A sluggish ending
From my reading of the fourth quarter statistics of Social Weather Stations (SWS), the ending of 2025 wasn’t too bad; but it wasn’t as good as before. I’ll base this on two seasonal indicators, about Christmas and the New Year, and two regular quarterly indicators about the trends in well-being as experienced now compared to a year ago, and as expected a year from now compared to the present.
Happiness at Christmas rose slightly. Yes, the 68 percent that expected a happy Christmas was 3 points up from 2024 (see “68% of adult Filipinos expect a happy Christmas, up from 65% in 2024,” www.sws.org.ph, 12/24/25). But the percentage was still in the 60s, whereas in 2022 and 2023 it had already recovered to 73, two years after the pandemic. Before the pandemic, all the Christmases of 2014 to 2019 had happiness rates of 70+, up from the steady 60s of 2004 to 2013.
The economy lurched as usual, in terms of the balance of Filipinos gaining rather than losing in their quality of life (QOL) in the last 12 months (see “The lurching economy,” 11/29/25). The lurches were initially going forward, in Quarters 1 and 2; but then they went backward in Quarters 3 and 4 (“Gainers minus Losers at -7, down from -2 in September 2025,” 12/30/25). The year’s final score, as of late November 2025, of -7 net gainers consisted of only 29 percent gainers versus 36 percent losers.
The trend in QOL over the past year ALWAYS carries over to the prospective change in QOL in the coming year. This is based on the current series of 163 national surveys in the SWS archives, going all the way back to 1984, in the time of then President Ferdinand Marcos Sr. Thus, the positive or negative lurching from the past has its counterpart of expected lurching to the future. Gainers minus Losers at -7, down from -2 in September 2025,” 12/30/25).
Among the 36 percent who were losers as of year-end, the net optimism score (optimists minus pessimists) was only +21, whereas among the 29 percent who were gainers, it was +58. Among the 34 percent who experienced no change since last year, the net optimism was +35, which is in-between.
The final national result for 2025, as of November, is a net optimism score of +36 (see “44% of adult Filipinos expect their Quality of Life to improve in the next 12 months,” 12/30/25). This is a paltry one point over the +35 net optimism score last September, but well below the year-end national results of +41 in December 2024, +39 in December 2023, and +44 in December 2022, to which we had been accustomed. Thankfully, it is above the +20s median range of net optimism.
The expectation for the New Year of 2026 is rather tepid. The final SWS media release of 2025 was “89% of Filipinos enter the New Year with Hope, the lowest since 2009” (12/31/25), dated on New Year’s Eve. In this survey question, copied from Germany’s Allensbach Institute for Demoskopy, a pioneer European polling center, the alternative to “hope” is “fear.” SWS has used this question in 26 end-year surveys since December 2000.
Prior to this year, the Philippine national new-year hope score went below 90 only five times. It peaked at 96 in the Decembers of 2017, 2019, and 2013, and bottomed at 81 in December 2004. The current hopefulness of only 89 percent is disappointing, from the historical perspective.
Hope for the New Year is directly related to expected happiness at Christmas. The national hopeful percentage is 92 among those expecting a happy Christmas, versus 83 among those expecting a neither happy nor sad one, and 79 among those expecting a sad one. By area, the percentage hopeful is 92 in Balance Luzon, 90 in the National Capital Region, 85 in the Visayas, and 84 in Mindanao.
There are natural interconnections in the people’s feelings about Christmas and the New Year with their experienced trend in QOL from a year ago, and their expected trend in QOL over the coming year.
The connections of holiday season sentiments with hunger and poverty will be taken up in another column, after SWS releases its year-ending deprivation numbers.
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mahar.mangahas@sws.org.ph.
