1981 Philippine presidential election and referendum
10th Philippine presidential election
The 1981 Philippine presidential election and national referendum was held on June 16, 1981. It was the first time an election was held in the Philippines, 12 years after the 1969 Philippine presidential election, the declaration of martial law on September 21, 1972 and under the 1973 constitution. Incumbent President Ferdinand E. Marcos of the Kilusang Bagong Lipunan (KBL) defeated retired general and World War II veteran Alejo Santos of the Nacionalista Party in a landslide victory. Most opposition parties boycotted the election as a sign of protest over the 1978 election for the Interim Batasang Pambansa (National Assembly), which they condemned as fraudulent. At the same time, a national referendum was held on the question in holding elections for barangay elections in 1982.
Marcos' 80% margin of victory is the most lopsided Philippine presidential election ever, beating out Manuel L. Quezon's landslide victory of 82% in 1941. Marcos getting 88% of the vote is also the largest in Philippine presidential election history, also beating Quezon's 1941 record of 82%. This is also the most votes received by a person in the Philippines for a single-winner election until 2022 when Sara Duterte won 32 million votes; for multiple-winner elections, it was beaten by Mar Roxas in 2004 with 19 million votes. This was also the presidential election with the most number of candidates, with 13, although nine candidates with the fewest votes collectively just got 0.13% of the vote.
Marcos would have served another six-year term ending in 1987, but it was cut short by the 1986 snap election that eventually resulted in his ouster in the People Power Revolution.
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “1981 Philippine presidential election and referendum” as 10th Philippine presidential election. Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.
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The subject matters to the history & society register because the source frames it as 10th Philippine presidential election. Its deeper value depends on whether names, dates, institutions and citations support that framing.
Contemporary correspondence, administrative files and participant testimony can test how later narratives organized the event or institution. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 14, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q7185386. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1981, 1969, 1972 and 1973.
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This entry incorporates text from “1981 Philippine presidential election and referendum” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.