Philippines’ Marcos Jnr shrugs off backlash over use of official helicopter for ‘unmissable’ Coldplay concert

“Perhaps by now, you know that I am really a music lover. I have been for a long time,” Marcos Jnr said.

He said he “studied music for many years” and to have somebody like Coldplay was “unmissable”.

Marcos Jnr never finished college, but has a special diploma from Oxford University. He also claims to have a master’s degree in business administration from the Wharton School of Business, University of Pennsylvania, but admitted in 2015 he never finished his dissertation.

The president, who watched the British rock band’s gig with First Lady Liza Araneta-Marcos in Bulacan last Friday, also raved about the event: “By the way, it was fantastic. It was great.”

“You can ask anybody who attended the concert. It’s different from the previous concerts we used to attend,” state media PNA quoted him as saying.

But Marcos Jnr waxing eloquent on the show was no music to many Filipinos’ ears who rebuked him for riding the helicopter to the venue – a move his Presidential Security Group said was due to “unforeseen traffic complications along the route” used by 40,000 concertgoers.

Social activist Renato Reyes said the Marcos’ workaround to avoid Manila’s traffic-choked roads was “a grave insult to millions of Filipino commuters”.

Others accused the president of blowing tax money on his chopper trip.

According to the 2023 Tomtom Traffic Index, Metro Manila had the worst traffic bottleneck among 387 cities in the world.

Coldplay will play six concerts at the Singapore National Stadium from Tuesday, before heading to Bangkok for a two-day performance in February.