When Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos Jr stood for election in 2022 with his running mate, Sara Duterte, the pair was seen almost as a match made in heaven.
Sure enough, Marcos, with his solid support base in the northern Philippines, and Sara, providing an equally firm support in the country's south, won the polls in a landslide unheard of since the overthrow of Marcos's namesake father, who served as president, in 1986 .
The leadership duo have now split not even halfway into their six-year term, robbing the country of desperately needed political stability.
What went wrong?
There were bad omens preceding the marriage between two of the country's best-known political families. The union did not receive the blessings of the then president, Rodrigo Duterte, when it was first hatched.
In fact, the senior Duterte had been quite scathing about Marcos's credentials.
Duterte had expected daughter Sara to be at the head of the presidential ticket to succeed him.
But Sara, who succeeded her father as mayor of Davao City, was not known to be much of a daddy's girl and went on to confound him by agreeing to be Marcos's running mate.
Perhaps Sara felt herself inadequate to immediately run for president, being a political novice on the national stage, unlike Marcos who had been a sena-tor and had run for vice-president earlier, albeit unsuccessfully.
She might have thought that she would get Marcos's nod to be his successor at the end of his constitutionally mandated single presidential term.
On hindsight, all this has appeared to be a potentially fatal and politically naive miscalculation on Sara's part.
She ought to have realised that her own political career rode on the coattails of her father's legendary popularity both in Davao City and later as president.
He had ended his term with his popularity largely undiminished.
In Philippine politics, blood always appears thicker than water as political office is regularly passed from father to wife, son or daughter, elections notwithstanding.
In fact, Marcos's presidential win has brought in its wake a son as a congressman, a sister as a senator and a cousin as speaker of the lower house of Congress.
Speculation swirls around the speaker, the third in line to the presidency.
Presidential succession largely figures in the rather bizarre chatter originating from Sara about killing the president and counter-spins about killing the vice-president!
Assassination of either the president or vice-president may be far-fetched, but attempts at political assassinations are clearly already afoot.
The Philippine Congress, typically sycophantic towards any sitting president despite being nominally a separate legislative branch, has turned to scrutinising the budget allocation for the vice-presidency when, under normal circumstances, its approval would be amereformality.
Additionally, the Congress has been conducting hearings on the alleged death squads let loose under former president Duterte.
Political guns are unquestionably targeted at the back of the vice-president and this will intensify in the run-up to mid-term legislative polls scheduled for mid-2025.
The polls will be a test of the political wills of the Marcos and Duterte clans, and the enduring popularity of both.
The tussle has a geopolitical dimension: Marcos has hewed closely to his country's security guarantor, the United States,
in the maritime disputes with China off the Philippine coast, while his vice-president has maintained a scrupulous silence about where she stands on this issue.
It is important to note that Duterte was famously friendly with China and had a testy relationship with the US.
* The writer views developments in the nation, region and the wider world from his vantage point in Kuching