By Leandro DD Coronel

The start of a new year is a good time to ask: How’s President Duterte doing? One thing is certain: Mr. Duterte has made a promising start.

He has made a lot of promises in his first 18 months in office. Forget about the jet-ski ride to the Spratlys where he promised to plant the Philippine flag to defy China.

Forget about resigning if he failed to conquer the drug trade in three to six months. The same with corruption. And getting rid of the Abu Sayyaf in one week. Who was it he was going to eat by just adding vinegar and salt?

His men ridiculed the previous administration for its inability to tame the monster traffic on EDSA, but now they’re realizing the monster is untamable. They criticized the previous managers of the Metro railway as incompetent, and yet the MRT still breaks down as regularly as it did previously.

He shooed away foreign, especially Western, ambassadors because they like to meddle in domestic affairs. He promised not to talk to media anymore for the rest of his term.

He cursed US President Barack Obama and promised to break ties with America and instead join forces with a triad composed of China, Russia, and the Philippines against the world.

For Duterte’s generous promises to the public to be realized, the government has to tax practically everything in order to amass the money needed to achieve his promises — Increased public salaries, new military hardware, showcase infrastructure projects, and other benefits promised by the President to soldiers’ widows and orphans.

The money to pay for all this will come from budgetary legerdemain, or magic, to be done by the Department of the Budget. Meaning, the money will come from the pockets of who else but tax-paying citizens.

 Even the money used to pay for the P1,000 increase in SSS pensions didn’t come from the government but from additional contributions of current SSS members.

 What other promises will be made this year?  Mr. Duterte has gone out of his way to win over different sectors of society, from soldiers and police whom he needs to maintain peace and order, to public workers to keep them on his side. It’s been a year-and-a-half of wooing various sectors to keep discontent at bay.

But if Mr. Duterte fails to keep his promises in the middle to long term, people will start asking questions. If the taxes that will be imposed on products and services will make life even harder for the majority of the people, then discontent will start to manifest itself.

The President knows that. And that’s why he’s hard at work at keeping people happy and not restless, believing instead of being cynical, and calm instead of agitated.

The poor are starting to give voice to the discontent while the rich remain apathetic and content to just fiddle as the country slow burns. The intelligentsia is standing by as its disaffection builds up, and the millennials are always poised and ready to provide mass to public agitations. The middle class are unhappy, while the marginalized remain, well, marginalized.

This year will likely be a crossroads for the country, the leadership, and the masses. The more the government pushes people to the brink, the more discontent will build up. Power can be ephemeral because it’s based on perception. It can change hands in a flash.

Those in power know that. Despite their brusqueness and bravado, they know they have to tread carefully.

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Tantum Ergo. The faceless money bills that surfaced recently will be worth much, much more than their face value (an ironic phrase in itself) as collectors’ items in the years to come.