By Neil Jerome Morales
MANILA (Reuters) – Ferdinand Marcos Jr, who will be sworn in as Philippines president on Thursday, has unveiled some of the main positions in his cabinet and wider administration in the past month.
Here are some of its key members:
BENJAMIN DIOKNO
The new finance secretary is a two-time budget minister and gives up the post of central bank governor to lead the Marcos economic team.
Diokno steered the country’s monetary policy and banking system through the pandemic, providing support to the economy via record-low interest rates and injecting liquidity into the financial markets.
ARSENIO BALISACAN
Balisacan returns as economic planning chief in the agency he led under late President Benigno Aquino from 2012 to 2016. Until recently, Balisacan, an economist by training, led the country’s competition watchdog.
SARA DUTERTE-CARPIO
Duterte-Carpio, daughter of outgoing President Rodrigo Duterte and election running mate of Marcos, is the new vice president and has been named education minister.
Credited with helping Marcos achieve his landslide victory, Duterte-Carpio was his first cabinet nominee. She was a trained lawyer before entering politics in 2007 as the vice mayor of southern Davao City.
JOSE FAUSTINO
A former military chief under President Duterte, Faustino has been picked as defence minister and will need to balance a close security relationship with treaty ally the United States and diplomatic ties that have been strengthened recently with China, despite their history of disputes over sovereignty in the South China Sea.
Faustino, a commander of military groups in the volatile southern Philippines, has vowed to upgrade the armed forces to improve national defence capability.
FELIPE MEDALLA
The new central bank governor is an economist and educator who earned his doctorate in economics at Northwestern University in the United States.
Currently one of the seven members of the central bank’s policymaking Monetary Board, Medalla was economic planning minister from 1998 to 2001.
AMENAH PANGANDAMAN
The new budget secretary was the ministry’s undersecretary and an assistant governor at the central bank.
Pangandaman has committed to support a broad-based, inclusive economic recovery.
JUAN PONCE ENRILE
Enrile, 98, is the new president’s chief legal counsel.
The former senator was defence minister under Marcos’s namesake father and the late Philippine dictator. He later changed sides, becoming a hero of the 1986 “people power” uprising that ousted the last Marcos administration.
FERDINAND MARCOS
Marcos has picked himself as agriculture minister in a bid to address problems faced by the sector and influence the politically sensitive issue of food prices.
The president has yet to name his ministers for foreign affairs, health and energy.
(Reporting by Neil Jerome Morales; Editing by Ed Davies)
