MANILA – Malacañang on Thursday downplayed the declining popularity numbers of President Rodrigo Duterte among the country’s poorest.

Presidential Spokesperson Ernesto Abella said the administration is not alarmed by the decline in the trust and approval scores of Duterte in the latest Pulse Asia survey.

“[We’re] not alarmed. I would say there’s a dip, instead of an erosion,” Abella said in a news briefing in Malacañang.

Analysts and critics have attributed the drop in the President's popularity scores to the government’s controversial war on drugs, which has supposedly targeted the country’s poorest.

Even President Duterte once admitted that it is inevitable for the poor to bear the brunt of his bloody drug war.

More than 7,000 have been killed in the campaign, deaths that critics have branded as extrajudicial slays. But the government has been asserting that only about half could be attributed to legitimate police operations.

• Read: Drug war only targeting the poor? That’s how it is, says Duterte

In Pulse Asia’s March 2017 survey, the President secured a trust rating of 76 percent, down 7 points from 83 percent in December.

Duterte's approval rating, on the other hand, was at 78 percent in March, down 5 points from 83 percent in December, the pollster said.

Duterte’s trust scores fell by 7 points and 11 points among members of Class D and E, respectively. This was offset by a 12-point increase in trust among members of Classes A, B and C.

Approval of the President’s performance among Class D and E also declined by 6 and 8 points, respectively.

‘SOFTER APPROACH’

The decline in the trust and approval ratings of the President among the poor, as well the 11-point drop in public support for the government’s war on drugs, have prompted Sen. Panfilo Lacson and other analysts to call for the government to change its approach to ending the drug menace.

Terry Ridon, chairperson of the Presidential Commission for the Urban Poor (PCUP), said several government agencies are now working on employing ways to make the approach to solving the drug problem “softer."

“Many of the agencies have been trying to implement interventions in respect to the demand side of drug problem,” Ridon said.

“This really aims to provide a softer approach towards the drug war. This is something many line agencies would want to undertake already.”

While Ridon has acknowledged criticism that the drug war is anti-poor, he said “it is in the interest of the poor and the urban poor to really see that criminality and the drug problem is resolved within their communities.”

“It is unfortunate that several of the people in the poor communities are affected by it. If you go to these communities, there would be at the very least an affirmation that responding to criminality and the drug problem is very important towards nation-building,” he added.

International rights group Human Rights Watch (HRW) last month released a report detailing police abuses in Duterte’s war on drugs.

The group found, among others, that the war on drugs seem to have only targeted the poor, and that many of the victims in the cases it examined were mere drug users, not dealers.