Voters in the Bangsamoro Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao went to the polls on 14 September to choose the region’s first elected parliament, and the count produced no majority. By mid-morning on 16 September the Commission on Elections had completed its canvass of the party vote: the Bangsamoro Federalist Party first on 678,328 votes, or 35.54 per cent, for sixteen of the forty party seats; the United Bangsamoro Justice Party on 613,663, or 32.16 per cent, for fifteen; the BARMM Grand Coalition on 391,266, or 20.5 per cent, for eight; and the Rayat Democratic Party on 68,839, or 3.61 per cent, for one. Four parties cleared the 2.5 per cent threshold that qualifies a party for seats. A fifth, on about two per cent, did not.
The chamber has eighty members: forty allocated proportionally among the regional parliamentary parties, thirty-two elected in districts and eight reserved for sectoral representatives. Forty-one is a majority, and no party is near it. The leaders of both front-running parties have said publicly that they will look for allies — the Justice Party’s Murad Ebrahim said the party “will look for parties who can be our allies so that we can form a coalition”, and the Federalists’ Abdulraof Macacua called a coalition “an unavoidable situation”, in remarks carried by Al Jazeera.
The Commission on Elections said on the morning of 15 September that 5,097 of 5,212 expected election returns had been received — 97.79 per cent — and put turnout at roughly 80 per cent of 2,393,202 registered voters, about 1.8 million ballots; those figures are the commission chairman’s statements on air rather than a published canvass. Proclamations of district winners began the same day and were continuing province by province as this edition went to press.
What makes the arithmetic worth watching is the shape of the institution behind it. A proportional allocation across forty seats rewards parties that can hold a third of the vote, and it makes the second and third-placed parties necessary rather than merely present. A chamber that must find its own majority turns an election into a negotiation, and this negotiation began before the counting had finished.
The region votes, the parties count, and now the talking starts. The first parliament Bangsamoro has ever elected will be built at a table.