Coming home from the back-to-back ASEAN and APEC summits, a confident President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. told the nation his administration will produce a “good, clean budget” for 2026. “We can have more savings,” he said brightly. “It is, in fact, possible to write a good, clean budget.”

The trouble is few Filipinos believe him. A lawmaker has said what many are thinking but are too wary to say aloud: it is all PR or a public relations spin. Kamanggagawa Partylist Rep. Eli San Fernando called out the President’s anti-corruption stance for what it appears to be: political theater.

“The public perception and my perception of PBBM is it’s all PR, as no one is being held accountable,” he said, his bluntness capturing the people’s widespread frustration over the loudest promises often ending up as mere background noise.

Filipinos have long learned to take talk of “good governance” with a shrug. They have lived through too many crusades that began with moral conviction but ended in silence. Every president in recent memory has vowed to “clean up the government,” yet corruption scandals persist like a chronic infection that is never cured.

Marcos insists his administration is serious about reform. He speaks of audits, systems and “making it harder for those people to do the stealing.” But every time the President talks about cleaning up the system, the public cannot help but notice who is not being swabbed by the mop.

San Fernando put it plainly: “Even if it’s your cousin, political ally, if you’re really serious, detain them.” The challenge cut close to home. The reference to former speaker Martin Romualdez, accused of receiving billions from phantom flood control projects, hung in the air, unacknowledged but impossible to ignore.

That is the real test of Marcos’ so-called anti-corruption drive. Will it hold those in his circle accountable, or only those without protection? Until that happens, the promise of a “good, clean budget” will remain just that, a promise detached from the realities of governance.

It does not help that the President has taken to emoting publicly about corruption.

“He’s tearing up, he’s angry, he’s sad,” San Fernando said wryly. “I, too, am angry and tearing up, billions of pesos is being talked about here; who wouldn’t cry?”

The sarcasm stings because it rings true. The country does not need a crying President; it needs a prosecuting one.

Marcos says corruption cannot be solved “with one fell swoop.” Fair enough. But what the public sees instead is a familiar pattern, rhetoric about reform without the accompanying reckoning.

“Systems” do not steal. People do. And those people are often the ones in power, the very ones never made to answer.

Meanwhile, corruption cases keep surfacing as quickly as the old ones fade. The flood control fiasco alone has exposed billions in fake projects, kickbacks and ghost contractors. The President’s response is to order a 50-percent cut in construction material costs, as if computations could mend morality.

To be fair, Marcos is right about one thing: the government needs systemic reform. But systems mean little without accountability, and a good process is no substitute for political will. What the people are waiting for is a different kind of system, one that goes beyond paperwork and actually punishes wrongdoing, no matter who is involved.

When Marcos said that “no matter what you do, they will find ways to fool the government,” he sounded less like a reformer than a man resigned to failure. That, more than any single scandal, is what fuels the public’s cynicism.

Filipinos are not disillusioned because they have stopped caring; they are disillusioned because they have seen this pattern before. Each new pledge of reform starts loud and ends quietly. Each new “clean budget” ends up compromised.

The President’s words will matter only when they lead to action, when anger gives way to arrests, and speeches yield to accountability. Until then, his promise of a “clean budget” will remain nothing more than an aspiration.