New Year 2025: Number of hopeful Filipinos drops to 90% – SWS

For the incoming 2025, the number of Filipinos who are hopeful about the new year decreased to 90 percent – lower than last year and the lowest since 2009, according to the Social Weather Stations (SWS) survey conducted Dec. 12-18, 2024, and released Friday, Dec. 27. INQUIRER FILE PHOTO

MANILA, Philippines — For the incoming 2025, the number of Filipinos who are hopeful about the new year decreased to 90 percent – lower than last year and the lowest since 2009.

Based on the Social Weather Stations (SWS) survey conducted Dec. 12-18 and released Friday, 10 percent of Filipinos will enter the New Year with “fear,” up by seven decimal points from three percent in 2023. It is also the highest rate since the 11 percent logged in 2009.

The number of Filipinos who are optimistic for New Year 2024 reached 96 percent, and for New Year 2010 hit 89 percent, according to SWS polls in 2023 and 2009, respectively.

Another SWS survey showed that fewer adult Filipinos expected a “happy” Christmas 2024. In the polls also conducted Dec. 12-18, 65 percent of of the 2,160 adult respondents expected a “happy” Christmas this year as 10 percent expected it to be “sad,” while 26 percent thought it would be “neither happy nor sad.”

In a similar survey last year, 73 percent of Filipino adults anticipated a happy Christmas 2023.

The latest SWS polling likewise indicated that from among the 65 percent who expected a happy Christmas 2024 and the 10 percent who anticipated a sad Christmas this year, 94 percent and 74 percent are hopeful about New Year 2025, respectively.

As to the 26 percent who were neither happy nor sad about this year’s Christmas, 87 percent of them are still hopeful about the incoming year.

In general, the hopeful Filipinos remain greater than those who would enter New Year 2025 with fear.

“Hope for the coming New Year has always been higher among those who expected a happy Christmas than those who expected a sad Christmas,” the SWS noted.

READ: SWS survey: 95% of Filipinos upbeat about 2023

The Fourth Quarter 2024 Social Weather Survey was conducted using face-to-face interviews of 2,160 adults nationwide: 1,080 in Balance Luzon (or Luzon outside Metro Manila), and 360 each for Metro Manila, Visayas, and Mindanao.

The pollster said that in its maiden survey about being hopeful for the New Year at the end of 2000, the number was at 87 percent.

The SWS noted that results from similar surveys it conducted at the end of 2000, 2001, 2004, 2005, and 2009 had rates around the 80 percent mark while polls made at the end of 2002, 2003, 2006, 2007, 2008, and from 2010 to 2024, the scores were around the 90 percent mark.