President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. speaks at the 2022 Department of Environment and Natural Resources Multistakeholder Forum in Manila on Oct. 5, 2022. AP PHOTO
President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. speaks at the 2022 Department of Environment and Natural Resources Multistakeholder Forum in Manila on Oct. 5, 2022. AP PHOTO

THERE is nothing official or otherwise particularly special about the "first 100 days" timestamp applied to new presidents, so when President Bongbong Marcos initially said that he was not inclined to mark the occasion (the 100th day was on October 8), I thought that might be a sensible breaking of a rather useless tradition. One of the biggest handicaps of Philippine governance, at least at the national level, is its lack of continuity. Most things a national government needs to do cannot be accomplished within the span of 100 days, or a legislative session that lasts only a few months before taking a recess, or the three-year interval between elections; as a consequence, government does much less than it should, or could if it did not mentally fence itself in with timed interruptions.

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