Left: Fernando “Bongbong” Marcos Jr., photo by Aaron Favila-Pool. Right: Coldplay’s Chris Martin, photo by Matt Jelonek/WireImage. Photos via Getty Images.
Philippines president Fernando “Bongbong” Marcos Jr. faced criticism from his constituents over the weekend for using the state-funded presidential helicopter to fly over the traffic jam caused by a Coldplay concert Friday night (January 19) in order to attend the show himself. According to the BBC, the show at the Philippine Arena — located in the Manila suburbs, about 40 minutes away from the presidential palace without traffic — drew a crowd of 40,000, intensifying the city’s famous gridlock. “We’ve seen some traffic, but I think you have the number one [traffic] in the world,” Coldplay frontman Chris Martin joked to fans during the band’s performance Friday, per The Guardian. (According to the 2023 TomTom Traffic Index, Manila’s metro area is, in fact, the slowest on earth.)
Responding to critics like activist Renaldo Reyes, who called Marcos’s helicopter trip to the show “a grave insult to millions of Filipino commuters,” and Facebook user James Patrick Aristorenas, who wrote that “[u]sing official resources, like the presidential chopper, for personal and non-official activities is generally considered an abuse of power or misuse of government resources,” the president’s office issued a statement saying the “unforeseen traffic complications” created by the Coldplay show posed a security threat to Marcos and his wife, who joined him for the concert.
Bongbong Marcos is the son of former Filipino president Ferdinand Marcos Sr., who along with his wife Imelda (Bongbong’s mother) famously embezzled billions of taxpayer dollars for personal use. Here Lies Love, a disco musical based on Imelda Marcos’s life created by David Byrne and Fatboy Slim, closed on Broadway in November after a four-month run.
