Thomas Maresca

Special for USA TODAY

Philippine voters head to the polls Monday to elect their next president following a volatile campaign on issues that carry a deep significance for the United States as well as one of its closest allies in Southeast Asia.

According to the latest polls, Rodrigo Duterte, the colorful mayor of Davao, has risen to the top with tough talk on crime and cleaning up corruption. His boastful manner and appeal as a political maverick have earned him comparisons to GOP presumptive presidential nominee Donald Trump.

"I will solve drugs, criminality and corruption in three to six months," Duterte said in a recent interview with Al Jazeera. "I am the only remaining card left for the Filipinos to deal with the situation."

Duterte is the most divisive candidate in an election that has been a four-way race for most of the campaign. A poll by Pulse Asia conducted from April 26 to 29 showed Duterte getting 33% of the vote to 22% for former government minister Mar Roxas, the choice of the Philippines' departing president, and 21% for Sen. Grace Poe, daughter of a Philippine movie star.

“Without a doubt, this is the most polarizing election the Philippines has had since the fall of the Marcos dictatorship in 1986,” said Richard Javad Heydarian, a professor of political science at De La Salle University in the Philippines. “And that in itself doesn't bode very well for the country in terms of post-election national unity.”

The outspoken Duterte has also been called “The Punisher” and “Duterte Harry,” a play on Clint Eastwood’s vigilante detective Dirty Harry. As mayor of Davao, which is on restive Mindanao Island, Duterte wins praise from supporters for cleaning up the city’s drug and crime problems.

However, his tactics included more than 1,000 extrajudicial killings using death squads, according to Human Rights Watch. Duterte admitted to the death squads on Philippine television and vowed that if he became president, he would execute 100,000 more criminals and dump their bodies in Manila Bay.

He has also repeatedly gotten himself into hot water with off-color remarks, from bragging about his womanizing ways to making a crude remark about a gang rape to even publicly cursing Pope Francis. And yet, like his American counterpart, Trump, he has managed to emerge unscathed, carried along by a core group of supporters who appear to be fed up with a political system that is notoriously corrupt and ruled by small cliques of elites.

That said, the administration of current President Benigno Aquino III, who is limited to a single six-year term, has made major strides improving the Philippines' economy, which has emerged from being “the sick man of Asia” to one of the region’s fastest-growing economies, averaging more than 6% annual growth and upgrading its sovereign credit rating.

Duterte has focused heavily on issues of security and law-and-order and has said he would delegate economic policy matters to expert advisers.

"I think growth will, more likely than not, continue," Ramon del Rosario Jr., chairman of the Makati Business Club, told a group of Filipino journalists this past week.

A more significant change may lie ahead on the geopolitical front, where the Philippines has been locked in a territorial dispute with an increasingly assertive Chinese military presence in the South China Sea. Under the Aquino administration, the Philippines has primarily relied on support from the United States, signing an Enhanced Defense Cooperation Agreement to allow a greater presence of U.S. troops and facilities at Philippine bases.

The Philippines has also turned to the international community, with a pending case against China at the International Arbitration Court in the Hague, Netherlands, over China’s "nine-dotted line" that claims jurisdiction over much of the South China Sea. China has refused to participate in the arbitration, which is being held under the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea.

Duterte has indicated he would be willing to change course and engage China one-on-one. He recently bragged that he would ride a jet ski to a disputed island occupied by China to personally stake the Philippines’ claim. But he has also said he would remain open to the possibility of joint energy exploration in China and would consider Chinese-funded infrastructure development in the Philippines.

There is a feeling among some in the Philippines that the U.S. has not been robust enough in its support, concerned more with freedom of navigation in the sea rather than Philippine territorial sovereignty.

“As a strategy you would think this is actually a good thing in some ways because it means the Philippines has leverage to play these great powers against each other, something it has not done under the current administration,” said Heydarian. “It will give us more leverage than the status quo.”

Given Duterte’s comments, the election outcome is one that not just the Philippines but the U.S. and China will be watching closely.