Can Marcos follow through on flood control promise in penultimate SONA?

At 4 pm on July 27, a nation that has spent a year waiting for specifics on the flood-control promise will finally hear the President’s report MANILA, Philippines — Up until Sunday evening, July 26, to even “one hour before,” President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. is likely to be introducing revisions and tweaks to his State of the Nation Address (SONA) on July 27. It will be the penultimate of his presidency. “I’m never done. Until one hour before the SONA, I’m still changing it, you know. Because, of course, you want it to be perfect,” said Marcos in a chance interview with reporters on Friday, July 24, days before he was set to deliver his annual speech. Every year, the SONA is a big deal. Officially, the speech is an address to Congress — delivered to both chambers at the Batasang Pambansa in Quezon City with top government officials from all branches and the diplomatic corps present. In reality, it’s the President’s report to the Filipino people. On July 27, at around 4 om, Marcos will speak to a nation and a people unsettled. Net satisfaction towards Marcos, according to the Social Weather Stations June 2026 survey, is still in the red at -7 percentage points. It’s an improvement from the -15 he registered in late March 2026. “I always regard the SONA as a report of the President to the public as to what has happened since the last SONA and that is what we will take up,” said Marcos in the same July 24 interview. Flood control, corruption at the center At the center of this year’s SONA will be what Marcos says — or does not say — about how his administration is fighting corruption, which had a rating of 29.8%, according to a late June to early July 2026 survey by Pulse Asia Research. A distant second topic that respondents wanted to hear about was the administration’s “efforts to investigate and hold accountable those involved in the flood control projects scandal (18.9%).” It’s an agenda that Marcos himself set out, whether inadvertently or not, in his last SONA. In July 2025, as the country was reeling from widespread flooding and its aftermath, Marcos vowed to go after government officials and contractors who had made money out of flood control projects that were either substandard or non-existent. The 2025 SONA line ballooned into a campaign — that, at times, the Marcos administration seemingly lost control of. In the year since the 2025 SONA, both Marcos’ allies and foes have been dragged into the net that is the flood control corruption scandal. But actual follow-through — that is, the filing of cases against these personalities — have been inconsistent, at best. The most glaring absence of cases is the one closest to the Marcos home. The Ombudsman announced in late July that former top Marcos aide and ally, his cousin former House speaker Martin Romualdez, was a “central figure” in the corruption scheme. Yet no case has been filed against the presidential cousin. Preceding the 2025 flood control corruption scandal was a political disaster that was partly of Marcos’ making, too — the embarrassing showing of the administration-backed Senate slate in the midterm elections that same year. The political tumult of 2025 was set in motion by the midterm elections and later intensified by the Marcos administration’s decision to arrest former president Rodrigo Duterte and send him to face crimes against humanity charges before the International Criminal Court. Duterte’s trial is set to begin in late November 2026. Pressure inside and out, too “I will make sure that people know all of the things that we have done to navigate this very difficult period in our history, where we are buffeted by all of these external forces,” said Marcos in the July 24 interview. While the president did not say what these “external forces” are, it is easy to deduce that one of them was the swings the Philippine economy — and the Filipino nation — has had to bear as a result of the United States and Israel’s war on Iran. Manila was among the first to declare a national energy emergency, as it scrambled to seek alternative sources of energy. Affordability of basic goods ranked third in the list of issues Filipinos wanted to hear from the President (18.7%), according to the same Pulse Asia survey. “Our response has been good, and we have had to make adjustments. But those adjustments have been effective and have served their purpose and I know that it has helped people weather this storm and continue to weather this storm until things hopefully normalize,” said Marcos. Inflation in the Philippines was at 6.4% in June, lower than the 6.8% in May and the three-year high of 7.2% in April. On average, based on government data, inflation for the first six months of 2026 stood at 4.8%, above the original target range of 2% to 4%. An issue that has dominated news headlines over the past month is, according to the survey, among Filipinos’ lowest priorities, with the impeachment trial of Vice President Sara Duterte registering just 1.2% in the survey. Vice President Duterte is the daughter of the former president and erstwhile ally to Marcos. Even as Marcos reckoned last-minute tweaks, the President said at least 90% of the speech was already done. Sources close to the Palace have said that last-minute changes can prove to be the most consequential, the flood control promise being a prime example. “We’re just fixing it up and making sure that it’s not too long or it’s not too short. That we have everything that we want to talk about is already included,” said Marcos of the speech. At 4 pm on July 27, a nation that has spent a year waiting for specifics on the flood-control promise will finally hear the President’s report. – Rappler.com