DU30 should not wait for his ratings to free fall

We read a cacophony of analyses from knowledgeable personalities on the most recent result of the Pulse Asia poll survey on the performance and trust rating of President Rodrigo Roa Duterte. These are quite enlightening and very educational to us ordinary mortals because we just do not know the implications lurking behind the gathered data. Interpreting the numbers is beyond our ken. So, from the incisive views our profound statisticians, we get to learn the various perceptions of our countrymen on how the president is doing his job that are otherwise difficult for us to understand. 

To recall, Pulse Asia revealed that the trust among Filipinos in President Duterte dropped from a previous high to a dramatic low of some 7 percentage points. The president, following a spectacular election victory, enjoyed, at the onset of his administration, an all-time high trust rating. Our trust in his capacity to lead seemed unprecedented despite the scurrilous efforts of his detractors to stain his brand of leadership. When he started his administration, the records of expectation busted the known charts.

Now, we have just completed the first nine months of a six-year Duterte administration. If we consider that the first 100 days were deemed traditionally as the president's honeymoon period, he, in fact, has served us for about half a year. This period of his rule, bannered by his bloody war against the illegal drug trade, is still unmistakably very short. We are not supposed to see yet spectacular results of his actual performance.

Having said that, I say that the loss of seven percentage points that the president suffers in terms of our trust in him, is huge. True, I wrote here, in this column and for a few times, that there was no other direction the earlier survey result was going but down. What goes up, a popular song says, must come down. But it is too early for the president to suffer such a steep fall in the number of people's trust.

Analysts point to the surge of extra-judicial killings as the main cause of the shift of peoples' trust perceptions. They claim that the number of deaths in the last nine months even surpassed the supposed figure in the years-long Martial Law of the late President Ferdinand Marcos. With due apologies, I do not completely agree with that opinion. I dare say that it is the president's turning a blind eye to the call for substantial justice that hurts his ratings. We can accept the deaths of the supposed illegal drug traders because cleansing our country from this form of disease is going to be always bloody. But the president's failure to balance this number with the anguished cry of those relatives who claimed innocence on the part of those felled drug pushers has started to cast doubt on his presidential sense of justice. The survey results seem to tell President Duterte that our trust in him is dipping and it is time for him to take stock of his reign. It might be only 7 percentage points now, but should Duterte be unable to adjust to the changing demands of the time, the drop might free fall.