Congress and the Supreme Court built in as actual checks, not just words on paper.
Constitution at a Glance
| Detail | Information |
|---|---|
| 1935 Constitution | Modeled after the U.S. Constitution |
| Martial Law Declared | September 21–23, 1972 (Proclamation No. 1081) |
| 1973 Constitution | Drafted under Marcos, parliamentary system introduced 1978 |
| Martial Law Formally Lifted | January 17, 1981 |
| Ninoy Aquino Assassinated | August 21, 1983 |
| EDSA People Power Revolution | February 22–25, 1986 |
| Marcos Exiled to Hawaii | February 25, 1986 (died 1989) |
| 1987 Constitution Drafted | 133 days, 48-member Constitutional Commission |
| Ratified by Plebiscite | February 2, 1987 |
| Martial Law Limit (New Charter) | 60 days, reviewable by Congress and Supreme Court |
📥 Read the Constitution of the Philippines
Read the complete, official text of the 1987 Constitution of the Republic of the Philippines:
👉 Read the Constitution of the Philippines — Official Gazette
A president who rewrote the constitution to keep ruling, then was removed from the country the same day he tried to swear himself in again. A replacement charter built almost line-by-line around everything that had just gone wrong. What part of the Philippines' constitutional story surprised you most? Tell us in the comments below.
This article reflects an editorial reading of publicly available constitutional text and reporting, intended for general understanding rather than legal interpretation. Readers are encouraged to consult the original constitutional text linked above to form their own view.
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