Unfiltered diagnoses of pundits and observers alike assess that President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. survived a tough, bruising year.
Whether his survival was by sheer luck or pluck, Mr. Marcos Jr. still standing and visibly cheery before cameras during populist-engineered Christmas gift-giving parties earned him admiring nods from even his toughest political critics.
While his whole survival story against political brawlers is worth retelling in detail because it’s easy for us to become mired to what happened, the essential first consideration is that Mr. Marcos Jr. is certainly primed to hog next year’s national conversation.
So, even as he ends an anxious year with sighs of relief, next year forces Mr. Marcos Jr. to conserve or reinforce further whatever remains of his and his advisers’ energies in confronting major unsolved problems.
Foremost among those exhausting problems is the economy. This year, the economy was in a gloomy state, that righting it is a political imperative.
“The Philippine peso is at a historic low against the dollar, while stock markets have been in turmoil with some of the country’s top conglomerates shedding tens of billions of dollars in value,” as one analyst puts it.
“Even worse, the Philippines’ third-quarter gross domestic product growth rate slowed to 4.0 percent, the lowest in more than a decade… largely due to the cessation of all major public infrastructure projects.”
Still, despite a gloom and doom economy, economists nonetheless agree the economy remains the fastest growing in Southeast Asia, gifting the harassed administration high hopes of a turnaround.
But while to many the economy and its future prospects remain hazy at best, issues of prices and jobs gutted the president.
Despite this year’s jarring political and corruption noises, jobs and prices remain in fact the ordinary Filipino’s top concerns.
In fact, jobs and prices led to the freefall of the president’s approval ratings, which an analyst said was among the lowest levels in contemporary political history.
But while the economy, jobs and prices are essentially the real issues throttling any administration, these concerns weren’t as crisply rendered to the public as gaudy politics and political maneuverings.
Broadly speaking, Mr. Marcos Jr. endured several life-threating political sieges, ranging from the largest corruption scandal in the country’s history, unprecedented massive popular protests, attempts at regime change to former allies turned bitter critics consolidating political support.
There’s nothing final yet with the unraveling of the massive thievery of flood control projects that Mr. Marcos Jr. himself brought to public attention.
Besides corruption probes, budgetary reforms, a bureaucrat’s Baguio suicide, the jailing of some main actors of the flood control thievery hogged the headlines at year’s end.
Previously, the hot-button issue chopped off the heads of political titans like former Senate President Francis Escudero and former House Speaker Martin Romualdez and several cabinet members.
The same massive thievery also led to Mr. Marcos Jr.’s surprising embrace of the liberal-progressive agenda like the anti-dynasty law. Centrist and militant oppositionists, however, remain skeptical of his liberal posturing.
Massive corruption also provided valuable political fodder for the president’s former allies, the cornered Duterte coterie.
But the Veep, the coterie’s darling, couldn’t do anything more that cultivate a state of critical helplessness, despite her brawling posturing.
This, largely because, as an observer summed up, Mr. Marcos Jr.’s “constitutional successor is considered unfit for the job, not to mention pro-China.”All these, however, only confirms the unavoidable fact that the tests of the president’s true survival skills are yet to come.