Bangsamoro’s first elected parliament is hung: BFP 31, UBJP 30

The Commission on Elections proclaimed the first elected Bangsamoro Parliament in the early hours of 16 September. No party won the 41 seats required for a majority in the 80-member house. The Bangsamoro Federalist Party finished with 31 seats. The United Bangsamoro Justice Party, the vehicle of the Moro Islamic Liberation Front leadership, finished with 30. The rest of the chamber is a scatter of smaller lists and district winners who now decide who becomes chief minister.

On the party-list ballot the BFP took 678,328 votes, 35.54 per cent, and 16 proportional seats. UBJP took 613,663 votes, 32.16 per cent, and 15 proportional seats. The BARMM Grand Coalition won eight proportional seats on 391,266 votes. Raayat Democratic Party won one seat on 68,839 votes. Those four lists filled the 40 party seats. UBJP also swept the six sectoral seats. District races added 15 BFP members and nine UBJP members, which is how the two camps reached 31 and 30 once the full house is counted.

The proclamation was held at the headquarters of the Army’s Sixth Infantry Division in Barangay Awang, Datu Odin Sinsuat, Maguindanao del Norte, beginning on the evening of 15 September. Comelec reported turnout of 84.34 per cent: 2,018,478 of 2,393,202 registered voters. Gun violence outside a polling station on voting day had already killed at least three people. A gun ban that started on 16 July runs to 29 September. By late August, 15 people had been arrested for breaking it and 20 firearms seized.

The parliament is not a ceremonial upgrade of the old appointed Bangsamoro Transition Authority. It elects the chief minister, who runs the regional executive. Interim Chief Minister Abdulraof Macacua won a district seat in Maguindanao del Norte on the BFP side and was proclaimed with the others. Murad Ebrahim, the MILF chairman, had said before the count that UBJP would look for allies if it fell short. On proclamation night Macacua and Ishak Mastura of the BFP said the same from the other direction.

The smaller blocs that now hold the arithmetic are the BARMM Grand Coalition (eight seats), Serbisyong Inklusibo-Alyansang Progresibo (six), Progresibong Bangsamoro Party (one), Raayat (one), Itihad (one) and two non-Moro indigenous representatives without a declared party. Any path to 41 runs through some mix of those 19 seats.

The term is a special transition: 30 October 2026 to 30 June 2031, so that the next Bangsamoro poll lines up with national elections. The 2014 peace agreement that created BARMM after decades of war assumed an elected parliament would lock in MILF-led government. The first actual vote produced a near tie between the MILF party and a newer federalist list, and a chamber that cannot organise without a deal.

That deal will be written in the next six weeks. The text of the Organic Law does not name a default chief minister if the house is hung. Whoever can assemble 41 votes on 30 October takes the executive. The rest of the peace architecture, including normalisation and the remaining decommissioning of MILF fighters, will sit under that person. The vote settled who has seats. It did not settle who governs.