Bangsamoro holds historic first parliament elections amid pre-poll violence

Nearly 2.4 million voters in the Bangsamoro Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao woke Monday to cast ballots in the first parliamentary elections since the region was formally established in 2019. The vote was meant to be historic—a step toward genuine self-governance after decades of insurgency and bloodshed that had claimed roughly 150,000 lives since the 1970s. But the night before the polls opened, violence erupted in Cotabato City. A shooting late Sunday killed three people and wounded fifteen others. An improvised explosive device injured the person carrying it. A gunshot rang out with no casualties. By Monday morning, election officials had placed the city under direct commission control.

The Bangsamoro region itself emerged from a 2014 peace agreement between the Philippine government and the Moro Islamic Liberation Front, a rebel group that had fought for decades for Muslim autonomy in the predominantly Catholic nation. Under that deal, the MILF agreed to disarm and abandon its goal of a separate state. In exchange, the region gained expanded self-governance powers. The 2019 establishment of BARMM marked the formal beginning of that transition, but it came with a catch: an interim government would rule until elected representatives could take office. Monday's election was meant to end that temporary arrangement.

Eighty seats were at stake. Forty would go to political party representatives, thirty-two to district representatives, and eight to sectoral representatives. The region's chief minister—the head of the executive branch—would be chosen by the new parliament in its first session. Election officials had been targeting an eighty percent voter turnout, a threshold that reflected both hope and caution. The vote had been postponed several times before finally being scheduled for this week.

But the pre-election violence was not the only irregularity. In the town of Maluso in Basilan province, election officials discovered pre-shaded ballots in thirty-six of sixty-eight precincts—a sign of tampering that suggested someone had attempted to predetermine votes before citizens even entered the polling booths. George Garcia, the chairman of the Commission on Elections, ordered the immediate reprinting of ballots for those precincts and delayed voting there. He vowed to prosecute anyone attempting to incite violence or buy votes.

Garcia framed the election in terms of historical weight. "These elections stand on generations of Bangsamoro struggle for homeland, identity, and self-determination, in the face of dispossession, marginalization, conflict and sacrifice," he said. The language was deliberate. The region had been marginalized for centuries under colonial and national rule. The conflict of recent decades had been brutal and intractable. The peace deal represented a genuine break from that past—a moment when armed insurgents agreed to lay down weapons and compete through ballots instead.

The violence and ballot tampering suggested that not everyone accepted that transition. Some actors, whether political rivals or extremist holdouts, appeared willing to use intimidation and fraud to shape the outcome. Yet the election proceeded. Polling stations were set to close at 7 p.m. local time. The region that had once harbored extremist groups and been defined by violence was attempting something it had never done before: choose its own representatives through a democratic vote.

What happens next depends partly on whether the new parliament can consolidate the peace. The MILF's demobilization was meant to drain the insurgency of its fighting force. But the presence of pre-shaded ballots and Sunday's shooting suggested that the transition from conflict to democracy was not yet complete. The election was a milestone, but it was also a test—of whether a region scarred by 150,000 deaths could genuinely move beyond violence and toward self-rule.