President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. is set to deliver his fourth State of the Nation Address (SoNA) before both houses of Congress on Monday, 28 July, at the Batasang Pambansa, under skies thick with rainclouds and, his critics say, public doubt.

As three tropical cyclones lashed parts of the country and the southwest monsoon brought misery to thousands, so too does a storm of unanswered questions and deepening controversies bear down on Malacañang.

The House of Representatives and the Senate, technically the hosts of the annual constitutional ritual, have reportedly stripped the occasion of its usual pomp.

Speaker Martin Romualdez called for simplicity, describing a lavish red-carpet affair as “out of touch.” Lawmakers were asked to keep their attire formal but restrained — Barong Tagalog and Filipiniana, as though sartorial modesty might signal moral clarity.

But no dress code can soften the tension in the air. The nation watches and waits: not for the length of the speech — which has hovered around an hour and a quarter in previous years — but for whether the President will say anything of substance on matters too large to ignore.

He is expected to tout progress in infrastructure — much of it inherited — as well as buzzwords like digitalization, food security, and housing. There will be mentions of social welfare and economic relief, fare discounts and health care access.

Certainly, the President may cite the country’s recent security alignment with the United States, Japan, Australia, and France, especially in the context of the West Philippine Sea.

But these are not ordinary times.

The Palace has dismissed with a mere shrug the alleged presence of the First Lady’s entourage at the purported drug-fueled party that led to the death of the young retail magnate, Paolo Tantoco.

Likewise, the president’s vaunted negotiations on tariffs — after dispatching a parade of envoys — have resulted in a meager, almost laughable 1 percent discount from the 20 percent tariff slapped by America on the country.

Spectacle

It was, according to some businessmen, a spectacle of weakness masquerading as diplomacy, one that cost more in air miles and hotel bills than it saved in trade.

Then there’s the elephant in the plenary: the trillion-peso discrepancy in the national budget.

Accusations of massive corruption in the 2025 General Appropriations Act have remained unanswered, especially on those allocated for flood control. So do allegations of technical malversation across key state institutions — PhilHealth, Social Security System, PDIC, Land Bank and GSIS.

The Maharlika Investment Fund, trumpeted as a legacy project, has all but vanished from the public radar. How is it being used? Is it being used at all?

Gold reserves reportedly sold off — why, and where did the proceeds go? And what of the bizarre spike in lotto winnings, the billions in jackpots that, according to math wizards, defy statistical logic and scream of laundering schemes dressed as luck?

Meanwhile, the impeachment complaint against Vice President Sara Duterte, widely seen as a witch hunt, has further exposed the political fault lines in the ruling coalition.

Giving her own version of the SoNA on Sunday (see related story), Duterte’s popularity presently eclipses even the President’s, and her targeting seems to have less to do with accountability and more with the consolidation of power.

Last week, the Supreme Court dealt a stunning blow to the House when it declared the impeachment complaint unconstitutional, citing fatal procedural flaws. The unanimous ruling cast the entire affair as a reckless abuse of legislative power, further fueling public suspicion that the complaint was a political hatchet job disguised as due process.

Raging, seething

Meanwhile, nothing has enraged Mindanao more than the arrest and reported kidnapping of former President Rodrigo Duterte, so the Marcos administration can hand him over on a silver platter to the International Criminal Court.

Even critics who disapproved of Duterte’s drug war questioned the wisdom and legality of cooperating with an international tribunal that the Philippines is no longer a party to.

On the domestic front, the president’s promised Cabinet revamp — teased for weeks as “massive” — fizzled into what many called a cosmetic shuffle.

Familiar names were recycled, controversial figures retained, and not a single shakeup suggested any shift in policy or direction. It left reform advocates disillusioned, reading it as a sign that the president prefers loyalty over competence.

And hovering over it all is the allegedly pervasive culture of corruption — bloated by impunity, which has yet to act on constitutional petitions involving the budget, the illegal arrest, and massive electoral fraud.

Whatever applause may be orchestrated inside Batasan, whatever lines are delivered with practiced calm, none of it will erase the fact that the country is demanding answers — and not the scripted kind. If the President’s speech ignores these issues, it may go down as another missed moment, another hour of words that failed to meet the moment.