Stormy weather

The President’s net trust ratings (positive minus negative) were last positive back in February. This means that for the entirety of the midterm campaign, trust in the President, who was the subject of the midterm referendum, was on the downturn. It’s only in the June 25 to 29 SWS survey—over a month after the midterms—that his net trust rating returned to positive territory.

The Vice President’s ratings, on the other hand, remain unchanged, which means she is more trusted. Her political position remains unchanged as well: she has a solid bloc in the Senate, but not yet enough to prevent her conviction. Her family remains entrenched in its home turf, but it remains a shadow of its former self in the House and in local governments.

Who, then, has the momentum, going into the inauguration of the 20th Congress? This week is all about the President’s visit to Washington, the stage par excellence for any Filipino president to look, well, presidential; the next time the President will be in the spotlight will be when he appears before the new Congress to deliver his State of the Nation Address (Sona), defining the political agenda for the year to come.

It will be an agenda made possible by control of the public purse, both in the allocation in Congress and the actual disbursement through the Department of Budget and Management. In either case, it depends on the President’s coalition and the President’s inclinations regarding who should be rewarded and punished by giving and denying funding.

The President still has five months under the current budget to make life easy or hard for those with outstretched hands, and the same amount of time to haggle and deal with those looking to secure their cut of the national budget for 2026. The executive department’s proposed national budget, after all, is traditionally submitted, along with a budget message to Congress, shortly after the Sona, which outlines the vision for the budget to come.

Just like their constituents, politicians, too, suffer during national calamities, not least because their ability to take credit for repair and rehabilitation depends on whether they are in good odor with the Palace. An administration sore from a midterm defeat, but confident in its own recuperative powers because it has been able to pull up its ratings, is inclined to remember who helped, who didn’t, who promised, and who did or didn’t deliver in the lead-up to and during the campaign. The sting of defeat is a stimulant; it can make you both more pragmatic and more ruthless.

On the other hand, since victory has a thousand fathers, the question of so much possible paternity ultimately leads to everyone trying to escape responsibility once the party’s over. The same hands outstretched at the Palace gates are also reaching out to the Vice President, except she no longer has her own share of public funds to disburse.

Not to mention the time and energy that will increasingly be used up as the Veep and her dear old dad face their own share of time-consuming problems in the Senate and The Hague.

In the case of the Veep, the Supreme Court and the Senate are both wrestling with questions concerning impeachment that were never asked before because no one in their right mind thought such questions would ever need to be asked. (To name just one: can an impeachment before the Senate be dismissed without even going through the motions of a trial?)

The House, for its part, is an interested party in either case. It has objected to the Senate’s high-handed manner in making demands as if the House were not a coequal branch of the legislature, but rather, an inferior body. The Senate, for its part, has brushed off the Supreme Court’s directives saying it can’t comply because it lacks access to the House’s internal records.

It remains to be seen if the situation will resolve itself by means of all the institutions involved retreating to the commonly held understanding of impeachment and the roles of the different players in it, after having milked the whole thing for maximum publicity opportunities during the midterm campaign.

In the case of the former president, by September, his actual trial will commence, and, were the Veep’s impeachment unimpeded before then, you’d potentially have, running in parallel to the methodical dissection of the so-called “war on drugs” in The Hague, the political, legal, financial, and social dissection of his daughter before the Senate.