How Did We Survive 2025?

It was a year of creativity, crisis, and the call to reckoning. As many factors pushed the nation to its breaking point, how did we find clarity amidst the chaos?

- AA Patawaran

Year 2025 did not ease in. It broke through roofs and rivers.

The sound of iron gates slamming shut defined its opening, a shockwave that instantly segregated the worthy from the damned. Twelve months later, the clamour for justice intensified, echoing the clatter of corrugated iron ripped by rain. This was not a year of story but a relentless cascade of scandal, betrayal, and calamity against a people who refused to break. If 2024 was the simple act of survival, 2025 demanded consequence. The question everywhere was who we had finally become.

POLITICS AS SPECTACLE AND STORM

The May midterm elections redrew the country's moral map. Youth turnout broke records, fuelled by impatience and disbelief. The results fractured old alliances. By February, the House had moved to impeach Vice President Sara Duterte, deepening the rift with President Ferdinand Marcos Jr and turning loyalty into the rarest commodity in Congress. Then came the historic international reckoning. In March, former President Rodrigo Duterte was arrested and extradited to The Hague, becoming the first Asian leader and only the second former head of state in history to be delivered into the custody of the International Criminal Court.

The Flood Control Projects scandal broke the illusion that nothing else could be worse. When monsoon rains swallowed towns, the public saw what the missing billions had bought: nothing but mud. By September, the "Trillion Peso March" filled the streets. The country moved as one body, furious and drenched.

Accountability returned as a national pastime.

Submerged villages against gleaming estates left the country staring at itself without filter. The corruption felt less like a localised crime and more like a systemic collapse, leaving the entire political order vulnerable to the call for revolution.

CALAMITY AS MIRROR