Youth organizations criticized the SONA for failing to address many pressing issues. With the Chief Executive devoting time to less urgent matters, neglecting to lay down plans for millions of jobless Filipinos and how to respond to pandemic, they questioned his administration’s sense of urgency and priorities. The President failed to share concrete plans for the health crisis or address the impending economical effects of the global pandemic, they said. 

Watch this video that our interns helped produce. 

Despite threats of arrests and the coronavirus pandemic, sectoral groups across the Philippines came out to protest on Monday, July 27, in time for President Rodrigo Duterte’s 5th State of the Nation Address. See this gallery of photos of women, students, indigenous peoples, farmers, workers, urban poor, religious, business leaders, and academics.

“I was expecting a roadmap to get us out of this greatest unprecedented public health crisis since World War II and also, of course, economic crisis. Yet, he addressed tangential issues,” Rappler editor-at-large Marites Vitug said in a panel discussion on Monday, July 27, after President Rodrigo Duterte failed to mention the government’s roadmap to fight the virus in his State of the Nation Address.

Rappler’s Pia Ranada also writes in her post-SONA piece:

“While words about the COVID-19 pandemic did materialize in his State of the Nation Address, Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte could not hide his ripened obsession with bringing down ‘oligarchs,’ leaving no doubt about what is occupying his mind.”