The finance ministers of Spain, Germany, Italy, Portugal and Austria did not dither. On 3 April, they fired off a blunt letter to the EU Commission demanding a bloc-wide windfall tax on energy companies’ excess profits from the Iran war.

Their message was precise: those who profit from the geopolitical chaos must help shoulder the burden on households and budgets.

Within 24 hours, the letter became public, the precedent set by the 2022 Ukraine solidarity contribution was invoked, and the Commission was forced to respond. That is what political will looks like.

Contrast that European spine with the Philippine reality.

A Senate panel had tabled the identical idea: a temporary tax on oil firms’ windfall profits to bankroll targeted fuel subsidies for jeepney drivers, farmers, and commuters.

The logic is identical to the European Union’s. Global prices have spiked due to the disruptions in the Strait of Hormuz. Local pump prices are among the highest in Southeast Asia.

Oil companies are booking record margins on pre-war inventories sold at post-war rates without any intervention from the Marcos administration. The windfall tax is not radical; it is rational, targeted, and temporary.

It is expected to remain just that, a proposal looking for a nonexistent will to enforce it.

Yet, the scheme is tailor-made for the Philippines under a declared national energy emergency.

Congress has handed President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. the legal hammer, Republic Act 12316, to suspend the fuel excise tax the moment Dubai crude breaches $80 a barrel. He signed it. He has not swung it.

Malacañang’s public line is that “nothing is off the table,” yet the table remains conspicuously bare of any executive push for a direct levy on excess profits.

Instead, Filipinos get staggered price hikes, cash doles, and pleas for oil firms to “exercise their social conscience.”

The contrast is damning. Other nations have firmly moved to equalize the situation and uplift marginal members of their societies. Here, the executive branch holds the tools but shows no urgency to use them, particularly against the very companies reaping the windfall.

The Marcos administration’s current policy prioritizes oil-company cash flow over the people’s wallets.

A properly designed windfall tax, say, 30-50 percent on profits exceeding a three-year average, triggered solely by external shocks, would raise billions without raising a single peso from ordinary taxpayers or adding to the public debt.

It would fund genuine relief rather than a regressive excise tax suspension that would disproportionately benefit wealthier motorists.

It would send the same message the EU ministers intended, which is that profiteering from war is not a business model the government will underwrite.

Applicability is not the obstacle; political will is. The ball has been in Malacañang’s court for some time.

President Marcos, under his special power, can certify urgent measures, direct the Department of Finance and the Bureau of Internal Revenue to draft implementing rules, and lean on his congressional allies to fast-track it.

Or he can continue the current script of emergency declarations that change nothing at the pump.

Europe’s ministers have shown what leadership in a crisis looks like: swift, coordinated, and unafraid to make the profiteers pay. Filipinos deserve the same.

The mechanism exists even as the Gulf crisis worsens.

The current leadership lacks the will to exercise the powers granted to it, leaving ordinary Filipinos to bear the full cost of someone else’s war profits.