As I write this column from calmer Florence in the Tuscan region, Europe is burning with public anger over rising living costs, unaffordable housing, inadequate wages, and governments increasingly perceived as unresponsive. These are grievances Filipinos know only too well. Yet while Europeans take to the streets demanding change, Filipinos appear to have developed an extraordinary capacity to endure the very conditions provoking outrage elsewhere. Have we become so accustomed to government failure that we are losing our capacity to be outraged by it?
Over the past several weeks, I have witnessed demonstrations in Málaga, Madrid, Barcelona, Paris, Strasbourg, and Milan. Streets filled with protesters demanding economic security and governments that listen. In some places, peaceful demonstrations deteriorated into confrontations, with police barricades, smoke, and violence overshadowing legitimate grievances. These protests have different causes, but they reflect a common frustration: the growing distance between what governments promise and what ordinary citizens experience. Europeans are increasingly unwilling to accept that economic progress should coexist with deteriorating living conditions.
Watching these developments as a Filipino is unsettling because our circumstances are hardly better. Millions contend with inadequate wages, expensive housing, unreliable transportation, struggling public hospitals, and deficient educational services. Corruption compounds these problems, diverting resources and weakening public institutions. Yet many of these failures have become so familiar that we treat them as ordinary features of Philippine life rather than unacceptable conditions demanding urgent correction.
Perhaps we have simply become exceptionally good at surviving them.
Resilience is among our most celebrated national virtues. We admire Filipinos who endure hardship, improvise solutions, and smile despite adversity. But resilience becomes politically dangerous when it allows governments to escape responsibility. When transportation fails, commuters wake earlier. When wages prove inadequate, workers take additional jobs or leave the country. When hospitals cannot provide treatment, families borrow money or organize fundraisers. When schools lack resources, parents contribute what government should have provided. Citizens repeatedly compensate for institutional deficiencies that should never have become their personal burdens.
We have effectively turned Filipino resilience into a subsidy for bad governance. Worse, our political culture rewards officials who distribute assistance rather than build institutions that make such assistance unnecessary. Government obligations become political favors, and citizens are expected to express gratitude for services they should receive as a matter of right.
Our outrage is equally vulnerable to political manipulation. Corruption scandals become contests between rival political camps. Accountability is celebrated when opponents are implicated and questioned when allies are accused. Congressional investigations generate headlines, political hearings become spectacles, and social media erupts with indignation. But the anger frequently dissipates before meaningful institutional reforms materialize. We replace controversies faster than we resolve their underlying causes.
This does not mean Filipinos have stopped protesting. Our history of People Power, labor mobilizations, and anti-corruption movements demonstrates otherwise. Nor should Europe’s unrest be romanticized, particularly when violence threatens legitimate democratic expression. The more troubling difference is our difficulty sustaining public pressure beyond individual scandals, personalities, and electoral contests. We have demonstrated that we can remove leaders. We have been less successful at changing the institutions that allow successive leaders to reproduce the same failures.
Europe’s unrest reminds governments that public patience has limits. The Philippines presents a different danger: citizens becoming so accustomed to disappointment that they gradually lower their expectations of government. Silence should never be mistaken for satisfaction, just as resilience should never be mistaken for approval.
The question is no longer whether Filipinos can survive another government failure. We have demonstrated that repeatedly. The question is how much longer we will allow our resilience to protect the institutions that continue to fail us.
Perhaps the greatest achievement of bad governance in the Philippines is not that it has silenced public outrage, but that it has taught citizens to endure what they should never have been expected to tolerate.
Make the opening more directSharpen the Europe–Philippines contrast.
