PH-D-07: The Philippines' Post-Impeachment Polity Reset and the 2028 Presidential Pre-Campaign (2025–2026)

1. Key Takeaways

• This document is the analytical companion to PH-D-06 — where PH-D-06 treats the Senate impeachment trial of Vice-President Sara Z. Duterte-Carpio as a constitutional and procedural object, PH-D-07 treats the polity within which the trial sits and that the trial's outcome (whatever it proves to be) will reshape. The corpus's empirical baseline is 22 May 2026: the Senate trial is in progress, the verdict has not yet been delivered, and the 2028 presidential election is twenty-three and a half months away. The document does not predict the verdict; it documents the political, fiscal, legislative, foreign-policy, and social-policy architecture that the verdict will enter. Three scenarios are treated in parallel throughout: a conviction outcome triggering disqualification under Article XI Section 3(7) of the 1987 Constitution; an acquittal outcome restoring the Vice-President's full institutional standing; and a dismissal-or-mistrial outcome leaving her formally unconvicted but politically wounded. As of mid-2026 [TBD-VERIFY: the trial outcome, given the trial's projected verdict window straddling the document's cutoff and the realistic possibility that the verdict is delivered between the document's last update and its first reading]. The post-verdict scenarios developed in Section 3 are calibrated to each branch without arbitrating between them.

• The Marcos administration's final 2.5 constitutional years — from approximately mid-2025 through 30 June 2028 — are governance years that are inseparable from succession positioning, and the analytical question of how to weigh "governance" against "pre-2028 positioning" is itself a contested framing. Article VII Section 4 of the 1987 Constitution provides that the President serves a single six-year term without immediate re-election; President Ferdinand R. Marcos Jr.'s term ends 30 June 2028. Every major Marcos-administration policy decision in 2025–2026 — the FY 2026 budget priorities, the maritime-enforcement posture, the response to climate shocks, the framing of charter-change debates, the cabinet reshuffles — can be read either through the administration's own "governance continuity" frame, through the opposition's "positioning the succession" frame, or through the civil-society "neither-purely-governance-nor-purely-positioning" structural frame. Section 4 develops each frame with primary-source attribution, including Press Secretary [TBD-VERIFY: name of Press Secretary in 2026 — Cesar Chavez succeeded by Claire Castro?] communications, Pilipinas Para sa Pinoy opposition framings, and civil-society analyses by CenPEG, the Philippine Center for Investigative Journalism (PCIJ), and the Stratbase ADR Institute.

• The 20th Congress, convened on 28 July 2025 after the 12 May 2025 mid-term elections and reorganised across its first session through legislative-leadership negotiations, is the institutional theatre within which the trial, the succession, and the 2026–2028 policy agenda are simultaneously contested. The House of Representatives remains under the speakership of Martin G. Romualdez (Leyte 1st District, Lakas-CMD), the President's first cousin, who consolidated his majority through the FY 2026 General Appropriations Act process and through the renewed Lakas-CMD–PFP–NPC–NUP "Alyansa" coalition arithmetic. The Senate's leadership — initially retained by Francis "Chiz" Escudero (NPC, Sorsogon) through the 28 July 2025 organisational vote — became the subject of renewed contestation through late 2025 and early 2026 as the trial proceeded and as factional alignments shifted. The legislative agenda combines fiscal-conservative priorities (deficit reduction, BIR and BoC revenue performance), security-sector items (the National Defense Act revision, the Coast Guard expansion, the EDCA-implementing supplemental), social-policy continuity (the Walang Gutom 2027 anti-hunger programme expansion, the 4Ps continuation), and the resurfacing of charter-change proposals (Section 10).

• The fiscal trajectory under Department of Finance Secretary Ralph G. Recto centres on a deficit-cap targeting framework that constrains the FY 2026 and FY 2027 General Appropriations Acts in ways that subordinate political-positioning expenditures to revenue and deficit discipline — a structural feature with consequences for the entire 2025–2028 cycle. Secretary Recto, formerly a senator and former NEDA Director-General, was appointed Finance Secretary in January 2024 and presented the administration's Medium-Term Fiscal Framework aiming to reduce the national-government deficit-to-GDP ratio from approximately 5.7 per cent in 2024 toward 3.7 per cent by 2028. The Bureau of Internal Revenue under Commissioner Romeo D. Lumagui Jr. [TBD-VERIFY: whether Lumagui remained BIR Commissioner through May 2026 or was replaced] and the Bureau of Customs under Commissioner Bienvenido Y. Rubio [TBD-VERIFY: precise spelling of "Bienvenido Rubio Jr." and his confirmation as BoC Commissioner under the 20th Congress's Commission on Appointments] together targeted revenue ratios of approximately 17.0 per cent of GDP in 2026 and rising. The Excise Tax on Single-Use Plastics, the Capital Markets Efficiency Promotion Act (Republic Act No. 12001, signed May 2024), and the Value-Added Tax on Digital Services Act (Republic Act No. 12023, signed October 2024) supplied the principal revenue-side legislative architecture. The deficit-cap regime has, by all accounts in 2025–2026, constrained discretionary expenditures including those that political operators would have preferred for pre-2028 positioning purposes.

• The 2028 presidential field as of mid-2026 is the most institutionally contested and personality-saturated in post-EDSA history, and the field's composition is conditioned by the trial's outcome and by the constitutional eligibility analyses applicable to each prospective candidate. The principal prospective candidates — to be developed in Section 8 — include: from the Marcos-aligned spectrum, Senator Imee R. Marcos (the President's elder sister, in her contested alignment); Senator Joel Villanueva (PFP); Senator Camille Villar; Senator Erwin Tulfo; Speaker Martin G. Romualdez; Senator Vicente "Tito" Sotto III; and Department of Finance Secretary Ralph Recto. From the Duterte-aligned spectrum, Vice-President Sara Z. Duterte-Carpio (if not constitutionally disqualified — the eligibility question turns on the trial's outcome and on the construction of Article XI Section 3(7)) [TBD-VERIFY: precise current eligibility status as of May 2026 given trial pendency]; Senator Christopher "Bong" Go; Senator Ronald "Bato" Dela Rosa; and former Senator Manny Pacquiao (whose 2025 senatorial campaign outcome is treated in PH-D-05). From the liberal-progressive opposition, former Senator Bam Aquino; former Vice-President Maria Leonor "Leni" G. Robredo (whose return to electoral politics in 2025 or 2026 is widely speculated but not formally announced); Senator Risa Hontiveros (Akbayan, though her interest in a presidential run remains uncertain); and Senator Aquilino "Koko" Pimentel III. From the centre and the independent space, Senator Juan Miguel "Migz" Zubiri; Senator Loren Legarda; and Vice-Presidential aspirants from across the spectrum. The constitutional eligibility analysis under Article VII Sections 2 and 4 (citizenship, age, residence, single-term limit applicability) is straightforward for all candidates except for the Vice-President under the trial's disqualification scenario.

• The maritime-EEZ enforcement continuation — through Bajo de Masinloc (Scarborough Shoal), Second Thomas Shoal (Ayungin Shoal), Iroquois Reef, Pag-asa Island (Thitu), and Sabina Shoal — has become the most visible continuity feature of Marcos-administration foreign policy and the principal vector through which the administration has built sustained domestic political capital. Through late 2025 and into 2026, Philippine Coast Guard and Bureau of Fisheries and Aquatic Resources vessels conducted regularised resupply, presence, and counter-grey-zone operations across the disputed maritime features. The Pag-asa Island civilian-and-military presence was expanded through the Department of National Defense and Department of Public Works and Highways infrastructure programme; the Iroquois Reef [TBD-VERIFY: specific 2025–2026 Iroquois Reef incidents and severity] confrontations recurred; the Bajo de Masinloc deployments by the China Coast Guard generated multiple sustained encounters; and the Philippine Coast Guard's transparency initiative — under Commodore Jay Tarriela and his successors — maintained the public-information posture that made Chinese coercion politically costly. The bilateral Reciprocal Access Agreement (RAA) with Japan (signed 8 July 2024, ratified in 2025) and the deepened security cooperation with Australia, France, India, the Republic of Korea, and the United Kingdom together produced what observers including Stratbase ADRi, AMTI (Greg Poling), and the Asia Society Policy Institute characterised as the "Squad-plus" architecture (PH-F-03 and PH-F-05 develop the institutional architecture).

• The Code of Conduct (CoC) negotiations between ASEAN and China — the principal multilateral diplomatic process intended to manage the South China Sea disputes — remained, as of mid-2026, formally active but substantively stalled, with the Philippines under Foreign Affairs Secretary Enrique A. Manalo's [TBD-VERIFY: whether Manalo remained DFA Secretary through May 2026] continued posture of constructive scepticism. The CoC's Third Reading of the negotiating text, target-completed by 2026 under the timeline announced at the 2023 ASEAN-China Special Senior Officials' Meeting, remained incomplete; principal sticking points included the geographic scope (whether the Code covers all disputed features or only certain ones), the binding legal status of the instrument, the relationship to the 2016 South China Sea Arbitration award (PH-K-05), the third-party-claimant question, and the enforcement-mechanism question. The Philippine position — emphasising compatibility with the 2016 award, binding character, and inclusion of all disputed features — diverged from the position of certain other ASEAN claimants and from the Chinese position. The CoC's stalled progression reinforced, rather than diminished, the Philippine bilateral and minilateral security architecture documented above.

• The Mindanao governance order after the 13 October 2025 Bangsamoro Parliamentary Elections — the first parliamentary elections under the post-2018 Bangsamoro Organic Law — entered a new and contested transitional phase whose constitutional and political stakes are independent of the Manila-centred succession contest. The BARMM elections, postponed from earlier scheduled dates and conducted under COMELEC supervision with the participation of the United Bangsamoro Justice Party (UBJP, the political vehicle of the Moro Islamic Liberation Front), the Bangsamoro People's Party, regional party-list formations, and individual candidates, produced a Bangsamoro Parliament whose composition shaped the post-election selection of the Chief Minister and the configuration of the Bangsamoro Government's cabinet through 2026 and beyond. The MILF-led UBJP secured [TBD-VERIFY: precise seat count and proportion] of parliamentary seats; the regional opposition formations (including ex-MNLF-aligned and dynasty-led blocs) secured the balance. The transition's central political-economy questions — the Bangsamoro Block Grant (the formula-based annual fiscal transfer from the national government), the integration of MILF combatants under the normalisation track, the local-government reorganisation under the Bangsamoro Local Government Code, and the unresolved questions concerning Sulu (the Supreme Court's 2024 Sulu v. Bangsamoro ruling excluding Sulu from the BARMM) — are developed in Section 11.

• The Davao Region's post-ICC-arrest political dynamics — with former President Rodrigo R. Duterte at The Hague, Vice-President Sara Duterte-Carpio facing impeachment trial, and the Davao City local government under the leadership of Sebastian "Baste" Z. Duterte (Mayor since 2022) and Paolo "Pulong" Duterte (Davao City 1st District Representative) — represent the localised institutional centre of the Duterte camp's political resilience strategy. Through late 2025 and into 2026, the Davao City local administration sustained the Davao model of municipal governance (visible-policing presence, business-friendly local-tax regime, infrastructure continuity through the Build-Build-Build inheritance), while the broader Davao Region's congressional and gubernatorial delegations supplied the political-base mobilisation infrastructure for Sara Duterte's impeachment defence and for the 2028 succession scenarios developed in Section 8. The Duterte family's institutional concentration in Davao City — three generations of family members holding national and local elected office — is the structural backstop against which the simultaneous Hague and Senate trials are tested.

• The Maharlika Investment Fund (MIF), operational since late 2023 under the Maharlika Investment Corporation (MIC) with initial capitalisation of PHP 125 billion drawn from the Land Bank of the Philippines, the Development Bank of the Philippines, and the Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas dividends, entered its third operational year in 2026 amid continuing contestation over governance, returns, and disclosure. The MIC's 2024 Annual Report disclosed initial investment allocations across infrastructure, energy, and financial-instrument categories; the 2025 Annual Report — released in mid-2026 [TBD-VERIFY: precise release date and disclosed return on assets] — was the subject of intensive scrutiny by the Senate Finance Sub-Committee under Senator Sherwin Gatchalian and the House Committee on Banks and Financial Intermediaries. The Court of Appeals' [TBD-VERIFY: pendency of constitutional challenge to MIC under the Bayan Muna et al. v. MIC litigation] continuing legal challenges remained unresolved. The MIF's policy role within the broader fiscal trajectory — whether the Fund operates as a sovereign-wealth-style investor or as a quasi-fiscal-stimulus vehicle — remained the subject of public commentary. PH-K-07 develops the MIF's establishment and the foundational 2023 legislative architecture.

• The 4Ps Pantawid Pamilyang Pilipino Program, the Walang Gutom 2027 anti-hunger food-stamp programme, and the FY 2026–2027 social-protection budget cycle together constitute the social-policy substrate against which the political contestation occurs and whose continuity is itself a political-economy fact. The 4Ps, the world's largest conditional-cash-transfer programme by beneficiary count (approximately 4.4 million household beneficiaries as of 2024–2025 [TBD-VERIFY: precise 2025–2026 beneficiary figure]), continued under the Department of Social Welfare and Development with FY 2026 budget allocation of approximately PHP 115 billion [TBD-VERIFY: exact FY 2026 4Ps appropriation]. The Walang Gutom 2027 food-stamp pilot — launched July 2024 under DSWD Secretary Rex Gatchalian and expanded in 2025–2026 — targeted approximately one million household food-insecure beneficiaries with monthly food credits redeemable at accredited retailers. The El Niño dry season of mid-2024 through early 2025 and the transition to La Niña conditions through late 2025 and 2026 [TBD-VERIFY: precise PAGASA-declared phase transitions] generated agricultural shocks (rice, corn, sugar, fisheries) and water-supply stress that the social-policy architecture absorbed. The 2024–2025 African Swine Fever (ASF) recurrence — distinct from the foot-and-mouth-disease challenge sometimes conflated with ASF in popular reporting — generated swine-sector losses and consumer-price pressure that the Department of Agriculture managed through the Bantay ASF sa Barangay programme.

• The corpus applies its three-account discipline to three principal contested framings developed in Section 14. First: Is President Marcos's final 2.5 years substantive governance or pre-2028 succession positioning? The administration account (articulated by Press Secretary [TBD-VERIFY: Press Secretary 2026], Executive Secretary Lucas P. Bersamin, and the Presidential Communications Office) characterises the period as the implementation phase of the Philippine Development Plan 2023–2028 with no significant deviation from the inaugurated agenda; the opposition account (articulated by Pilipinas Para sa Pinoy and analogous opposition formations) characterises it as a sequence of positioning manoeuvres dressed as governance; the civil-society structural account (CenPEG, Stratbase ADRi, PCIJ) emphasises the simultaneity of governance and positioning without arbitrating which is "primary." Second: Is the resurfacing of Charter Change reform or self-perpetuation? The Senate-reformist account (Senators Hontiveros, Pimentel, Zubiri) characterises the contemporary proposals as either narrowly economic-reform proposals or as politically motivated; the House-majority account characterises them as overdue institutional reform addressing economic restrictions and electoral architecture; the civil-society account (Kontra Daya, Bayan) characterises them as institutionally suspect under conditions of contested presidential succession. Third: Is Sara Duterte's 2028 political viability salvaged or terminated? The Duterte-Davao account characterises her viability as intact under any conviction outcome short of disqualification; the Marcos-Imee-camp account [TBD-VERIFY: whether Imee Marcos's camp publicly positions itself on Sara Duterte's viability] characterises the trial's outcome as inevitably foreclosing the Vice-President's path even short of formal disqualification; the political-science account (Mendoza, Teehankee, Arugay, Thompson) emphasises the gap between base-loyalty (sustained) and national-preference (declining) as the analytical frame.

---

2. Framing — From the Trial's Centre of Gravity to the Polity Reset

The Senate impeachment trial of Vice-President Sara Z. Duterte-Carpio, treated as a constitutional and procedural object in PH-D-06, is the political-system fact around which the 2025–2026 Philippine polity has organised itself. But the trial is not — even were it dispositive of the Vice-Presidency — the totality of the polity. The Marcos administration has 2.5 constitutional years remaining; the 20th Congress has a legislative agenda; the fiscal trajectory is constrained by deficit-cap commitments to international markets and ratings agencies; the maritime-EEZ enforcement against Chinese grey-zone coercion continues without pause; the BARMM has held its first parliamentary elections; the climate cycle has rotated from El Niño to La Niña; the African Swine Fever recurrence has generated agricultural-sector stress; the Maharlika Investment Fund has entered operational maturity; and the 2028 presidential succession has begun its pre-campaign positioning phase. PH-D-07 (this document) treats these features as the polity within which the trial sits and that the trial's outcome will reshape — without predicting the outcome and without conflating the trial's centrality with the polity's coverage.

The framing problem is methodologically consequential. A document that treated the post-mid-term Philippine polity only through the trial would obscure the policy and fiscal architecture that constrains the Marcos administration's choices irrespective of trial outcome; a document that treated it only through governance would obscure the trial's pervasive conditioning of every legislative-leadership negotiation, every budget item with succession-positioning implications, every public-communications choice. The discipline applied here is to develop both registers in parallel: each section treats the trial's relevance to the policy domain in question while developing the policy domain's substantive content. The three-account discipline (administration, opposition, civil-society/structural) is applied to contested framings throughout; Section 14 develops the framings in their consolidated form.

The temporal anchor is 22 May 2026, with the analytic window extending backward to the 28 July 2025 convocation of the 20th Congress (which followed the 12 May 2025 mid-term elections covered in PH-D-05) and forward to the 30 June 2028 expiry of President Marcos's constitutional term and the 9 May 2028 presidential election. The "post-impeachment" phrasing in the document title carries no implication about trial outcome; it refers to the period subsequent to the impeachment's formal initiation on 5 February 2025 and the subsequent commencement of trial proceedings in the 20th Congress's Senate (Section 3). For documentary continuity, the document accepts PH-D-06's treatment of the trial's procedural and evidentiary architecture as background and develops in its own Section 3 only the aftermath dimensions specific to this document's focus.

The empirical baseline is constituted by primary sources documented in the Sources Consulted list: Senate and House journals, Supreme Court decisions, Office of the President and cabinet-department releases, COMELEC issuances, polling data from Pulse Asia, SWS, and OCTA, scholarly commentary from Curato, Thompson, Teehankee, Arugay, Mendoza, Coronel, Bello, and Rocamora, and sustained reporting by Rappler, the Inquirer, the Philippine Star, BusinessWorld, Manila Bulletin, Manila Times, Vera Files, and PCIJ. TBD-VERIFY tagging is applied to dates, figures, identifications, and outcomes whose verification through primary sources is incomplete as of the document's cutoff.

3. The Senate Trial's Outcome and Its Constitutional Aftermath (Late 2025 – May 2026)

3.1 The Trial-in-Chief Phase (August 2025 – Early 2026)

The Senate impeachment court of the 20th Congress, organised in early August 2025 following the 29 July 2025 Supreme Court ruling sustaining the carry-over of the Articles (covered in PH-D-06 Section 7), commenced trial-in-chief proceedings in [TBD-VERIFY: precise August or September 2025 trial-opening date and the sequence of opening statements by the House prosecution panel and the OVP defence team]. The presiding officer was Chief Justice Alexander G. Gesmundo, per Article XI Section 3(6) of the 1987 Constitution. The House prosecution panel, designated by Speaker Romualdez, comprised approximately eleven House members serving as managers of the prosecution; the defence team was led by former Executive Secretary Salvador C. Medialdea, Atty. Martin Loon Delgra III, and a panel of additional domestic and foreign counsel.

The prosecution's case-in-chief, presented across multiple trial sessions through the autumn of 2025 and into early 2026, organised around the seven counts of the Articles (PH-D-06 Section 4). The principal evidentiary tranches included: the Commission on Audit's audit observations and Notices of Disallowance relating to the December 2022 PHP 125 million OVP confidential-fund disbursement and to the DepEd FY 2023 confidential-fund line; the recording and transcript of the 23 November 2024 press conference statement; testimony from former OVP and DepEd officials concerning fund administration; documentary evidence concerning the political-coordination patterns surrounding the November 2024 statement; and additional evidentiary material developed through the prosecution's continuing investigations. The defence's case combined cross-examination challenging the prosecution's evidentiary characterisations, motions challenging the trial court's jurisdiction (preserving the jurisdictional objections that the Supreme Court had ruled against in the 29 July 2025 decision), and the defence-in-chief presentation of witnesses and documentary evidence intended to demonstrate procedural compliance and rhetorical-rather-than-criminal character of the November 2024 statement.

The trial's procedural rhythm through late 2025 and early 2026 was conditioned by the Senate's parallel legislative obligations. The Senate sat as an impeachment court on designated days each week, conducting legislative business on the remaining days. The FY 2026 General Appropriations Act process consumed substantial Senate floor time in November and December 2025; the South China Sea–related foreign-affairs hearings consumed Senate time in early 2026; the BARMM post-election briefings and the cabinet-confirmation work of the Commission on Appointments [TBD-VERIFY: precise pace of CA confirmations through the 20th Congress's first session] together produced a Senate calendar in which the trial competed for time with the upper chamber's ordinary work.

3.2 The Three-Branch Scenario Analysis

As of mid-2026, three outcomes are constitutionally available to the Senate impeachment court [TBD-VERIFY: whether a verdict has been delivered between the document's cutoff and the realistic time of first reading]:

Conviction with disqualification. A two-thirds vote of all sitting senators (sixteen of twenty-four) on any of the seven counts would constitute conviction and trigger immediate removal under Article XI Section 3(7); the same provision provides for disqualification from holding "any office of honour, trust, or profit under the Republic of the Philippines." This is the outcome that triggers the most extensive constitutional and political aftermath. Under conviction-with-disqualification, the Vice-Presidency falls vacant; under Article VII Section 9 of the 1987 Constitution, the President nominates a successor from the membership of either house of Congress, subject to confirmation by a majority vote of both houses voting separately. The succession nomination would itself be a politically consequential decision; the Marcos administration's likely nominees include [TBD-VERIFY: which figures the administration has signalled would be considered — Senator Tito Sotto, Senator Pia Cayetano, Speaker Romualdez, or Cabinet members are among names that have surfaced in 2025–2026 commentary]. Disqualification under Article XI Section 3(7) would foreclose the Vice-President's 2028 presidential candidacy.

Acquittal. A failure of the prosecution to secure sixteen senator-judges' affirmative votes on any count would constitute acquittal. The Vice-President would retain her constitutional office and her unimpaired electoral mandate for the remainder of her term ending 30 June 2028. Politically, acquittal would substantially restore her 2028 presidential viability — though not eliminate the political damage of the trial's evidentiary record. The conviction arithmetic (Section 8 develops the senator-by-senator analysis) is the central uncertainty; the Marcos camp's calculation is that conviction requires the alignment of approximately fifteen of the seventeen non-Duterte-aligned senators, a margin that depends on the alignment of approximately three to five senators who are formally Marcos-aligned but whose individual political incentives and judicial-temperament considerations make their votes uncertain.

Dismissal or mistrial. A range of intermediate outcomes — dismissal on procedural grounds, failure to complete trial proceedings within the constitutional or institutional time available, suspension of proceedings for cause — would leave the Vice-President formally unconvicted but politically wounded. The dismissal scenarios include: a Senate procedural vote on a motion to dismiss; an outcome in which the Senate fails to complete trial proceedings before the conclusion of the 20th Congress in mid-2028 (raising fresh carry-over questions distinct from those resolved on 29 July 2025); or a settlement-style outcome in which the proceedings are wound up by mutual procedural manoeuvring. As of mid-2026, no dismissal motion has succeeded; the trial continues.

3.3 The Constitutional and Institutional Aftermath Across Scenarios

The post-verdict aftermath has institutional implications independent of the verdict's content. The 1987 Constitution provides no explicit timeline for post-impeachment institutional transition; the Rules of Procedure on Impeachment Trials and the Senate's own deliberations provide procedural specificity. Under any conviction-with-disqualification outcome, the Vice-Presidency vacancy would be filled by Marcos-administration nomination from Congress; the constitutional and political stakes of that nomination would condition the 2028 succession by establishing an incumbent Vice-President with administration-coalition backing whose own candidacy would be plausible. Under acquittal, the Vice-Presidency would retain its current occupant, with the 2028 succession contested between the trial-tested Vice-President and the Marcos-camp prospective candidates. Under dismissal or mistrial, the constitutional position would be ambiguous, generating new contestation over the formal status of the Articles.

The civil-society response to each branch — articulated through the Movement Against Disinformation, Akbayan, the Philippine Bar Association, Karapatan, Bayan, the Catholic Bishops' Conference of the Philippines (CBCP), PCIJ, and Rappler — has been calibrated to the procedural conduct of the trial rather than to a specific verdict. The CBCP's pastoral interventions through the 2025–2026 period, including statements by Cardinal Pablo Virgilio David of Caloocan (CBCP President 2023–2025 and continuing in pastoral leadership) and Cardinal Jose F. Advincula of Manila, emphasised the procedural integrity of the trial and the political-mobilisation responsibility of laypeople without advocating a specific verdict.

The international dimension — including the parallel ICC proceedings against former President Rodrigo Duterte and the alliance-political relationship with the United States, Japan, Australia, and other partners — supplies additional context. The ICC's confirmation-of-charges hearing and the subsequent trial-phase proceedings against former President Duterte (PH-D-02 and PH-D-06 Sections 8 and 11 develop the architecture) provide a parallel accountability track whose progression is institutionally independent of the Senate trial. The US, Japan, Australia, and the European Union have declined to comment materially on the Senate trial, characterising it as a Philippine internal constitutional matter; the implicit position of these partners is that domestic constitutional accountability is the responsibility of the Philippine institutions to manage.

4. The Marcos Administration's Final 2.5 Constitutional Years — Governance versus Succession

4.1 The Constitutional Architecture of the Single-Term Presidency

The 1987 Constitution's Article VII Section 4 provides that the President "shall be elected by direct vote of the people for a term of six years which shall begin at noon on the thirtieth day of June next following the day of the election and shall end at noon of the same date six years thereafter. The President shall not be eligible for any re-election. No person who has succeeded as President and has served as such for more than four years shall be qualified for election to the same office at any time." This single-term constitutional structure — a deliberate post-EDSA reform reflecting both the Marcos Sr. precedent of constitutional manipulation and the constitutional-convention drafters' conviction that single terms reduce the incentive for executive-power-perpetuating manoeuvres — sets a structural constraint on every Philippine presidency's final-period governance.

President Marcos Jr., inaugurated 30 June 2022, faces 30 June 2028 as his constitutional terminus. The final 2.5 years from approximately late 2025 through mid-2028 are conventionally characterised in Philippine politics as the lame-duck period — a term whose accuracy in the Philippine constitutional context is contested, since the President retains full constitutional and political powers throughout the period. The post-EDSA pattern across the Cory Aquino, Ramos, Estrada (truncated), Arroyo, Aquino III, and Duterte presidencies has been that the final two to three years of each presidency combine meaningful policy work with succession positioning, with the relative weight of each varying by presidency. The Cory Aquino and Aquino III final periods emphasised legacy-policy consolidation; the Ramos final period included the controversial "Cha-cha" initiative for term extension (defeated); the Arroyo final period was dominated by post-Hello Garci political-survival manoeuvring; the Duterte final period featured the 2022 election campaign-by-proxy and the ICC withdrawal completion.

The Marcos Jr. final-period architecture is contested precisely because the 2028 succession contest is among the most plurally contested in post-EDSA history (Section 8). The administration's policy programme — the Philippine Development Plan 2023–2028 and its supporting sectoral plans, the Medium-Term Fiscal Framework, the foreign-policy and defence postures, and the social-policy commitments — supplies the governance substance against which the succession positioning is conducted. The political-economy literature on Philippine presidential lame-duck periods (Mendoza et al., Teehankee, Thompson, Curato) emphasises the institutional mechanisms by which a lame-duck President retains influence: budget priorities, cabinet appointments, regulatory issuances, foreign-policy commitments that extend beyond the term, and the political-coalition arithmetic that shapes the successor field.

4.2 The Cabinet and the 2025–2026 Reshuffles

The Marcos cabinet through 2025–2026 underwent successive reshuffles whose pattern is itself a subject of political reading. The principal cabinet positions as of mid-2026 include: Executive Secretary Lucas P. Bersamin (former Chief Justice, appointed 2022); Department of Foreign Affairs Secretary Enrique A. Manalo [TBD-VERIFY: whether Manalo remained DFA Secretary through May 2026 or was succeeded]; Department of National Defense Secretary Gilberto C. Teodoro Jr. (appointed June 2023 in succession to Carlito Galvez); Department of Finance Secretary Ralph G. Recto (appointed January 2024 in succession to Benjamin Diokno); Department of Budget and Management Secretary Amenah F. Pangandaman (appointed 2022, continuing); Department of Trade and Industry Secretary [TBD-VERIFY: DTI Secretary as of May 2026 — Cristina A. Roque succeeded Alfredo E. Pascual in 2024]; Department of Agriculture Secretary Francisco P. Tiu Laurel Jr. (appointed November 2023 in succession to the President's concurrent service); Department of Social Welfare and Development Secretary Rex Gatchalian (continuing); Department of Education Secretary Juan Edgardo "Sonny" Angara (appointed July 2024 in succession to Vice-President Duterte); Department of Justice Secretary Jesus Crispin Remulla (continuing); Department of the Interior and Local Government Secretary Juanito Victor "Jonvic" C. Remulla [TBD-VERIFY: whether Jonvic Remulla remained DILG Secretary through May 2026]; and Department of Public Works and Highways Secretary Manuel Bonoan (continuing).

The post-2024 reshuffles — including the Recto-Diokno transition at DOF, the Tiu Laurel appointment at DA, the Angara appointment at DepEd, and the various department-of-secondary-importance changes — were widely characterised in 2025–2026 commentary as combining policy considerations with positioning considerations. The Recto appointment at DOF signalled a fiscal-conservative posture that the administration considered politically necessary for market and ratings-agency confidence; the Angara appointment at DepEd signalled the formal end of the UniTeam cabinet's residue and the consolidation of Marcos administration control over the education-policy domain (PH-J-06 develops the education-policy frame). The Cabinet Secretary position — held by Frederick D. Go from January 2024, with the Cabinet Secretary renamed Special Assistant to the President for Investment and Economic Affairs — supplied a coordinating role across investment-promotion and economic-affairs questions.

4.3 The Administration's Policy Programme and the Public-Communications Frame

The Marcos administration's significant policy programme through 2025–2026, articulated in the Fourth State of the Nation Address (SONA) of 28 July 2025 and in subsequent communications, organised around six principal pillars: (1) macroeconomic stability and growth, with emphasis on the 6 to 7 per cent annual GDP growth target and the deficit-cap trajectory; (2) infrastructure continuation, including the Build-Better-More programme as successor framework to Build-Build-Build, and the Bagong Pilipinas infrastructure-and-services portfolio; (3) food security and agricultural modernisation, including the rice-tariff regime under Executive Order No. 62 and the Department of Agriculture's modernisation programme; (4) social protection and human-capital investment, including 4Ps continuation, Walang Gutom 2027, the Universal Health Care Act implementation, and the K-to-12 review under MATATAG; (5) defence and foreign-policy alignment, including EDCA expansion, the South China Sea posture, the Reciprocal Access Agreements, and the Squad-plus architecture; and (6) governance reform, including the Bagong Pilipinas anti-corruption narrative, the digitalisation of government services, and the Ease of Doing Business reforms.

The public-communications frame through the Presidential Communications Office (PCO) under Secretary Jay Ruiz [TBD-VERIFY: PCO Secretary as of May 2026, given multiple successions through 2024–2026] and the Press Secretariat emphasised the policy programme as the dominant narrative, with explicit framing-management of the impeachment trial and the parallel ICC proceedings as institutional accountability operations to which the administration was procedurally adjacent rather than politically engaged. The communications architecture's success in 2025–2026 is contested: administration analysts characterise it as effective insulation of governance from political-trial noise; opposition analysts characterise it as a thin veneer over coordinated positioning; civil-society analysts emphasise the structural problem that governance and positioning cannot, under conditions of contested succession, be cleanly separated.

4.4 The Three-Account Framing of the Final-Period Governance

The first three-account framing — Is the Marcos final 2.5 years governance or pre-2028 succession positioning? — is developed in summary form here and at greater length in Section 14.

The administration account, articulated through PCO releases, SONA texts, and cabinet-secretary commentary, characterises the period as considerable governance organised around the Philippine Development Plan 2023–2028. The administration emphasises measurable policy outputs: GDP growth, infrastructure delivery, 4Ps coverage, EDCA-site activations, FDI inflows, BIR and BoC revenue performance. The succession question is, on this account, a constitutional and political process for the public to decide in May 2028 without administrative pre-positioning beyond what is institutionally proper.

The opposition account — articulated through Pilipinas Para sa Pinoy (the post-2025 opposition formation succeeding Robredo's People's Council and combining Liberal Party residue, Akbayan, Aksyon Demokratiko, and independent reformists), through senator-opposition figures including Hontiveros, Pimentel, and Aquino, and through commentary by Bello, Rocamora, and Conde — characterises the period as a sequence of positioning manoeuvres dressed as governance. Specific examples invoked: the FY 2026 GAA's allocations to House-majority districts characterised as pork-barrel positioning; the cabinet reshuffles characterised as candidate-development; the foreign-policy commitments characterised as 2028-extending lock-ins; the charter-change resurfacing characterised as institutional-perpetuation manoeuvring (Section 10).

The civil-society structural account — articulated through CenPEG, PCIJ, Stratbase ADRi (in its institutional-analytic capacity), the AIM Policy Center, and the academic commentariat — emphasises that governance and positioning are not cleanly separable under conditions of contested succession. The structural account observes that every late-period presidency in post-EDSA history has combined the two, with the relative weight conditioned by external constraints (economic conditions, security shocks, institutional disruptions) and by the President's own coalition position. The Marcos administration's combination is, on this account, neither uniquely positioning-heavy nor uniquely governance-pure; it occupies a typical position on the continuum.

The framing's analytical utility is that it makes explicit the contested character of all subsequent sections. Sections 5 (legislative agenda), 6 (fiscal trajectory), 8 (2028 pre-campaign), 9 (coalition recalibrations), 10 (charter change), and 13 (Maharlika and electricity) each contain elements legible under each account; the sections develop the elements without arbitrating among accounts.

4.5 The Flood-Control Corruption Scandal's 2026 Recovery Record and the August 2026 Succession Signal [Recency-sweep update, 2026-08-29]

The flood-control-projects corruption scandal — the "ghost" Department of Public Works and Highways flood-control projects controversy that had already surfaced as a grievance in the September 2025 Senate reorganisation (Section 5.4) — remained, through mid-2026, the most consequential test case for the "governance versus positioning" framing of Section 4.4. In July 2026, President Marcos announced that the administration's crackdown on flood-control corruption had resulted in the recovery, freezing, or preservation of assets valued at nearly ₱25 billion, of which more than ₱800 million had by that point been returned to the National Treasury. Search-corroborated reporting (Sunstar, Rappler, GMA News Online, and the Philippine Center for Investigative Journalism) placed at least 45 individuals facing criminal charges before the Sandiganbayan and various regional trial courts in connection with the scandal, including two sitting members of Congress, two former lawmakers, 33 former DPWH officials, and eight contractors. [TBD-VERIFY: the precise ₱25 billion and ₱800 million figures, and the 45-defendant breakdown, are search-corroborated across multiple outlets but have not been independently fetch-verified against a primary DOJ, Ombudsman, or Sandiganbayan release in this update.] Commentary surveyed in this sweep (a PCIJ retrospective and an Eurasia Review opinion piece) noted that the recovered sum remained a small fraction of the scandal's estimated scale — reported elsewhere as approaching $2 billion in diverted funds — and that many officials implicated in the controversy continued to hold public office notwithstanding the prosecutions under way.

Separately, on 15 August 2026, President Marcos stated publicly that he intends to endorse a candidate for the 2028 presidential succession, characterising it as still "far too early" to name one, and that any such successor should continue his administration's anti-corruption campaign — remarks reported contemporaneously by the Manila Times and Philstar under headlines describing Marcos as having "launched" the search for a successor. This is the first instance in this document's sourcing of the President publicly linking his anti-corruption record to his succession-endorsement calculus, and it bears on the Section 4.4 three-account framing: the administration account can read the statement as evidence that anti-corruption is a substantive governance legacy the President intends to entrench through his chosen successor; the opposition and civil-society-structural accounts can read the same statement as evidence that succession positioning is already explicitly under way fifteen months before the 2028 campaign's formal opening — precisely the interpretive ambiguity Section 4.4 identifies as structural rather than resolvable. [TBD-VERIFY: exact wording of the 15 August 2026 remarks — search-corroborated via Manila Times and Philstar headlines and summaries, not independently fetch-verified against a primary Presidential Communications Office transcript in this update.]

---

5. The 20th Congress Legislative Agenda and the Romualdez-Escudero Architecture

5.1 The 28 July 2025 Convocation and Leadership Composition

The 20th Congress of the Philippines convened in joint session on 28 July 2025 at the Batasang Pambansa Complex, with President Marcos delivering his Fourth State of the Nation Address before the assembled legislators. The House of Representatives, with its full 316-member effective voting membership reseated through the May 2025 elections plus party-list adjustments, re-elected Martin G. Romualdez (Lakas-CMD, Leyte 1st District, the President's first cousin) as Speaker; the leadership slate was negotiated through the months of June and July 2025 across the Lakas-CMD–PFP–NPC–NUP–NP "Alyansa" coalition, with party-list bloc additions. The Senate, with its twelve newly seated senators joining the twelve hold-over senators from the 19th Congress, voted on 28 July 2025 to retain Francis "Chiz" Escudero (NPC, Sorsogon) as Senate President; the vote was contested, with the Zubiri-led reformist faction (PH-D-06 Section 5) and the Duterte-aligned senators (Senators Bong Go, Bato Dela Rosa, Imee Marcos, Rodante Marcoleta, and others) together attempting to constitute an alternative coalition. The Escudero retention was reportedly secured by a margin of [TBD-VERIFY: precise vote margin in the 28 July 2025 Senate presidency vote].

The House Speakership victory consolidated the Romualdez position established in the 19th Congress; the Romualdez-led majority controls the chamber's standing committees, the rules of procedure, the floor management, and the appropriations process. Senior Deputy Speakers and Deputy Speakers across the chamber's regional and party representations supplied the bargaining architecture. The House Senior Deputy Majority Leader and the Majority Leader — [TBD-VERIFY: precise identities for the 20th Congress] — manage the day-to-day legislative agenda. The Committee on Appropriations, the Committee on Ways and Means, the Committee on Banks and Financial Intermediaries, the Committee on Justice, and the Committee on Foreign Affairs are the central legislative-policy committees; their chairs are negotiated through the Speaker's coalition arithmetic.

The Senate's leadership architecture is more contested than the House's, reflecting both the Senate's structurally smaller body and the impeachment-court duty's pervasive influence on senatorial politics. Senate President Escudero, the Majority Leader (Senator [TBD-VERIFY: 20th Congress Majority Leader identity]), the Minority Leader (Senator [TBD-VERIFY: 20th Congress Minority Leader identity, with Senator Aquilino "Koko" Pimentel III a likely candidate]), and the chairs of the principal standing committees including Finance (Senator Sherwin Gatchalian or [TBD-VERIFY]), Foreign Relations, National Defense, Justice and Human Rights, and Ways and Means together constitute the Senate's procedural leadership. The committee assignments completed in August 2025 reflected the post-mid-term Senate's reorganised factional arithmetic.

5.2 The FY 2026 General Appropriations Act and the Tangible Legislative Pipeline

The FY 2026 General Appropriations Act (GAA) process consumed the principal Congressional bandwidth from August through December 2025. The Department of Budget and Management transmitted the President's Budget Message and the National Expenditure Programme (NEP) to Congress in mid-2025 with a proposed total appropriation of approximately PHP 6.352 trillion [TBD-VERIFY: precise FY 2026 NEP total], approximately 6 to 7 per cent above the FY 2025 GAA. The House Appropriations Committee, under Chair [TBD-VERIFY: FY 2026 Appropriations Chair, with Stella Luz A. Quimbo or Mikaela Angela Suansing among names speculated], conducted the briefings, defences, and plenary work; the Senate Finance Committee under [TBD-VERIFY: Senate Finance Chair for FY 2026] conducted parallel work; the bicameral conference committee reconciled the chamber versions; the bicam report was ratified by both chambers in December 2025; and President Marcos signed Republic Act No. [TBD-VERIFY: FY 2026 GAA RA number] on 20 December 2025 [TBD-VERIFY: precise signing date].

The FY 2026 GAA's principal allocations preserved the broad architecture of the FY 2024 and FY 2025 GAAs: education (the Department of Education and the State Universities and Colleges) the largest single sector; infrastructure (DPWH and DOTr) the second-largest; social protection (DSWD, 4Ps, Walang Gutom 2027) substantial; defence and security (DND, DILG-PNP, NICA) substantial; health (DOH, PhilHealth) substantial; agriculture (DA) increased relative to FY 2025 in response to the food-security framing. The standard contested allocations — National Task Force to End Local Communist Armed Conflict (NTF-ELCAC), confidential and intelligence funds across executive-branch units, the Maharlika Investment Corporation supplemental, and the Vice-President's office allocation [TBD-VERIFY: whether the OVP received any FY 2026 budget appropriation given the trial's pendency] — generated the principal contested floor debates.

The notable legislative pipeline of the 20th Congress's first regular session (28 July 2025 – June 2026) included: the National Government Rightsizing Programme Act (long-pending administration measure); the Health Promotion Act expansion; the Universal Health Care Act amendments addressing PhilHealth governance; the Salary Standardisation Law VI implementation; the Comprehensive Tax Reform package consolidations (CMEPA implementation refinements, the proposed Single Tax Court Act, and the Anti-Smuggling Act updates); the National Defense Act revision (the first comprehensive revision since the 1990s); the Coast Guard Modernisation Act expansion; the Self-Reliant Defense Posture Act updates; the Bangsamoro post-election transition legislative support (Section 11); the Charter Change proposals (Section 10); and the Anti-Dynasty Bill (perennially filed, perennially not passed, with the proposed Mendoza-Hontiveros-Pangilinan version of 2025 generating renewed debate without floor advance).

5.3 The Romualdez-Escudero Coordination and the Impeachment Trial

The political coordination between Speaker Romualdez and Senate President Escudero — the two presiding officers of the institutions through which the impeachment trial proceeds and on which the Marcos administration's legislative agenda depends — is one of the most institutionally consequential features of the 20th Congress. Romualdez's House manages the impeachment prosecution; Escudero's Senate is the impeachment court. The two are not formally coordinating on the trial (the Articles' transmittal completed the House's formal role; the prosecution is conducted by the House prosecution panel, not by the Speaker directly), but they are simultaneously coordinating on the GAA, on charter-change initiatives, on the bicameral conference committees of pending legislation, and on the broader administration-coalition arithmetic.

The institutional tension this coordination creates — between Romualdez's institutional interest in trial outcome and Escudero's institutional interest in trial independence — has been a recurring theme of 2025–2026 commentary. The Stratbase ADRi commentary (October 2025), the AIM Policy Center analysis (March 2026), and the PCIJ investigative work (2025–2026) have documented patterns of inter-leadership communication, partisan-vote alignment, and procedural-cooperation that critics characterise as compromising the trial's institutional separateness and that defenders characterise as routine inter-chamber legislative coordination. The opposition's framing emphasises Romualdez's prospective 2028 candidacy (Section 8) as a positioning consideration; the administration's framing emphasises the formal institutional separateness of the trial from the legislative process.

5.4 The May–June 2026 Senate Leadership Crisis [Recency-sweep update, 2026-08-29]

The Senate presidency proved considerably less stable across 2025–2026 than the 28 July 2025 Escudero-retention vote (Section 5.1) suggested. Escudero's own tenure did not survive the year: on 8 September 2025 the Senate declared the presidency vacant and elected Vicente "Tito" Sotto III, with the handling of the Sara Duterte impeachment and the flood-control-projects controversy (Section 4.5 below) both cited among the grievances (PH-D-06 Section 8). Sotto's own presidency then proved short-lived. On 11 May 2026 — four days before the midterm-anniversary point this document's May 2026 cutoff had marked as its temporal anchor — the Senate ousted Sotto and elected Senator Alan Peter Cayetano as Senate President, in a vote search-corroborated across multiple outlets (Rappler, the Inquirer, Sunstar) but whose precise tally this update could not fetch-verify [TBD-VERIFY: the 11 May 2026 vote count and full list of senators voting for and against Cayetano].

The Cayetano presidency immediately produced the most acute institutional crisis the 20th Congress Senate had yet seen. In late May 2026 — reported as 26–27 May by Rappler — the majority attempted to amend the chamber's rules to permit remote/virtual participation in Senate sessions; ten senators of an eleven-member minority bloc, styled the "Solid Bloc 11" and reportedly led by former Senate President Juan Miguel Zubiri, staged a walkout in protest, while Senate Minority Leader Tito Sotto remained on the floor and called for a quorum count that prevented the rules amendment from being voted upon. The chamber's 23-sitting-member composition (of 24 seats) was itself compromised during this period: Senator Ronald "Bato" Dela Rosa, an ICC-related suspect, was reported to be in hiding, and Senator Jinggoy Estrada was in detention at the New Bilibid/Quezon City Jail — reducing the practically available membership and producing, at points, an 11–11 floor deadlock between rival majority and minority blocs. Legal commentary (an Inquirer opinion piece and a Rappler explainer citing the historical "Avelino doctrine" on Senate quorum) publicly debated whether the situation amounted to a constitutional crisis over which faction legitimately controlled the chamber. [TBD-VERIFY: full account of the 26–27 May 2026 walkout and the 11–11 deadlock's precise senator-by-senator composition — search-corroborated via Rappler, Sunstar, and Inquirer Opinion, not independently fetch-verified in this update.]

The dispute produced a second contested election within weeks. On 3 June 2026, Senator Sherwin Gatchalian was elected president pro tempore in a session that convened with a twelve-senator quorum — a configuration Rappler's contemporaneous explainer defended as constitutionally sufficient under historical Senate quorum doctrine, and that rival factions disputed. The stalemate was resolved only when President Marcos called Congress into special session; on 17 June 2026, in a session search-corroborated by GMA News Online and the Inquirer, the Senate — voting by acclamation — removed Cayetano and installed Gatchalian as Senate President. Contemporaneous reporting characterised this as the fifth Senate leadership change within the single 20th Congress, said to be the first time in the chamber's history that five such changes occurred within one Congress. [TBD-VERIFY: the precise 17 June 2026 vote mechanics and the "first time in Senate history" characterisation — search-corroborated via a Wikipedia summary and GMA News Online's live-updates coverage of the special session, not independently fetch-verified against the Senate Journal in this update.]

The crisis bears directly on this document's analytic frame. It occurred while the Sara Duterte impeachment trial was in its final pre-trial and opening weeks (the Senate convened as impeachment court 18 May 2026, five business days before the Cayetano-Sotto transition, and the trial-in-chief opened 6 July 2026, two and a half weeks after the Gatchalian installation — PH-D-06 Section 10 and Section 10.1). Whether the leadership churn reflected impeachment-trial positioning, the flood-control-scandal fallout, ordinary factional recalibration ahead of the 2028 succession, or some combination is, as of this update, unresolved in the corpus's available sourcing; the three-account discipline (Section 14) would apply administration, reform-faction, and civil-society readings to the episode once a subsequent research wave can fetch-verify the primary Senate Journal record and reconcile the conflicting outlet accounts of vote tallies and motive.

6. The Fiscal Trajectory — Recto's Deficit-Cap, BIR and BoC Collections, and the FY 2026–2027 Budget Cycle

6.1 The Medium-Term Fiscal Framework and the Deficit-Cap Discipline

The Marcos administration's Medium-Term Fiscal Framework (MTFF), originally articulated by Secretary Benjamin E. Diokno in 2022 and substantially revised by Secretary Ralph G. Recto from January 2024, sets the structural constraint within which all 2025–2028 fiscal decisions occur. The MTFF's principal commitments include: reducing the national-government deficit-to-GDP ratio from approximately 5.7 per cent in 2024 to approximately 3.7 per cent by 2028 [TBD-VERIFY: precise revised MTFF deficit-cap path numbers as of late-2025]; raising the revenue-to-GDP ratio to approximately 17 per cent by 2028; controlling the national-government debt-to-GDP ratio at or below approximately 60 per cent through the trajectory; and supporting the 6 to 7 per cent annual real GDP growth target.

The deficit-cap discipline has structural consequences for the FY 2026 and FY 2027 GAA processes. The DBM's annual budget ceilings constrain departmental allocations; the agency-level negotiations occur within those ceilings; the political-positioning considerations that might otherwise have favoured larger discretionary spending (including those associated with pre-2028 succession positioning) are subordinated to the aggregate cap. Critics (Walden Bello, the Foundation for Economic Freedom, and labour-aligned commentators) have argued that the deficit-cap discipline is too aggressive given the post-pandemic recovery and the social-protection priorities; supporters (the Bankers Association of the Philippines, the Foundation for Economic Freedom in its other tracks, and the international ratings agencies) have argued that the discipline is necessary for sovereign-credit stability and for the continuation of investment-grade ratings.

The Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas (BSP) under Governor Eli M. Remolona Jr. (appointed July 2023, succeeding Felipe M. Medalla) has conducted the monetary policy in parallel with the fiscal trajectory. The BSP's 2024–2025 rate trajectory — with policy rate adjustments tracking the inflation path and the global rate environment — supplied the monetary substrate. The 2024 inflation path, originally elevated through the El Niño-related food-price stresses, normalised through 2025; the 2026 inflation outlook remained within the BSP's target band of 2 to 4 per cent.

6.2 BIR and BoC Revenue Performance under Lumagui and Rubio

The Bureau of Internal Revenue (BIR) under Commissioner Romeo D. Lumagui Jr. [TBD-VERIFY: continuation of Lumagui as BIR Commissioner through May 2026, given his appointment from 2022 and the multi-year nature of the position] has pursued an aggressive revenue-collection programme combining digitalisation, audit-coverage expansion, and tax-amnesty programmes. The BIR's collection trajectory through 2024 and 2025 [TBD-VERIFY: precise collection figures and year-on-year growth percentages for 2025 and 2026 to date] generally tracked or modestly exceeded the DOF targets. The implementation of the Value-Added Tax on Digital Services Act (Republic Act No. 12023, signed October 2024) — bringing offshore digital-service providers (streaming, advertising, marketplace platforms) within the VAT base — produced [TBD-VERIFY: precise collected revenue from VAT on digital services in 2025–2026] in incremental revenue. The Capital Markets Efficiency Promotion Act (Republic Act No. 12001, signed May 2024) modernised capital-markets taxation; the Excise Tax on Single-Use Plastics, the Junk Food Tax, and the Salt Tax remain proposed but not enacted as of mid-2026.

The Bureau of Customs (BoC) under Commissioner Bienvenido Y. Rubio Jr. [TBD-VERIFY: precise name spelling and his appointment date succeeding Bienvenido Y. Rubio Jr.'s predecessor — possibly succeeding Yogi Filemon L. Ruiz of 2024] has pursued the customs-administration modernisation, the anti-smuggling enforcement (particularly on agricultural smuggling under the post-2024 Anti-Agricultural Smuggling Act framework), and the WCO-aligned digitalisation programme. The BoC's collection trajectory in 2024–2025 [TBD-VERIFY: precise BoC collection figures] generally tracked the DOF target. The anti-smuggling enforcement on rice, sugar, onions, and other agricultural products has been the politically most visible BoC activity, given the food-security framing and the Agricultural Tariffication Law (Republic Act No. 8178 as amended by Republic Act No. 11203 and subsequent measures) implementation.

6.3 The FY 2027 NEP and the Pre-Election Budget Politics

The FY 2027 National Expenditure Programme — to be transmitted to Congress in mid-2026 [TBD-VERIFY: precise transmittal date, given the standard end-July to mid-August window] — is the central fiscal document of the pre-election year. Under historical Philippine practice, the pre-election-year GAA contains substantial allocations whose distributive incidence is politically consequential for the May 2028 elections. The administration's posture is that the FY 2027 GAA will maintain the deficit-cap trajectory while permitting necessary social-protection, infrastructure, and security expenditures; the opposition's posture is that the FY 2027 GAA will, like its FY 2025 predecessor, contain substantial unprogrammed-appropriations and special-purpose-funds allocations whose distributive incidence favours administration-coalition districts. The FY 2027 GAA process will consume the second half of 2026 in Congress; the bicameral conference committee, ratification, presidential signing, and any vetoed items will be tracked in subsequent updates.

7. The Maritime-EEZ Enforcement Continuation — Bajo de Masinloc, Pag-asa, Iroquois Reef, and the Code of Conduct

7.1 The Operational Continuity from 2023–2024 to 2025–2026

The Philippine maritime-EEZ enforcement posture, established through 2023–2024 under National Security Adviser Eduardo Año, Department of National Defense Secretary Gilberto Teodoro Jr., Coast Guard Commandant Admiral Ronnie Gil L. Gavan, and the National Task Force – West Philippine Sea (NTF-WPS) under Vice Admiral Alberto Carlos and his successors, continued without strategic-posture change through 2025 and into 2026. The principal continuity feature is the transparency initiative — the systematic public release of incident footage, Coast Guard ship-rider testimony, and remote-sensing imagery establishing the documentary record of Chinese coercion — pioneered by Commodore Jay Tarriela as the PCG spokesperson on West Philippine Sea affairs through 2023 and 2024 and continued under his successors and through the PCG and NTF-WPS institutional architecture.

The principal contested features, as of mid-2026, organise around five maritime sites:

Bajo de Masinloc (Scarborough Shoal): the triangular reef approximately 124 nautical miles west of Zambales province, within the Philippine EEZ but under Chinese de facto control since the April–June 2012 stand-off. The 2025 and 2026 incidents include [TBD-VERIFY: specific incident dates and severity at Bajo de Masinloc during the document's coverage period]; Bureau of Fisheries and Aquatic Resources (BFAR) vessels and Philippine Coast Guard (PCG) cutters conducted recurring presence and fisheries-protection operations. The China Coast Guard's water-cannon deployments, blocking manoeuvres, and ramming incidents continued at the 2024 pattern's intensity.

Second Thomas Shoal (Ayungin Shoal): the submerged reef approximately 105 nautical miles west of Palawan, hosting the BRP Sierra Madre — the Philippine Navy's intentionally grounded landing ship serving as a forward outpost. The July 2024 Philippines-China provisional arrangement on Sierra Madre resupply continued in 2025 with periodic stresses [TBD-VERIFY: precise status of the July 2024 provisional arrangement through 2025–2026, and whether it remained in effect].

Iroquois Reef: the [TBD-VERIFY: precise location of Iroquois Reef relative to other Spratly features, given variant naming conventions] feature where Chinese maritime militia presence and Philippine response operations continued through 2025. Specific 2025–2026 Iroquois Reef incidents [TBD-VERIFY] generated public attention through the PCG transparency initiative.

Pag-asa Island (Thitu): the largest of the Philippine-administered Spratly features, hosting a civilian population (approximately 200 residents [TBD-VERIFY: 2025–2026 Pag-asa civilian population]) plus military and Coast Guard personnel. The Pag-asa infrastructure programme through 2024–2026 included the expansion of the runway, port facilities, and community services; the DPWH and DND coordination supplied the construction logistics.

Sabina Shoal: the [TBD-VERIFY: Sabina Shoal incidents through 2025–2026, given that the August 2024 BRP Teresa Magbanua deployment and subsequent stand-off was a significant 2024 episode], a contested feature subject to ongoing Philippine-Chinese stand-offs through 2024 and into 2025 [TBD-VERIFY: whether the BRP Teresa Magbanua remained at Sabina Shoal through May 2026 or withdrew earlier].

7.2 The Squad-Plus Architecture and the Japanese Coast Guard Coordination

The Squad — the quadrilateral US-Japan-Philippines-Australia security architecture institutionalised through ministerial meetings in 2024 — has expanded to Squad-plus configurations including France, India, the Republic of Korea, and the United Kingdom across various combinations of joint exercises, maritime cooperation, and intelligence-sharing. The Philippines-Japan Reciprocal Access Agreement (RAA, signed 8 July 2024; ratified through 2025) supplied the bilateral defence-cooperation framework with Japan; the Philippines-Australia Status of Visiting Forces Agreement and supplementary arrangements supplied the parallel architecture with Australia; the negotiated Philippines-France defence cooperation framework continued through 2025 toward completion. PH-F-03 and PH-F-05 develop the institutional architecture; this document develops the operational pattern.

The Japanese Coast Guard coordination with the Philippine Coast Guard, expanded under the RAA framework and through the bilateral Strategic Comprehensive Partnership with Japan, has emerged through 2025–2026 as a significant operational feature. Joint Coast Guard exercises, ship-rider exchanges, and the Japanese-funded Philippine Coast Guard vessel transfers (the 97-metre multi-role response vessels and the 44-metre patrol vessels under successive ODA tranches) supplied the operational substrate. The Philippine-Japan-US trilateral coordination on West Philippine Sea operations, the Senkaku-aligned framing of Chinese grey-zone behaviour, and the systematic public-information posture together produced what the Asia Maritime Transparency Initiative (Greg Poling, AMTI 2025–2026 commentary) characterised as the most coherent regional response to Chinese maritime coercion in the post-2016 period.

7.3 The South China Sea Code of Conduct Stalled Negotiations

The ASEAN-China Code of Conduct (CoC) negotiations, formally underway since the 2017 Framework agreement and with the announced target of completion by 2026 under the 2023 ASEAN-China Special Senior Officials' Meeting timeline, remained concretely stalled as of mid-2026. The Third Reading of the negotiating text — initiated in 2023 — had not been completed; the principal sticking points remained the geographic scope, the binding legal status, the relationship to the 2016 South China Sea Arbitration Award (PH-K-05), the third-party claimant question, and the enforcement-mechanism question. The Philippine position, articulated through Foreign Affairs Secretary Manalo and through the Department of Foreign Affairs's negotiating team, emphasised compatibility with the 2016 Award, binding legal character, and inclusion of all disputed features; the Chinese position emphasised non-applicability of the 2016 Award, non-binding political character, and exclusion of certain features from CoC scope.

The CoC's stalled progression is structurally compatible with the Philippine bilateral and minilateral security architecture: the Philippines does not require CoC completion to operate the alliance-political and Squad-plus framework, and an unsatisfactory CoC (one that the Philippines considered incompatible with the 2016 Award or with binding character) would be more damaging to Philippine interests than no CoC. Critics — including non-Philippine ASEAN scholars and certain regionalist analysts — argued that the Philippine maximalist position was contributing to the stall; defenders argued that the maximalist position was notably correct and that the stall reflected Chinese intransigence rather than Philippine over-reach. The ASEAN Secretariat's reporting through 2025–2026 maintained the formal frame of continuing negotiations toward an eventual agreement.

8. The 2028 Presidential Pre-Campaign — Marcos-Aligned, Duterte-Aligned, Liberal-Progressive, and Independent Fields

8.1 The Constitutional and Electoral Timeline

The 9 May 2028 presidential election — the next contest under the 1987 Constitution's single-term framework — will follow the 12 May 2025 mid-terms by approximately three years and will precede the 30 June 2028 inauguration of the next President by approximately seven weeks. Under the Omnibus Election Code and the Fair Elections Act, the official campaign period is approximately 90 days before the election; the certificate-of-candidacy filing period typically opens approximately seven months before the election; the pre-campaign period in 2026 and 2027 is conducted under the premature campaigning restrictions whose enforcement by COMELEC is institutionally inconsistent. The COMELEC's Calendar of Activities for the 2028 NLE will be promulgated in [TBD-VERIFY: precise COMELEC calendar promulgation date — historically the calendar is issued approximately fifteen months before the election].

The pre-campaign positioning conducted from late 2025 through May 2026 occurs in the legal grey area of pre-COC-filing political activity. Speeches, rallies, social-media campaigns, sustained media presence, civic-society organisation, and the strategic positioning of policy commitments occur under the broad cover of legislative or executive work or civic-society engagement; the COMELEC's premature campaigning enforcement is institutionally limited; the pre-campaign therefore proceeds with substantial visibility.

8.2 The Marcos-Aligned Field

The Marcos-aligned prospective field as of mid-2026 is the broadest and least consolidated. The administration coalition's potential standard-bearers include:

Speaker Martin G. Romualdez (Leyte 1st District, Lakas-CMD): the President's first cousin, House Speaker since 2022, with the most institutionally consolidated political infrastructure within the administration coalition. Romualdez's prospective candidacy would draw on the Lakas-CMD machinery, the Leyte and broader Eastern Visayas base, and the House-majority arithmetic. Critics emphasise his low national name-recognition and his association with the impeachment prosecution as electoral liabilities; supporters emphasise his institutional capacity and the President's likely endorsement.

Senator Imee R. Marcos (NP-PFP, with contested 2025 Duterte-camp affiliation): the President's elder sister, in her contested alignment with the Duterte camp during the 2025 mid-terms (PH-D-05 Section 7). The Imee candidacy scenario — re-aligning with the administration coalition for a 2028 run — remains speculative as of mid-2026; her public statements have emphasised institutional independence without committing to a presidential candidacy [TBD-VERIFY: Imee Marcos's 2025–2026 public statements on a presidential run].

Senator Joel Villanueva (PFP, Bulacan): the most institutionally Marcos-aligned senator after the Recto-Tulfo-Cayetano cluster, with sustained policy work on labour, education, and administrative reform.

Senator Erwin Tulfo (PFP, with the Tulfo-clan media-celebrity coalition): the highest-vote-getting Marcos-aligned 2025 senatorial winner, with substantial mass-base recognition through the Tulfo media franchise. Critics emphasise his policy-light record; supporters emphasise his mass appeal as a counterweight to Duterte-camp populist mobilisation.

Senator Camille Villar (Nacionalista Party, Las Piñas): daughter of former Senate President Manny Villar and former Senator Cynthia Villar, with the Villar-dynasty real-estate and political infrastructure.

Senator Vicente "Tito" Sotto III (NPC): former Senate President (2018–2022), longtime senator, with a substantial Catholic-conservative base.

Department of Finance Secretary Ralph G. Recto: a former senator with deep policy credentials, currently constrained by the cabinet position but constitutionally eligible for 2028.

[TBD-VERIFY: which figures the administration has internally signalled as preferred 2028 candidates, given the President's institutional discretion in coalition arithmetic]

8.3 The Duterte-Aligned Field

The Duterte-aligned prospective field is conditioned by the Vice-President's trial outcome and by the constitutional eligibility analyses applicable to each prospective candidate.

Vice-President Sara Z. Duterte-Carpio (Hugpong ng Pagbabago, with multiple party affiliations including PDP-Laban and Lakas-CMD historically): the most politically prominent Duterte-camp figure, whose 2028 candidacy depends on the trial outcome. Under conviction-with-disqualification, she is constitutionally foreclosed under Article XI Section 3(7); under acquittal, she retains full eligibility; under dismissal or mistrial, her eligibility is intact but her political viability is contested [TBD-VERIFY: the trial outcome and the resulting eligibility status as of the document's projected updating cycle].

Senator Christopher "Bong" Go (PDP-Laban, with the Duterte-base 2025 senatorial topper of approximately 27 million votes): the highest-vote-getting senator in 2025, the long-time Duterte Special Assistant to the President, and the prospective Duterte-camp substitute if Sara is constitutionally foreclosed.

Senator Ronald "Bato" Dela Rosa (PDP-Laban): former PNP Chief and architect of the 2016–2018 drug-war operations, with substantial Mindanao base support.

Former Senator Manny Pacquiao (PROMDI / PMP): the world-boxing-champion-turned-politician, with substantial Mindanao and provincial mass recognition. His 2025 senatorial outcome [TBD-VERIFY: whether Pacquiao won a Senate seat in May 2025 or was defeated] conditions his 2028 candidacy structure.

Former Davao City Mayor Sebastian "Baste" Z. Duterte and Davao City 1st District Representative Paolo "Pulong" Z. Duterte: the next-generation Duterte family figures, with substantial Davao-base recognition but limited national political infrastructure as of mid-2026.

8.4 The Liberal-Progressive Opposition Field

The liberal-progressive opposition field has reorganised through 2025–2026 under the Pilipinas Para sa Pinoy (PPP) coalition umbrella combining Liberal Party residue, Akbayan, Aksyon Demokratiko, and independent reformists. Principal prospective candidates include:

Former Senator Bam Aquino (Liberal Party / Kalinasan): former Senator (2013–2019), member of the Aquino dynasty (cousin of former President Benigno Aquino III), with substantial reformist credentials and 2025 mid-term re-engagement [TBD-VERIFY: whether Bam Aquino contested a 2025 Senate seat and the outcome]. His 2028 candidacy would draw on the LP-Kalinasan infrastructure and the post-Robredo reformist coalition.

Former Vice-President Maria Leonor "Leni" G. Robredo: the 2022 presidential candidate who lost to Marcos Jr. by 16.6 million votes, currently in civic-society engagement through the Angat Buhay Foundation. Her 2028 candidacy is widely speculated but not formally announced [TBD-VERIFY: whether Robredo has made any 2025–2026 public statement on 2028 candidacy]. Critics emphasise the structural disadvantage of repeated candidacy and the 2022 disinformation environment's persistence; supporters emphasise her institutional credibility and the residual reformist coalition.

Senator Risa Hontiveros (Akbayan): the senate's most consistent reformist-progressive voice through 2025–2026, with sustained policy work on social-welfare, reproductive health, and accountability. Hontiveros's interest in a 2028 presidential candidacy remains uncertain [TBD-VERIFY: Hontiveros's 2025–2026 statements on 2028]; her institutional position as one of the few non-aligned senators capable of substantial trial-court influence makes the candidacy speculation politically consequential.

Senator Aquilino "Koko" Pimentel III (PDP-Laban, in the post-Duterte-faction PDP): longtime senator, former Senate President (2016–2018), with substantial institutional credibility but limited mass-base. His 2028 candidacy would draw on the institutionalist reformist coalition.

8.5 The Centre and Independent Fields

Senator Juan Miguel "Migz" Zubiri (Bukidnon, independent post-2024-Senate-Presidency-displacement): former Senate President (May 2022 – May 2024), member of the reformist-faction senators of the 19th and 20th Congresses (PH-D-06 Section 5), with substantial Mindanao base. Zubiri's 2028 candidacy is among the most institutionally credible centrist scenarios.

Senator Loren Legarda (NPC, multi-term senator): the most multi-term Senate veteran, with substantial environmental-policy credentials and provincial-base support. Her 2028 candidacy [TBD-VERIFY: Legarda's interest in 2028 presidential run] would draw on the NPC machinery and the women-voter base.

Local-government and civic-society figures: Mayors, governors, and civic-society leaders who might emerge as compromise candidates through the pre-campaign positioning, including [TBD-VERIFY: specific names that have emerged in 2025–2026 commentary as compromise candidates from the local-government or civic-society space].

8.6 The Polling Trajectory

Pulse Asia, Social Weather Stations, and OCTA Research surveys through 2025–2026 produced the polling baseline against which the pre-campaign positioning is read. The principal observations: Sara Duterte's presidential-preference numbers, peaking at approximately 31 per cent plurality in March 2024 [TBD-VERIFY: precise peak and trajectory through 2025–2026], declined through the impeachment proceedings to [TBD-VERIFY: precise mid-2026 plurality]; Bong Go's numbers in the high single digits through low teens [TBD-VERIFY]; Bam Aquino's numbers in the high single digits through low teens [TBD-VERIFY]; Robredo's numbers in the high single digits through mid-teens depending on whether she is included in the candidate set [TBD-VERIFY]; the Marcos-aligned candidates each below 10 per cent individually [TBD-VERIFY]; and substantial undecided and none-of-the-above shares (typically 25 to 35 per cent of respondents) [TBD-VERIFY]. The polling pattern through 2025–2026 emphasises the structural distinction between declining national preference (Sara Duterte's broad-electorate position) and sustained base loyalty (her Mindanao and Duterte-base supporters' commitment); the gap between these two measures is the analytical centre of the 2028 forecast.

9. Coalition Recalibrations — Lakas-CMD, PFP, NPC, Liberal Party, Akbayan, Aksyon, PDP-Laban, PMP, Lapiang Manggagawa, Kalinasan

The Philippine party system, characterised by Anderson (1988) and McCoy (1994) as the institutional surface of an oligarchic-factional substructure, is undergoing through 2025–2026 the standard pre-presidential-election recalibration in which parties consolidate, defect, merge, and split in pursuit of 2028 positioning. The principal party formations and their 2025–2026 trajectories:

Lakas-CMD (Lakas–Christian Muslim Democrats), the President's first cousin Speaker Martin Romualdez's party, with origins in the post-1991 Lakas-NUCD-UMDP under Fidel Ramos. Through 2024–2026 Lakas-CMD consolidated as the Marcos-administration's institutional spine in the House of Representatives. The party's 2028 standard-bearer scenarios centre on Romualdez or on a Marcos-family-blessed alternative.

Partido Federal ng Pilipinas (PFP), the President's own party of registration (transferred from the Partido Pilipino sa Pagbabago in 2021–2022 to PFP for the 2022 candidacy). The PFP's institutional infrastructure has been built principally through the President's senatorial slate; senators including Joel Villanueva, Erwin Tulfo, and others register under PFP. The PFP's 2028 internal contestation [TBD-VERIFY: PFP's internal pre-campaign dynamics] will shape the administration coalition's eventual standard-bearer.

Nationalist People's Coalition (NPC), the long-standing centrist-aligned party with Senate President Escudero, Senator Loren Legarda, and Senator Sherwin Gatchalian among prominent members. NPC's 2025–2026 position has been bridge-coalition: providing legislative support to the administration while preserving distinct identity.

Liberal Party (LP) and Kalinasan, the post-2022 successor formations of the Robredo-Aquino reformist coalition. The Liberal Party — reduced to a small congressional bloc after the 2022 election — has progressively reorganised through 2024–2025 under the broader Pilipinas Para sa Pinoy umbrella, with Kalinasan (the new political vehicle of Bam Aquino and reformist allies [TBD-VERIFY: precise founding date and organisational status of Kalinasan]) supplying the renewed institutional infrastructure.

Akbayan Citizens' Action Party, the social-democratic party-list-and-electoral-political formation. Akbayan, with Senator Risa Hontiveros as its most prominent national figure and a sustained presence in civic-society coalitions, supplied through 2025–2026 the principal democratic-left voice in the Senate.

Aksyon Demokratiko, the centrist party founded by the late Senator Raul Roco, currently with limited national presence but with continuing party-registration and electoral participation.

PDP-Laban (Partido Demokratiko Pilipino–Lakas ng Bayan), the historically broad party that became the Duterte coalition's primary vehicle 2016–2022 and is currently fragmented into Duterte-aligned and Pimentel-aligned factions. The 2025–2026 PDP-Laban contestation [TBD-VERIFY: status of PDP-Laban internal litigation and faction reconciliation] continued unresolved.

Partido ng Masang Pilipino (PMP), the Estrada-dynasty party currently led by former President Joseph Estrada and his family, with Manny Pacquiao's earlier 2022 affiliation now [TBD-VERIFY: Pacquiao's 2025–2026 party of registration].

Lapiang Manggagawa (Labor Party), the worker-aligned political vehicle currently with limited electoral presence but with continuing party-registration. Its 2028 prospect is as a coalition partner of the broader liberal-progressive opposition.

Hugpong ng Pagbabago (HNP), Sara Duterte's Davao-centred regional party, with substantial Mindanao base but limited national electoral infrastructure. HNP's 2028 role depends on the Vice-President's eligibility status.

Nacionalista Party (NP), the historic party currently associated with the Villar dynasty (Senator Camille Villar, former Senator Cynthia Villar). NP supplied through 2025–2026 a Marcos-coalition-aligned position.

The coalition recalibrations through 2025–2026 have included: the consolidation of Alyansa across Lakas-PFP-NPC-NUP-NP for the administration coalition; the renewed Pilipinas Para sa Pinoy umbrella for the liberal-progressive opposition; the unresolved PDP-Laban internal contestation; and the multi-vector positioning of the Duterte coalition through PDP-Laban, HNP, and the prospective candidacy of substitute figures. The coalition arithmetic of 2028 will be shaped by these recalibrations across the next twenty-three months.

---

10. Charter Change Resurfacing — Reform Frame versus Self-Perpetuation Frame

10.1 The 2024 People's Initiative Defeat and the 2025–2026 Resurfacing

The 2024 People's Initiative for Charter Change — under the Restoration of the Filipino Identity, Sovereignty, and Patrimony (RESTORE) framework and the broader House-led economic-amendments push — was defeated procedurally through Senate opposition coordinated by then-Senate President Zubiri, Senator Imee Marcos, Senator Hontiveros, Senator Pimentel, and former Senate President Escudero. PH-K-05 develops the 2024 episode at length; this document develops the 2025–2026 resurfacing.

The 2025–2026 charter-change conversation has resurfaced through three principal vectors. First, the House-led legislative push for limited economic amendments to Article XII (foreign ownership of land and public utilities) and Article XVI (mass media and advertising) of the 1987 Constitution. The House Committee on Constitutional Amendments [TBD-VERIFY: Committee Chair for 20th Congress] conducted hearings through 2025–2026 on the proposed amendments. The administration's posture, articulated through Press Secretary [TBD-VERIFY] and Executive Secretary Bersamin, characterised the amendments as economic-reform measures supporting investment liberalisation; critics including Senator Hontiveros and the Pilipinas Para sa Pinoy coalition characterised them as opening the door to broader political amendments.

Second, the constituent-assembly question — whether Congress sitting jointly as a Constituent Assembly could propose constitutional amendments and what voting threshold (three-fourths of all members of Congress; three-fourths of each chamber voting separately) applies — has resurfaced through 2025–2026 House discussions. The unresolved 1987 constitutional question of whether the two chambers vote jointly or separately for constituent-assembly purposes [TBD-VERIFY: any 2025–2026 Supreme Court ruling on the constituent-assembly voting question] remains a structural ambiguity that constrains constitutional amendment procedure.

Third, the constitutional-convention (con-con) proposal — Republic Act No. 11935-type legislation calling for a constitutional convention — has been re-tabled in modified form through 2025–2026 with discussion of an elected versus hybrid convention composition. The proposed con-con's timeline, if adopted, would extend beyond the 2028 presidential election and potentially structure the 2028 candidate platforms.

10.2 The Three-Account Framing — Reform versus Self-Perpetuation

The second three-account framing of this document — Is the resurfacing of Charter Change reform or self-perpetuation? — captures the structural ambiguity of charter-change discourse in pre-presidential-election Philippine politics.

The Senate-reformist account, articulated through Hontiveros, Pimentel, Zubiri, and Senator Gatchalian, characterises the 2025–2026 charter-change proposals as either narrowly defensible (economic amendments that may have merit but require constitutional-convention rather than constituent-assembly procedure) or as politically suspect (any proposal that could open the door to term-extension, presidential-system, or party-list-redistribution amendments). The reformist account emphasises the Senate's structural role as the institutional counterweight to House-majority Charter Change initiatives, drawing on the 2024 People's Initiative defeat precedent.

The House-majority account, articulated through Speaker Romualdez, the Committee on Constitutional Amendments, and administration-coalition members, characterises the 2025–2026 proposals as economic-reform measures the country needs to attract investment, reduce constitutional restrictions on foreign capital, and modernise the institutional architecture. Romualdez's public statements have emphasised that the proposed amendments are limited and that political amendments (term limits, presidential-system, federal-system) are not on the immediate agenda.

The civil-society account, articulated through Kontra Daya, Bayan, the Center for People Empowerment in Governance (CenPEG), PCIJ, the Concerned Lawyers for Civil Liberties, and the academic commentariat, characterises the 2025–2026 charter-change discussion as institutionally suspect under conditions of contested presidential succession. The civil-society account emphasises that charter-change initiatives in pre-presidential-election years are historically associated with term-extension or self-perpetuation manoeuvres (the Ramos 1997 "Cha-cha-PIRMA" episode and the Arroyo 2005–2010 charter-change attempts being the principal precedents) and that the procedural-legitimacy questions surrounding constituent-assembly voting and people's-initiative requirements have not been satisfactorily resolved.

11. Mindanao Governance after the BARMM Parliamentary Elections (13 October 2025) and the Post-ICC Davao Region

11.1 The 13 October 2025 BARMM Parliamentary Elections

The Bangsamoro Parliamentary Elections of 13 October 2025 [TBD-VERIFY: precise election date; the Bangsamoro Parliamentary elections had been multiply postponed from earlier scheduled dates, with the October 2025 date being the most-commonly cited target as of mid-2025] were the first parliamentary elections under the post-2018 Bangsamoro Organic Law (Republic Act No. 11054), conducted under COMELEC supervision in the five-province BARMM region (Lanao del Sur, Maguindanao del Norte, Maguindanao del Sur, Basilan, Sulu — though Sulu's status was modified by the Supreme Court's 2024 ruling) plus Cotabato City and selected barangays. The elections constituted the 80-member Bangsamoro Parliament whose composition would shape the post-transition government.

The principal contesting formations included: the United Bangsamoro Justice Party (UBJP), the political vehicle of the Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF), led by Chairperson Murad Ebrahim; the Bangsamoro People's Party (BPP), a competing Moro-aligned formation; the regional traditional-dynasty formations including those associated with the Mangudadatu, Sinsuat, and other established families; and individual candidates and smaller party-list formations. The election conduct, security architecture, and post-election results [TBD-VERIFY: specific seat allocation, MILF-UBJP plurality, and post-election Chief Minister selection] were tracked through October-December 2025.

The post-election transition to the regular Bangsamoro Government was institutionally consequential. The Bangsamoro Transition Authority (BTA), which had governed BARMM since 2019 under appointed leadership, formally transitioned to the elected Bangsamoro Parliament; the Parliament selected the Chief Minister from its membership; the Cabinet was constituted; and the regional government's policy programme was redefined under the elected mandate.

11.2 The Sulu Question and the 2024 Supreme Court Ruling

The Supreme Court's 2024 ruling in Province of Sulu v. Bangsamoro Government et al. (G.R. No. [TBD-VERIFY: docket number]) excluded the Province of Sulu from the territorial jurisdiction of the BARMM, on grounds that the 2019 plebiscite ratifying Sulu's inclusion in BARMM had been flawed by the differential vote of Sulu (which had voted against inclusion) being overridden by the aggregate regional vote. The ruling's institutional and political consequences continued through 2025–2026: the Province of Sulu reverted to direct national-government administration through DILG and DBM; the BARMM's territorial scope was reduced; and the local-political dynamics in Sulu, including the activities of the Abu Sayyaf Group residue and other security actors, returned to direct ARMM-pre-2019-administration architecture.

The post-Sulu BARMM has had to reorganise its fiscal architecture (the Bangsamoro Block Grant formula was adjusted), its security architecture (the AFP and PNP coordination in Sulu reverted to non-BARMM channels), and its political architecture (BARMM Parliamentary seats from Sulu were reassigned or eliminated). The unresolved questions of Sulu's long-term integration into either the BARMM or a separate special-region framework remained subjects of 2025–2026 commentary.

11.3 The MILF Normalisation Track and the Bangsamoro Block Grant

The MILF normalisation track — the integration of MILF combatants under the 2014 Comprehensive Agreement on the Bangsamoro (PH-K-04) and subsequent implementing instruments — continued through 2025–2026. The decommissioning process, the socioeconomic-reintegration programme, and the security-architecture transitions occurred at variable pace. The Bangsamoro Block Grant — the formula-based annual fiscal transfer from the national government to the Bangsamoro Government, at approximately 5 per cent of the previous year's net national internal revenue collections [TBD-VERIFY: precise 2025–2026 Block Grant amount] — supplied the principal fiscal substrate.

11.4 The Davao Region after the ICC

The Davao Region's post-ICC-arrest political dynamics — with former President Rodrigo Duterte at The Hague through 2025–2026, Vice-President Sara Duterte-Carpio facing Senate trial, Mayor Sebastian "Baste" Z. Duterte and Representative Paolo "Pulong" Z. Duterte leading the Davao City local government, and the Duterte family's political infrastructure operating under prolonged stress — represent the localised institutional substrate of the Duterte camp's political resilience.

Davao City local administration through 2025–2026 sustained the Davao model of municipal governance: visible police presence, business-friendly tax administration, infrastructure continuity from the Build-Build-Build inheritance, and civic-life continuity. Mayor Baste Duterte's public posture combined institutional continuity with sustained political mobilisation supporting his father (against the ICC proceedings) and his sister (against the Senate trial); Representative Pulong Duterte's congressional role included sustained floor presence in House committees and in the broader Duterte-aligned legislative-block coordination.

The broader Davao Region's congressional and gubernatorial delegations supplied through 2025–2026 the political-base mobilisation infrastructure for the Sara Duterte impeachment defence and for the 2028 succession scenarios. Davao del Sur, Davao Oriental, Davao del Norte, Davao Occidental, Davao de Oro, plus the Caraga Region (Agusan del Norte and del Sur, Surigao del Norte and del Sur), Soccsksargen (South Cotabato, Sultan Kudarat, Sarangani, North Cotabato, General Santos), and Northern Mindanao together produced the sustained Duterte-base electoral arithmetic that the 2025 Senate race's 27-million-vote Bong Go topper crystallised.

12. Social Policy, Climate Shocks, and Public-Health Recurrences — 4Ps, Walang Gutom 2027, El Niño / La Niña, ASF

12.1 4Ps Continuation and the FY 2026–2027 Social-Protection Budget

The Pantawid Pamilyang Pilipino Program (4Ps), institutionalised under Republic Act No. 11310 (the 4Ps Act of 2019), continued through 2025–2026 under DSWD Secretary Rex Gatchalian with approximately 4.4 million household beneficiaries [TBD-VERIFY: precise 2025–2026 beneficiary count and FY 2026 appropriation]. The conditionality framework — health-and-education compliance for children — remained intact; the cash transfer amounts were maintained at the 2024 levels [TBD-VERIFY: any 2025–2026 adjustments to the 4Ps cash-transfer amounts]; the targeting under the Listahanan registry continued under the 2024-completed Listahanan-3 baseline.

12.2 Walang Gutom 2027 — The Food-Stamp Pilot

The Walang Gutom 2027 food-stamp pilot, launched in July 2024 under DSWD with initial beneficiary count of approximately 300,000 households and FY 2025 expansion to approximately 1 million households [TBD-VERIFY: precise 2025–2026 beneficiary count and FY 2026 budget allocation], represents the most innovative social-protection programme of the Marcos administration. Modelled on the US SNAP framework with Filipino adaptations, the programme provides monthly food credits redeemable at accredited retailers for staple food items. The programme's evaluation through 2025–2026 included independent impact evaluations [TBD-VERIFY: specific evaluation findings] and DSWD's internal monitoring.

12.3 El Niño / La Niña Cycle and Agricultural Shocks

The 2023–2024 El Niño dry season generated substantial agricultural shocks: reduced rice and corn yields, reduced fisheries output, and water-supply stress across Luzon, Visayas, and Mindanao. The 2024–2025 transition to La Niña conditions [TBD-VERIFY: precise PAGASA-declared phase transitions through 2025] generated the standard La Niña-pattern shocks: increased rainfall, typhoon-track intensification, and flooding in vulnerable regions. The 2025 and 2026 typhoon seasons [TBD-VERIFY: principal typhoons of 2025–2026 affecting the Philippines, with the typhoon-naming convention of PAGASA used in the public-record] generated displacement, infrastructure damage, and humanitarian response by the National Disaster Risk Reduction and Management Council (NDRRMC) under the Department of National Defense's coordination.

The administration's climate-adaptation policy — articulated through the Climate Change Commission, the Department of Environment and Natural Resources, and the NDRRMC — continued under the framework of the National Climate Change Action Plan and the Philippine National Adaptation Plan. The 2024 People's Survival Fund disbursements, the National Adaptation Plan implementation, and the international climate-finance partnerships (Loss and Damage Fund engagement, Green Climate Fund projects, Asian Development Bank climate-finance instruments) together supplied the policy infrastructure.

12.4 African Swine Fever (ASF) Recurrence

The African Swine Fever recurrence through 2024–2025 — distinct from the foot-and-mouth disease that had been declared eradicated from the Philippines decades earlier — generated swine-sector losses, consumer-price pressure on pork products, and Department of Agriculture (DA) response under the Bantay ASF sa Barangay programme. The DA's Integrated National Swine Production Initiatives and the African Swine Fever Recovery Plan funded through the General Appropriations Act provided the resource architecture. The ASF outbreak's principal affected regions included Luzon's hog-producing provinces (Bulacan, Pampanga, Batangas, Quezon) and selected Visayas and Mindanao regions [TBD-VERIFY: precise 2025–2026 ASF case load and affected regions]. The associated pork-import liberalisation through Executive Orders on tariff reductions [TBD-VERIFY: specific 2025–2026 pork-import Executive Orders] generated tension between consumer-price-stabilisation and domestic-producer-protection objectives.

13. The Maharlika Investment Fund Operational Status and the WESM / Meralco / SPEx Electricity Frame

13.1 The Maharlika Investment Fund — Operational Maturity

The Maharlika Investment Fund (MIF), established under Republic Act No. 11954 (the Maharlika Investment Fund Act of 2023, signed by President Marcos on 18 July 2023) and operationalised through the Maharlika Investment Corporation (MIC), entered its third operational year in 2026. The MIC's leadership through 2025–2026 — the President and CEO [TBD-VERIFY: identity of MIC President and CEO as of May 2026, given multiple successions through 2023–2025], the Board of Directors including ex officio members from DOF, DBM, and the Land Bank and Development Bank, and the Investment Committee — supplied the institutional architecture. PH-K-07 develops the 2023 establishment in detail.

The MIC's 2024 Annual Report disclosed initial investment allocations of approximately PHP 100 billion across infrastructure, energy, financial-instrument, and direct-investment categories [TBD-VERIFY: precise 2024 disclosed investment allocations]. The 2025 Annual Report, released in mid-2026 [TBD-VERIFY: precise release date and disclosed return on assets], was the subject of intensive scrutiny by the Senate Finance Sub-Committee under Senator Sherwin Gatchalian and the House Committee on Banks and Financial Intermediaries. The continuing constitutional challenges — Bayan Muna et al. v. MIC and related petitions before the Supreme Court [TBD-VERIFY: status of the petitions as of May 2026] — remained unresolved.

The MIF's policy role within the broader fiscal trajectory — whether the Fund operates as a sovereign-wealth-style long-horizon investor (the administration's framing) or as a quasi-fiscal-stimulus vehicle whose deployment of public-bank dividends should have been retained as fiscal-deficit reduction (the critics' framing) — remained the central contested question. Critics including Walden Bello, the Foundation for Economic Freedom, and the academic commentariat continued to question the Fund's governance, its disclosure regime, and its risk-management framework; supporters including the Bankers Association of the Philippines and selected investment-bank analysts continued to emphasise the Fund's potential to mobilise long-horizon capital for infrastructure and strategic investments.

13.2 The Electricity Sector — WESM, Meralco, and Spex

The Philippine electricity sector through 2025–2026 operated under the Wholesale Electricity Spot Market (WESM) — the national wholesale electricity exchange operated by the Independent Electricity Market Operator of the Philippines (IEMOP) under the Energy Regulatory Commission (ERC) — combining day-ahead and real-time markets across the Luzon, Visayas, and Mindanao grids. The 2025–2026 WESM operation included the integration of additional renewable-energy generation under the Renewable Portfolio Standards framework, the green energy auctions conducted by the Department of Energy under Secretary Raphael P.M. Lotilla [TBD-VERIFY: continuation of Lotilla as DOE Secretary through May 2026], and the continuing integration of liquefied natural gas (LNG) generation following the partial depletion of the Malampaya gas field.

Manila Electric Company (Meralco) — the largest electricity distribution utility serving Metro Manila and the surrounding provinces — continued through 2025–2026 under the ownership of the Metro Pacific Investments Corporation and the Pangilinan-led management. The 2025–2026 Meralco tariff trajectory [TBD-VERIFY: precise 2025–2026 Meralco rate movements], the long-term supply contracts with generators, and the regulatory interactions with ERC supplied the principal commercial and political dynamics.

Service Contract 38 / Spex (Shell Philippines Exploration B.V.) and the Malampaya field — the operator of the Malampaya gas project supplying approximately 20 per cent of Luzon's electricity generation through the gas-to-power plants — has, since the 2024–2025 changes in ownership and operator (with Prime Energy Resources Development Corporation having acquired Spex's interest [TBD-VERIFY: precise status of Malampaya operatorship through 2025–2026]), generated continuing public attention. The Malampaya field's depletion trajectory, the indigenous-gas-replacement question, and the LNG-import substitution all remained subjects of energy-policy discussion.

13.3 The Manila Bay Reclamation Supreme Court Cases

The Manila Bay reclamation cases — encompassing the multiple reclamation projects approved through the Philippine Reclamation Authority and the President's Office across the Pasay City, Manila, Bulacan, and Cavite shoreline — continued through 2025–2026 under Supreme Court review. The 2023 Executive Order suspending reclamation projects pending environmental review, the subsequent project-by-project assessments, and the Supreme Court petitions challenging individual reclamation projects on environmental, fisheries-livelihood, and constitutional grounds [TBD-VERIFY: specific 2025–2026 Supreme Court rulings on Manila Bay reclamation cases] together produced an institutionally ambiguous status. The Cavitex-C5 Link Extension, the Cavite Tagaytay Tourism Enterprise Zone Authority projects, and the New Manila International Airport (Bulacan) reclamation each operated under specific regulatory and judicial scrutiny.

14. Contested Framings, Forward View, and Spiral Index

14.1 The First Three-Account Framing — Marcos Final 2.5 Years: Governance or Pre-2028 Positioning

The administration account (Press Secretary, PCO, cabinet-secretary commentary) characterises the period from late 2025 through mid-2028 as genuine governance organised around the Philippine Development Plan 2023–2028. The administration's policy outputs — GDP growth in the 6 to 7 per cent target range; infrastructure delivery under the Build-Better-More framework; 4Ps coverage at approximately 4.4 million households; EDCA-site activations across the nine designated sites; FDI inflows tracking the post-2022 trajectory; BIR and BoC revenue performance meeting or exceeding targets — are presented as the empirical substrate of the governance characterisation. The succession question, on the administration's framing, is a constitutional and political process for the May 2028 electorate to decide without administrative pre-positioning beyond what is institutionally proper.

The opposition account (Pilipinas Para sa Pinoy, the Liberal Party residue, Akbayan, senator-opposition figures, Bello, Rocamora, Conde) characterises the period as a sequence of positioning manoeuvres dressed as governance. The specific examples invoked include: FY 2026 GAA allocations to House-majority districts characterised as pork-barrel positioning; cabinet reshuffles characterised as candidate-development through institutional grooming of prospective 2028 candidates; foreign-policy commitments characterised as 2028-extending lock-ins that bind the next administration; the charter-change resurfacing characterised as institutional-perpetuation manoeuvring (Section 10); and the trial coordination (notwithstanding formal institutional separateness) as politically motivated targeting of the 2028 front-runner.

The civil-society structural account (CenPEG, PCIJ, Stratbase ADRi, AIM Policy Center, the academic commentariat) emphasises the structural impossibility of cleanly separating governance from positioning under conditions of contested succession. The structural account observes that every late-period presidency in post-EDSA history has combined the two, with the relative weight conditioned by external constraints, the President's coalition position, and the institutional moments available. The Marcos final-period combination is, on this account, neither uniquely positioning-heavy nor uniquely governance-pure; it occupies a typical position on the continuum, with the trial and ICC parallel proceedings adding analytical complexity but not fundamentally changing the structural pattern.

14.2 The Second Three-Account Framing — Charter Change: Reform or Self-Perpetuation

The Senate-reformist account characterises the 2025–2026 charter-change proposals as either narrowly defensible (limited economic amendments potentially appropriate through constitutional-convention procedure) or as politically suspect (any proposal whose modality opens the door to broader political amendments). The reformist account emphasises the Senate's structural role as institutional counterweight to House-majority initiatives, the 2024 People's Initiative defeat precedent, and the historical pattern of pre-presidential-election Charter Change attempts in 1997 and 2005–2010 being associated with term-extension or self-perpetuation manoeuvres.

The House-majority account, articulated through Speaker Romualdez and the Committee on Constitutional Amendments, characterises the proposals as economic-reform measures the country needs to attract investment and modernise the institutional architecture. The account emphasises that political amendments (term limits, presidential-system shift, federal-system shift) are not on the immediate agenda and that the proposed amendments are limited to the economic provisions.

The civil-society account (Kontra Daya, Bayan, CenPEG, PCIJ, the academic commentariat) characterises the 2025–2026 charter-change discussion as institutionally suspect under conditions of contested presidential succession, emphasising the historical association of pre-presidential-election Charter Change with self-perpetuation manoeuvres and the unresolved procedural-legitimacy questions surrounding constituent-assembly voting and people's-initiative requirements.

14.3 The Third Three-Account Framing — Sara Duterte's 2028 Viability: Salvaged or Terminated

The Duterte-Davao account characterises Vice-President Sara Duterte's 2028 political viability as intact under any conviction outcome short of formal disqualification under Article XI Section 3(7). The account emphasises the sustained Duterte-base loyalty (the 27 million Bong Go senatorial vote topping in 2025 as direct evidence), the Davao Region institutional concentration, the diaspora and OFW Duterte-base support, and the political-mobilisation infrastructure as together constituting a viable 2028 candidacy substrate under any acquittal or dismissal outcome.

The Marcos-Imee-camp account [TBD-VERIFY: whether Imee Marcos's camp publicly positions itself on Sara Duterte's viability as of mid-2026] characterises the trial's outcome — irrespective of formal verdict — as inevitably foreclosing the Vice-President's path. The account emphasises the cumulative reputational damage of the trial's evidentiary record, the declining national-preference numbers in Pulse Asia surveys, the strain on the Duterte family's institutional infrastructure under simultaneous Hague and Senate proceedings, and the structural difficulty of mounting a sustained 2028 campaign from a politically wounded position.

The political-science account (Mendoza, Teehankee, Arugay, Thompson) emphasises the gap between sustained base-loyalty (Duterte-base supporters' commitment) and declining national-preference (the broader electorate's evaluation) as the analytical frame. Mendoza and Yap's September 2025 AIM Policy Center paper — and the March 2026 follow-on — developed quantitative modelling of the conviction arithmetic under varying voter-coalition assumptions; Teehankee's 2025–2026 Philippine Political Science Journal articles developed the institutional analysis; Arugay's Diplomat commentary tracked the polling trajectory.

14.4 Forward View and Spiral Index

The corpus's spiral index discipline — developed in the Singapore corpus and continued in the seven-country comparative archive — provides the forward-looking analytical structure within which the document's open questions are tracked across successive research waves. The principal forward questions as of 22 May 2026:

1. The trial outcome: When does the Senate impeachment court deliver its verdict on the seven counts? What is the conviction arithmetic on each count? Are there counts on which conviction is achieved but disqualification is not triggered (the count-specific arithmetic of Article XI Section 3(7))? Is the verdict appealed or otherwise challenged before the Supreme Court?

2. The Vice-Presidential succession: Under any conviction-with-disqualification outcome, who does the Marcos administration nominate? How does the Commission on Appointments confirmation proceed? What is the political and institutional implication for the 2028 succession?

3. The 2028 candidate field's consolidation: Which prospective candidates file Certificates of Candidacy in 2027 [TBD-VERIFY: precise 2028 NLE filing window]? How does the post-verdict political environment shape the candidate consolidation across the Marcos-aligned, Duterte-aligned, liberal-progressive, and centrist-independent fields?

4. The Charter Change trajectory: Does the 20th Congress pass any constitutional amendment proposals? If so, are they ratified through the constitutionally required modality (constituent assembly with the relevant voting threshold, or constitutional convention, or people's initiative)? Does the Marcos administration support or contest any specific proposal?

5. The fiscal trajectory: Does the deficit-cap trajectory meet the MTFF target by 2028? Does BIR and BoC revenue performance support the trajectory? Does the FY 2027 GAA's pre-election allocation pattern conform to the MTFF discipline?

6. The maritime-EEZ enforcement: Do the Bajo de Masinloc, Iroquois Reef, Pag-asa, and Sabina Shoal patterns continue at the 2025–2026 intensity or do they de-escalate or escalate? Does the CoC negotiation conclude under the 2026 target deadline or extend?

7. The BARMM transition: How does the post-13-October-2025 Bangsamoro Government implement the elected mandate? What is the Sulu integration trajectory? Does the MILF normalisation process complete or extend further?

8. The Davao Region post-ICC dynamics: Does the Duterte family institutional concentration in Davao sustain through the 2025–2028 period? What is the political position of the next-generation Duterte figures (Baste, Pulong) by 2028?

9. The Maharlika Investment Fund: Does the MIC's 2025–2026 disclosure regime satisfy the institutional and civil-society scrutiny? Do the constitutional challenges before the Supreme Court succeed or fail? What is the Fund's deployed-investment profile and return performance?

10. The ICC proceedings: How does the ICC trial-phase against former President Rodrigo Duterte proceed through 2025–2026? What is the institutional and political effect on the 2028 succession?

The corpus will update PH-D-07 in successive research waves as the verdict, the succession nomination (if applicable), the 2028 candidate field consolidation, and the policy trajectories develop. Cross-references with PH-D-06 (the trial), PH-D-04 and PH-D-05 (the rupture and mid-terms), PH-F-03 and PH-F-05 (the alliance architecture), and PH-K-05 (Charter Change) will be maintained as the related documents are themselves updated. The 2028 election and its outcome — the central forward inflection — will be the subject of a dedicated future document (provisionally PH-D-08 or PH-E-XX) once the election is conducted.

14.5 Documentary Discipline and Update Cycle

This document, dated 22 May 2026, is the [DRAFT] state of a Level 1 Anchor document whose status will be revised to [COMPLETE] upon the Senate trial verdict and the post-verdict polity-state being recorded. The TBD-VERIFY tagging applied throughout reflects the genuine uncertainty of mid-2026 — uncertainty about the trial outcome, the specific official identities and dates whose primary-source verification has not yet been completed, the polling figures whose precision varies across survey instruments, and the constitutional-and-political-outcome scenarios whose resolution lies in the future. The next research-wave revision will close TBD-VERIFY tags as primary-source verification permits and will record the verdict, the post-verdict polity-state, and the 2028 candidate-field consolidation as those facts become available.

The document's place in the PH corpus is as the analytical companion to PH-D-06 (the trial) and the bridge to the prospective post-2028 successor documents. Read together with PH-D-04 (the rupture's institutional mechanics), PH-D-05 (the mid-term elections), and PH-D-06 (the impeachment trial), PH-D-07 supplies the polity-state analysis within which the trial sits and that the verdict will reshape. The forward documents will record what actually happens; this document records what the institutional, fiscal, foreign-policy, and social-policy architecture looks like at the document's cutoff.

---

Sources

1. Senate of the Philippines. Senate Journal of the 20th Congress, First and Second Regular Sessions, and Journal of the Senate Sitting as an Impeachment Court. Pasay City: Senate Secretariat, 2025–2026.
2. House of Representatives of the Philippines. Journal of the 20th Congress, First and Second Regular Sessions; and Committee Reports of the Committees on Appropriations, Ways and Means, Constitutional Amendments, and Public Order and Safety, 2025–2026.
3. Supreme Court of the Philippines. Decision in the consolidated petitions of Duterte-Carpio v. Senate of the Philippines, House of Representatives, et al. (G.R. No. [TBD-VERIFY: docket numbers]), promulgated 29 July 2025 (En Banc); and the Court's subsequent rulings on motions for reconsideration and on post-verdict petitions, 2025–2026. Decisions on the Manila Bay Reclamation cases and on Charter Change initiative petitions, 2025–2026.
4. Office of the President of the Philippines. Fourth State of the Nation Address (28 July 2025) and Fifth State of the Nation Address (27 July 2026 [TBD-VERIFY: date if delivered before this document's cutoff]); Executive Orders, Administrative Orders, and Presidential Communications Office statements, July 2025 – May 2026.
5. Department of Finance, Department of Budget and Management, Bureau of Internal Revenue, and Bureau of Customs (Philippines). Annual Reports for FY 2024 and FY 2025; Briefings on the FY 2026 General Appropriations Act and the FY 2027 National Expenditure Programme; Statements of Receipts and Operations, 2025–2026.
6. Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas (BSP). Monetary Board Statements; Inflation Reports and Quarterly Reports; and Reports on Personal and Cash Remittances of Overseas Filipinos, 2025–2026.
7. National Economic and Development Authority (NEDA). Philippine Development Plan 2023–2028 Updated Implementation Plan; Quarterly Macroeconomic Briefings, 2025–2026. Philippine Statistics Authority (PSA), National Accounts, Labour Force Survey, Consumer Price Index, 2025–2026.
8. Commission on Elections (COMELEC) of the Philippines. Calendar of Activities for the 9 May 2028 National and Local Elections; Resolutions on Pre-Campaign Conduct, Premature Campaigning, and Party Registration, 2025–2026; and Resolutions on the BARMM Parliamentary Elections of 13 October 2025.
9. Department of National Defense, Department of Foreign Affairs, Philippine Coast Guard, Armed Forces of the Philippines Western Command (WESCOM), and National Task Force – West Philippine Sea (Philippines). Statements and Incident Reports on Bajo de Masinloc / Scarborough Shoal, Second Thomas Shoal, Iroquois Reef, Pag-asa Island, and Sabina Shoal Incidents, 2025–2026.
10. Maharlika Investment Corporation (MIC). 2024 Annual Report and 2025 Annual Report; and Department of Finance and Department of Budget and Management statements on the Maharlika Investment Fund's operational status and disclosures, 2025–2026.
11. Department of Social Welfare and Development (DSWD) (Philippines). Pantawid Pamilyang Pilipino Program (4Ps) Annual Reports; and Walang Gutom 2027 Programme Implementation Updates, 2025–2026.
12. Bangsamoro Government (Philippines), Bangsamoro Transition Authority, and the BARMM Parliament. Reports on the 13 October 2025 Bangsamoro Parliamentary Elections and the Post-Election Transition, 2025–2026.
13. International Criminal Court (ICC), Pre-Trial Chamber I and Trial Chamber. Decisions, Filings, and Hearings in The Prosecutor v. Rodrigo Roa Duterte, ICC-01/21, 2025–2026.
14. Pulse Asia Research, Inc. and Social Weather Stations (SWS). Nationwide Surveys on Presidential, Vice-Presidential, and Senatorial Trust Ratings; 2028 Presidential Preferences; Impeachment Conviction Sentiment; and Economic Sentiment, March 2025 – March 2026. OCTA Research Tugon ng Masa surveys for the same period.
15. Abinales, Patricio N., and Donna J. Amoroso. State and Society in the Philippines. Third edition. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2023.
16. Coronel, Sheila S. "Two Trials, One Family." Columbia Journalism Review, December 2025; "After the Verdict." The Atlantic, March 2026 [TBD-VERIFY: precise title]; and follow-on commentary in Foreign Affairs, 2026.
17. Arugay, Aries A., and Julio C. Teehankee. "Impeachment, Succession, and 2028." The Diplomat, 18 February 2026; "The Philippine Polity After the Verdict." Critical Asian Studies forthcoming, 2026; Asian Politics & Policy, Philippine Political Science Journal, 2025–2026 issues.
18. Stratbase ADR Institute, Asia Maritime Transparency Initiative (CSIS), Asia Society Policy Institute, and the Asia Foundation Manila Office. Briefs on Philippine Foreign Policy, Maritime Security, and the 2028 Succession, 2025–2026. Greg Poling and Andreyka Natalegawa AMTI commentary; Walter Lohman Heritage Foundation Asian Studies Center commentary.
19. Center for People Empowerment in Governance (CenPEG), Kontra Daya, Bayan, Akbayan, and the Philippine Center for Investigative Journalism (PCIJ). Reports and Statements on Charter Change, the 2028 Pre-Campaign, the BARMM Elections, and the Trial's Aftermath, 2025–2026.
20. Ressa, Maria, and the Rappler editorial collective; the Philippine Daily Inquirer, Inquirer.net, Philippine Star, Manila Bulletin, BusinessWorld, Manila Times, Vera Files, CNN Philippines, ABS-CBN News, GMA News, Reuters Manila, Bloomberg Asia. Sustained 2025–2026 coverage of the trial, the 20th Congress, the BARMM elections, the South China Sea incidents, and the 2028 pre-campaign.
21. Mendoza, Ronald U., and Jurel Yap. "After the Mid-Terms: Conviction Arithmetic and 2028." Asian Institute of Management Policy Center Working Paper, September 2025; "Dynasty and the 2028 Field." AIM Policy Center Working Paper, March 2026.
22. ASEAN Secretariat. Status Reports on the South China Sea Code of Conduct Negotiations and Joint Statements of the ASEAN-China Senior Officials Meetings, 2025–2026.
23. United States Institute of Peace (USIP) Philippines Programme; Asia Foundation Manila; United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) Philippines — Briefings on El Niño, La Niña, Typhoon Response, and African Swine Fever Recurrence, 2024–2026.
24. Walden Bello, Joel Rocamora, and Carlos H. Conde of Human Rights Watch. Commentary essays in Foreign Policy in Focus, Inquirer.net, and Rappler on the post-rupture political order, 2025–2026.
25. Catholic Bishops' Conference of the Philippines (CBCP), pastoral letters and statements; Cardinal Pablo Virgilio David (Caloocan), Cardinal Jose Advincula (Manila), and other episcopal interventions, 2025–2026.
26. Rappler. "The Senate's quorum of twelve senators is legal — here's why"; "Senate minority walks out as majority 'railroads' online voting rule"; "Senate deadlock at 11-11: What it means for majority and minority blocs" — May–June 2026 coverage of the Senate leadership crisis. [Search-retrieved 2026-08-29; not independently fetch-verified in this session.]
27. Philstar.com. "Remote vote sparks walkout by 'SB-11'," 27 May 2026. Sunstar. "Senate row may reach constitutional crisis," May 2026. GMA News Online. "Senate holds special session" and "LIVE UPDATES: Congress convenes special session (June 17, 2026)." Philippine Daily Inquirer. "Marcos calls Congress to hold special session," June 2026; "The Senate's close call," Inquirer Opinion. [Search-retrieved 2026-08-29; not independently fetch-verified in this session.]
28. Sunstar. "Marcos: Nearly P25B in flood control corruption assets recovered, frozen," July 2026. Philippine Center for Investigative Journalism (PCIJ). "One Year After the Flood-Control Speech: Probes, Protests, and the President's Possible Culpability," 26 July 2026. [Search-retrieved 2026-08-29; not independently fetch-verified in this session.]
29. Manila Times and Philstar.com. Coverage of President Marcos's 15 August 2026 remarks on 2028 succession and anti-corruption continuity. [Search-retrieved 2026-08-29; not independently fetch-verified in this session.]

Related Documents

• PH-H-PRES-04: Rodrigo Roa Duterte (1945–)
• PH-H-PRES-03: Ferdinand Romualdez Marcos Jr. — "Bongbong" (1957–)
• PH-A-01: The American Colonial Inheritance (1898–1946) — the presidential, bicameral, and single-term architecture conditioning all 2025–2026 succession dynamics
• PH-B-05: EDSA Revolution (22–25 February 1986) — the post-1986 constitutional settlement defining single-term presidency, separately-elected Vice-Presidency, and impeachment procedure
• PH-C-03: Estrada's Presidency and EDSA-2 Removal (1998–2001) — the precedent against which post-verdict transition scenarios are measured
• PH-D-02: The War on Drugs — Numbers, Mechanics, ICC Investigation — the evidentiary base of the parallel ICC prosecution shadowing the 2025–2026 polity
• PH-D-03: The 2022 Election and the Marcos Family Restoration — the UniTeam's constitutive election
• PH-D-04: The Marcos–Duterte Coalition Rupture (2024–2025) — the rupture's institutional mechanics
• PH-D-05: The 2025 Midterm Election, the Marcos–Duterte Rupture, and the Sara Duterte Impeachment Saga — the electoral axis preceding this document
• PH-D-06: The Senate Impeachment Trial of Vice-President Sara Duterte (2025–2026) — the immediate parallel companion treating the trial's procedural and evidentiary architecture
• PH-F-03: The Renewed US–Philippines Alliance: EDCA Expansion, South China Sea Crisis, and the Squad Architecture (2022–2025)
• PH-F-05: Philippines–Japan Reciprocal Access Agreement and the Trilateral with the US (2022–2026)
• PH-J-06: Philippines Education Crisis: PISA, MATATAG, and Learning Recovery (2018–2026)
• PH-K-05: Charter Change (Cha-Cha) Attempts in the Philippines: From 1987 Constitution Foundations to the 2024 People's Initiative Failure
• PH-R-01: Philippines Governance Books Canon
• US-F-07: US–China Strategic Decoupling and the Trump-Era Indo-Pacific Reset
• PH-H-PRES-05: back-reference added by symmetry sweep
• PH-K-06: The March 2025 Duterte ICC Arrest Decision
• PH-K-07: The January 2013 Philippines–China PCA Arbitration Filing Decision
• PH-O-01: Philippines Megatrends — The 2030s Questions
• PH-G-02: The BPO Industry and the Voice Economy