The quiet before the budget
One would have thought that, after last year’s protests against massive corruption in flood control projects, our politicians would know better than to pad the 2027 national budget once more with pork barrel insertions. But a patronage-driven political system must be fed, and there seems to be no other way to feed it. So we are treated to a House-approved budget that barely bothers to hide its sordid side under a veneer of technical transparency.
It cannot, however, evade the scrutiny of the young professional accountants who have been combing through past budgets since the flood control scandal broke. We expect them to promptly report their analysis of the 2027 budget at every stage of this tedious process. Their work is important because protest needs concrete proof of political abuse. A budget remains abstract until someone shows where the pork is hidden. The question is whether the movement that brought so many angry people to the streets in September last year will still be there to act on what the People’s Budget Coalition and BetterGov.PH find in the 2027 budget.
Elsewhere in the region, the young have not been quiet. In Indonesia, students have marched for weeks against rising prices and the government’s failure to contain the forest fires whose haze has smothered Sumatra and Kalimantan—fires traced to corporate forest concessions licensed in Jakarta. Youth-led protests have toppled governments in Bangladesh and Nepal, and forced the resignation of India’s education minister. Why does our own protest movement seem suddenly timid?
Part of the answer lies in the nature of social movements. They begin outside electoral politics. They imagine themselves standing outside society, judging its structures and calling to account those who rule and have ruled it. They demand answers but do not offer to govern. That is why they sound as though they are above politics—cause-oriented rather than power-oriented—and why they can draw people of every affiliation. It is also why their organization is fragile. Much of its energy dissipates the moment a movement becomes the electoral opposition, or the government itself.
The other reason may lie in how the Marcos government responded to the flood control scandal. To its credit, it kept in step with public anger over the insatiable corruption in these public works projects. It named the biggest contractors, opened a website for citizens to report on public works, and created an Independent Commission on Infrastructure. Congress held its own performative hearings. Officials were dismissed or made to resign, the most significant being then House Speaker Martin G. Romualdez, the President’s cousin and close ally, now on pretrial detention in a nonbailable plunder case.
One need not dismiss all this as mere show. What matters is the effect. When those in power take up the very cause of a protest, the protest loses part of its reason to stand apart. This is one of the curious paradoxes of social movements: success can be the beginning of their demise.
Then there’s the bitter, public break between President Marcos and the Dutertes, his allies in 2022. The Duterte bloc moved aggressively into the role of opposition, and, as a result, the accountability movement lost the ground from which it had once opposed both. It found itself on the same side as the Marcos camp on the West Philippine Sea, the dismantling of the Philippine offshore gaming operators, the arrest of Pastor Apollo Quiboloy, Duterte’s arrest and turnover to the International Criminal Court, and the impeachment of Vice President Sara Duterte.
The contest between the Marcos and Duterte political dynasties has thus displaced the conventional distinction between government and opposition. Until the Vice President’s impeachment trial is concluded, any protest against the Marcos government can be easily portrayed as pro-Duterte propaganda. For a middle class whose deepest fear is a Duterte return in 2028, that is a heavy price.
This may explain why the movement has largely held its tongue on the worsening economic situation, and its ambivalence toward some senators, also implicated in the flood control scandal, who found instant relief from the investigations after switching sides. Their new loyalties now serve the effort to remove the Vice President from the 2028 race.
But the government’s indifference to the smoldering resentment over budget insertions will make silence harder to keep. And a middle class-led movement that cannot speak to rising fuel prices and inflation risks losing the masa, for whom accountability means little unless it touches the price of rice.
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