The Commission on Elections Regional Board of Canvassers declared final results Tuesday evening for the Bangsamoro Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao's first-ever parliamentary election, with the Bangsamoro Federalist Party (BFP) winning a plurality of 16 seats on 678,328 votes, or 35.54 percent of the party-list tally. The United Bangsamoro Justice Party (UBJP) — the party long associated with the Moro Islamic Liberation Front leadership that has run the region's interim transition authority — placed a close second with 15 seats on 613,663 votes, or 32.16 percent.
The BARMM Grand Coalition took eight seats with 20.5 percent of the vote, and the Raayat Democratic Party won a single seat with 3.61 percent, according to results reported by Philstar.com. The new 80-seat Bangsamoro Parliament is composed of 40 party-list seats, 32 district representatives, and 8 sectoral representatives, and its members are scheduled to assume office on October 30, formally ending 15 years of appointed governance in the autonomous region — first under the old Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao and then under the interim Bangsamoro Transition Authority that Malacañang appointed after the 2019 Bangsamoro Organic Law plebiscite.
The September 14 vote itself was not the clean handover its "historic" framing suggests. Gun violence outside a polling station in Cotabato City killed at least three people during voting, and Pulpulitiko previously reported that COMELEC Chairman George Garcia is weighing electoral sabotage charges — which can carry a non-bailable, life-imprisonment penalty — after 16,563 pre-shaded ballots turned up across 36 precincts in Maluso, Basilan. Neither Comelec nor the party blocs have said how, or whether, those irregularities affected the final seat allocation reported this week; the tally announced Tuesday did not carry any qualifier acknowledging the ongoing sabotage probe.
That gap between celebration and scrutiny matters because the vote closes out a peace process that began with the 1968 Jabidah massacre and the decades of Moro insurgency that followed, and was delayed four times from its original May 2022 target date. UBJP's strong second-place finish keeps the MILF-rooted political bloc that negotiated the 2014 Comprehensive Agreement on the Bangsamoro at the center of the new government even as it lost its outright dominance of the outgoing transition authority, where it held the bulk of appointed seats. BFP's plurality signals that a broader, less insurgency-linked coalition can now credibly claim the chief minister's post once Parliament convenes.
Roughly 2.4 million voters were registered for the election, and turnout figures reported alongside the final results were described by outlets covering the count as record-setting for the region, though Pulpulitiko was unable to independently verify a specific final turnout percentage as of this report.
Context
The BARMM Parliament election was the capstone step of the Bangsamoro Organic Law, ratified in a 2019 plebiscite that replaced the old Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao. Malacañang and the MILF agreed to a series of transition extensions — pushing the first parliamentary election from 2022 to 2025 and finally to 2026 — citing the need for more time to build voter rolls, security arrangements, and the normalization track for decommissioning MILF combatants. The election was also the first major electoral test of Comelec's administration since it flagged the Basilan pre-shading incident, which remains under investigation alongside military and police coordination in the affected precincts.
Sources
- Bangsamoro Federalist Party secures 16 seats, tops BARMM polls — Philstar.com, Renalyn Ramirez
- Historic, record-turnout BARMM poll winners proclaimed — Daily Tribune