For decades, Philippine politics functioned on a simple rule: the powerful do not fall. Scandals could rage, evidence could pile up, and witnesses could testify, but the ruling class survived through a shared pact of silence. This was elite immunity, the invisible architecture that allowed corruption to flourish without consequence. What makes the current implosion unprecedented is not the magnitude of the theft but the collapse of that pact. The center of power is no longer holding. It is eating itself.
The Zaldy Co exposé detonated the first charge. A former appropriations baron, once protected by the very system he served, suddenly accusing the President, the Budget Secretary, the former Speaker, and senior Malacañang operatives of orchestrating P100 billion in insertions — this is not mere whistleblowing. It is regime fragmentation. It is a political insider setting fire to the house he helped construct. His revelations were not delivered in a courtroom but in a video addressed to the nation, and he did not hide his intent. He was not seeking justice. He was declaring revenge.
Then came Roberto Bernardo, a former DPWH undersecretary with a catalogue of names, percentages, delivery routes, and cash transfers that implicated senators, mayors, and executive officials. In any stable democracy, such testimony would reflect a functioning accountability system. Here, it reflects the opposite: a system so rotten that only its own functionaries can expose it. And they are not exposing it out of virtue but out of desperation. They are fighting for survival in a collapsing order.
The political class is no longer united by mutual protection. It is united only by fear. And when fear replaces loyalty, the destruction of elite immunity becomes inevitable. The flood-control scandal is no longer about kickbacks. It is about the unraveling of a governing coalition and the death of the political compact that kept the ruling families insulated from consequences.
The first casualty is not the Marcos administration’s legitimacy, although that is rapidly disintegrating. It is the old assumption that the highest officials of the land can continue to operate without accountability. The spectacle of Co and Bernardo naming senior government figures is shattering the illusion that the elite are untouchable. Their words may be self-serving, but their impact is real. Every name dropped chips away at the myth that power protects its own. Every affidavit exposes the cracks in a once-impenetrable wall.
The second casualty is public trust. Filipinos have long tolerated corruption, but they have done so under the belief that the system, however imperfect, remained functional. What the current implosion reveals is that the system itself has become a criminal ecosystem. The very institutions meant to protect the nation have been weaponized for extraction. When people begin to see that corruption is not an anomaly but an organizing principle, faith in the state collapses. And when faith collapses, realignment follows.
The third casualty is political stability. When elites lose the ability to shield themselves, they lose the ability to protect each other. Alliances fracture. Factions emerge. Former allies turn into enemies. Opportunists reposition themselves. The Marcos–Duterte war is only the opening act. The flood-control scandal accelerates the fragmentation. Every revelation weakens the center and empowers the fringes. Every denial fuels suspicion. Every new witness invites another betrayal.
The beneficiaries of this rupture are not the reformers. They are the political opportunists who thrive in chaos. Sara Duterte gains from the weakening of the administration she now openly despises. Those positioning for 2025 and 2028 gain from every blow to the incumbent’s credibility. Power in the Philippines does not disappear. It migrates. And it is now migrating away from the palace.
The losers are easier to name. First, the Marcos administration, which now confronts the implosion of the political order it inherited and the exposure of the system it failed to reform. Second, Congress and the Senate, whose reputations are collapsing under the weight of the revelations. Third, the bureaucracy, which now stands revealed not as a technocratic pillar but as a marketplace of extraction.
But the greatest loser is the Filipino public, who must now endure the consequences of a ruling class that governed not for stability or development but for self-enrichment. When elite immunity dies without being replaced by accountability, the result is not renewal. It is a crisis.
Yet in that crisis lies the possibility of realignment. When the old order collapses, new coalitions form. New power centers emerge. The death of elite immunity opens a vacuum that must be filled. Whether it is filled by authoritarians, reformists, opportunists, or insurgents remains unresolved. But one thing is certain: the era of silent, consensual corruption is ending. The era of exposed, contested corruption has begun.
And once the criminals start talking, the system they built can never be restored.
