Sara Duterte

Sara Zimmerman Duterte, popularly known as Inday Sara, is the 15th vice president of the Philippines and the youngest to be elected to the post.

Born on May 31, 1978, in Davao City, she is the daughter of former president Rodrigo Duterte and his former wife, Elizabeth Zimmerman. She is married to lawyer Manases Reyes Carpio, with whom she has three children.

Duterte completed a degree in respiratory therapy at San Pedro College in Davao City before she pursued law at San Beda College and later at San Sebastian College-Recoletos, both in Manila. She passed the bar examination in 2005​, and began her political career shortly after.

In 2007, she was elected as the vice mayor of Davao City, serving alongside her father, who had been mayor for a long time. In 2010, she succeeded her father, who had reached his term limit as mayor, and served until 2013​, when the older Duterte was allowed to run for mayor again. Her first term as mayor was particularly remembered for when she punched a sheriff, who was serving a demolition order against informal settlers despite her request for a two-hour extension of the deadline.

After that one term as local chief executive, Sara Duterte focused on private practice as a lawyer, and then served as mayor again from 2016 to 2022, the time her father was president of the Philippines.​

Sara Duterte’s policy priorities included peace and order and providing livelihood support to her constituency. She also established a hotline for anonymous reports of child abuse incidents.

In surveys leading up to the 2022 election year, she was the potential presidential candidate preferred by most voters, thus disappointing her father when she decided to seek the vice presidency instead, as the running mate of former senator Ferdinand Marcos Jr.

Running on a platform of “unity,” the tandem notably promised to continue the policies initiated by their fathers, both considered authoritarian presidents​.

Concurrent with her role as vice president, Sara Duterte also served as secretary of the Department of Education (DepEd), the largest bureaucracy in the Philippine government. It was under her watch when the MATATAG Agenda was launched. The program aimed at revising the basic education curriculum by decongesting it, delivering facilities and services faster, prioritizing student well-being, and providing better support for teachers, including considerably freeing them of non-teaching tasks.

She was criticized, however, for rejecting the call of public school teachers for salary increases, for ordering to strip classrooms bare of visual learning aids, and for getting hundreds of millions of pesos in confidential and intelligence funds and spending them in just 11 days. She resigned from DepEd two years after her appointment, as well as from another Cabinet post, the vice chairmanship of the National Task Force to End Local Communist Armed Conflict. She did not cite the reason for her resignation.

Sara Duterte has consistently registered the highest trust and approval ratings among national government officials in the Philippines. Recent surveys also show her as a leading contender for the presidency in the 2028 elections.