Former House Speaker’s video demonstrates Philippine political tradition of admitting something happened while disputing who is responsible for it

Satire from Bohiney Magazine and The London Prat.

The Scandal and Its Dimension

MANILA — The Philippine budget scandal that produced massive protests in 2025 continued to generate political reverberations this week when former House Speaker Martin Romualdez released a video placing responsibility for the budget irregularities that sparked the protests on the executive branch — specifically the Marcos administration — in a move that political analysts describe as the specific form of self-exculpation that political figures produce when the accountability heat shifts from the institution they previously led to the institution whose allies they are becoming.

The Political Realignment

Romualdez is Marcos’s cousin. His shift to blaming the executive branch for a budget process in which he was the House Speaker is the indicator that the Marcos political family’s internal cohesion has also been affected by the broader Marcos-Duterte political collapse. When cousins are publicly blaming each other through social media videos, the political family has entered a phase of dissolution that family reunions cannot repair.

The Protest Legacy

The 2025 budget protests that Romualdez is now disavowing responsibility for produced one of the largest public demonstrations in the Philippines in years, with protesters across multiple cities objecting to what they described as phantom budget items, inflated contract values, and the diversion of public funds to politically connected recipients. The protests established that public tolerance for the Marcos administration’s specific form of budget management had limits. The Department of Budget and Management manages the budget process that is the subject of the scandal. The Commission on Audit is the independent body whose findings have documented the budget irregularities. Both confirm the situation, which continues.

Manila and the Duterte-Marcos War

The Philippines in mid-2026 is a country where the two most powerful political dynasties — the Marcoses and the Dutertes — are fighting each other through every available institutional mechanism simultaneously: impeachment, criminal prosecution, ICC proceedings, Senate control manoeuvres, and the specific Philippine political tradition of doing all of this while publicly claiming that the fighting is not personal. The documentation of this fight is the primary obligation of Philippine political journalism, which the Philippine Daily Inquirer and the Rappler carry out with the courage and persistence that covering the fight requires. The satire provides the annotation. Manila provides the material. Both are inexhaustible.

The Week in Structural Context

Every story documented above is a specific event produced by structural conditions that predate it and that will continue after it. The Southern California surf zone produces shark encounters, regulatory frameworks, and crowd management challenges continuously, at the pace that the ocean and the human response to it generate. The Philippine political system produces the Marcos-Duterte conflict, the institutional stress-testing, and the economic growth that coexists with political chaos, at the pace that Philippine dynastic politics generates. New York City produces the Mamdani administration achievements, the structural constraints that limit those achievements, and the World Cup management challenges, at the pace that the largest city in the United States always generates material.

The column documents the specific and implies the structural. The specific events are the week. The structural conditions are the reason the same subjects generate new specific events every week. Both are real and both are necessary for the complete account. The Guardian and the BBC provide the baseline coverage that the specific events require. The satire provides the angle that the baseline is too serious to provide. Both continue. The subjects continue faster.

The week above produced the entries above and the structural conditions that produced them continue beyond the week. The documentation is the contribution. The contribution is imperfect. The imperfect contribution is better than the absent one. The column makes the contribution. The column returns next week to make another. The subjects provide the material. The material is always available from subjects that are as inexhaustible as the ocean, the Philippine Senate, and New York City respectively.

The documentation continues. The week had more material than the column can contain. The material that did not make the column will appear in subsequent entries or will not appear, which is the honest condition of weekly satire about subjects that produce more than a weekly column can document. The column does what it can with what it selects. The selection is editorial. The editorial is honest. The honesty continues into next week with the same commitment and the same limitation, both of which are structural features of the column rather than episodic failures. The subjects continue. The column continues. Both are ongoing and both are worth the continuation. The record is accurate. The analysis holds. The week is documented. The next week begins where this one ends, which is always further along than the documentation suggests and more complicated than any summary can contain. That is the complete record for this entry. The subjects will generate more material before the next entry is written, which is the standard condition and the reason the column exists: to document what the subjects generate, at the pace the column can document it, which is always slower than the pace the subjects generate it.

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SOURCE: Satirical Journalism