The President of Philippine, Rodrigo Duterte says he will not be standing for vice president in next year’s election.
Mr. Duterte said instead, he will retire from active politics after saing last month that he would run for the vice presidency in 2022.
The Philippine’s constitution stops him from a second term as president as  it only permits presidents to serve for a single six-year term.
There are speculations that his daughter Sara Duterte-Carpio could run as the president in 2022 being that she is currently mayor of the southern city of Davao.
She said that she wouldn’t join the race because she had agreed with the father that only one of them would stand in next year’s election.
The controversial “strongman” figure, Mr Duterte, came to power in 2016 promising to crush crime and fix the country’s drug crisis.
Critics say in his five years as presiden, Mr Duterte, has engaged police to carry out thousands of extrajudicial killings of suspects in what he’s termed his “war on drugs”.
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Mr Duterte’s surprise retirement was announced  at the venue in Manila where he was expected to register his candidacy noting that standing for the vice presidency is a violation a violation of the constitution to circumvent the law, the spirit of the constitution”.
When Mr. Duterte originally announced his intention to run, there was widespread suspicion that he would look for a politically weak running mate so that he could rule from the position of number two. He had previously stated publicly that as vice president, he would be exempt from prosecution by the International Criminal Court (ICC) for presiding over the country’s horrific “war on drugs,” which has resulted in the deaths of thousands of people.
It was unclear, however, whether he would have been granted legal immunity.
In the first six months of Mr Duterte’s presidency, more than 7,000 individuals were slain by police or unknown armed attackers, according to Amnesty International.
