On September 21, on the 53rd anniversary of Ferdinand Marcos Sr.’s 1972 martial-law proclamation, thousands of Filipinos, from students to young workers, informal settlers, jeepney drivers, church groups, artists, and professionals, flooded the streets to protest what many now call the country’s biggest corruption scandal in years: the plunder of flood-control funds amid deadly inundations. Much of the media shorthand called what followed “riots”. But to reduce Mendiola to a night of smashed glass is to ignore the deeper dynamics of the Philippines’ political economy at work: widening social inequalities, the long grind of unemployment and underemployment, the siphoning of public money through “ghost projects”, and the narrowing of democratic space that greets poor and young Filipinos when they demand accountability.
Yes, there was violence around Ayala Bridge, Recto Avenue, and the Mendiola Peace Arch; video and photojournalists documented chaotic confrontations, including police use of water cannons and tear gas and scenes of batons swinging indiscriminately. But those images exist within a larger arc: months of flooding that made the corruption scandal visceral, testimony about “ghost” flood-control projects, and a youth cohort staring at a future of precarious jobs and stagnant prospects. The question asked by many is: Who pays for crises, and who profits from them?
Floods, “ghost projects”, and a groundswell led by the young
The immediate catalyst for the protests is well documented: allegations that climate and flood-control funds were diverted at scale, even as communities drowned. Major outlets reported the state’s own loss estimates alongside civil society’s far higher figures; Greenpeace, for instance, has alleged sums in the trillions of pesos squandered or siphoned, while the government’s inquiry has already shaken political elites.
Yet, to reduce the upsurge to “rioting” is to miss the social question that drove so many into the streets. Flood-prone districts, often informal or peripheral, shoulder the heaviest costs when infrastructure fails: lost income, disease, displacement. The burden falls on those whose labor keeps the city running and who already navigate precarious work, high prices, and weak services. The demand that public funds become public goods – flood barriers that hold, drainage that works, transparent tenders that deliver – is at its root a class demand for dignity, safety, and a say over the use of collective resources.
The class character of the crowd matters. Young Filipinos and especially poor youth shouldered the brunt of both flooding and the cost-of-living squeeze. In July 2025, the national unemployment rate rose to 5.3%, the highest since 2022, with the labor force shrinking and underemployment elevated to 14.8% of the 46.05 million employed persons that translate into millions of stalled lives. If you are young and told to wait patiently while a flood of public funds goes missing, your “political education” can happen overnight.
This is also a generational story. Gen Z students and out-of-school youth living through unstable jobs, rising costs, and threadbare opportunity ladders – were conspicuous in the assemblies and, controversially, among those later accused of violent acts. The rhetoric from officials escalated quickly. The Office of the President vowed “justice” against groups it portrayed as intent on “steal[ing], burn[ing] and destroy[ing],” while the Interior Secretary Juanito Victor “Jonvic” Remulla said many detainees were minors and warned of arson and sedition raps.
The National Union of Peoples’ Lawyers (NUPL) moved quickly, mobilizing legal teams and spotlighting the social profile of many detainees. As one report summarizing NUPL’s statement put it: “Most came from poor backgrounds … many denied inflicting any violence or damage to property,” with minors among those roughed up and held. This is not a sidebar to the main story, it is the main story for a movement that insists accountability must extend to police command responsibility, not just “troublemakers”. The Commission on Human Rights (CHR) said it would conduct its own inquiry into possible violations, including harassment of the media and use of force.
What the youth are saying about power and the economy
If you study protest cycles across the Global South, the faces at Mendiola feel familiar. They are the precarious, the underemployed, the climate-battered young people, fighting for a dignified life.
A serious response must also widen the frame to the political economy that enabled the scandal. The Philippines’ infrastructure financing has long braided domestic patronage, contractor oligopolies, and external capital. Anti-imperialist analysis is not a slogan here; it is a method that tracks how foreign lenders, international contractors, and geopolitical patrons intersect with domestic elites to skew priorities toward mega-projects, hard-currency contracts, and import-intensive inputs. When that model meets weak oversight and clientelist politics, leakages become structural and deliberate, not accidental. In this light, the youth-fronted marches sit alongside other Asian uprisings where Gen Z denounces not only corruption as theft, but a growth model that reproduces unemployment and underemployment while devaluing public services.
Social inequalities are reflected in the country’s state of income distribution. Data from the Family Income and Expenditures Survey of the Philippine Statistics Authority reveal that as of 2021, 55% of the country’s population belong to the poor and low-income categories. This is equivalent to 62 million Filipinos. On the other hand, those in the rich and upper income categories comprise a mere 0.9% of the total, or 350,000 individuals. Incomes of the rich upper class are 50 times the incomes of those in the poor category. Many of those in the lower middle income rung, about 26% of the total, live precarious lives with the constant threat of falling into the low income and poor categories.
Historically, the memories of January 26, 1970 ring loud and clear. This was the clash between police and demonstrators at the State of the Nation Address of then President Marcos, Sr. More violent confrontations took place in the following days leading to an assault on the Presidential Palace itself. Thus began what became known as the First Quarter Storm – a months-long series of demonstrations and mass organizing that shattered the myth of the Marcos mystique.
It is tempting to fixate on broken glass; it is harder but more honest to hear what the streets said. The young are not merely angry; they are analytic. They connect malfunctioning levees to missing funds, missing funds to patronage and impunity, and impunity to their own stalled futures under this socio-economic system. When public funds do not become public goods and dissent is reflexively securitized, legitimacy erodes. Students, workers, church networks, and neighborhood associations did not march because they hate order; they marched because they want just one.
The post “From floodwaters to fury”: Why the Philippines’ Mendiola protests are about class, democracy, and dignity appeared first on Peoples Dispatch.
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