The danger in BARMM’s first elections is not the calendar. It is the capture.
Congress has passed the bill. September 2026 is the date for BARMM’s first parliamentary elections. Two Supreme Court petitions challenging BAA No. 86 — the redistricting law — remain pending, but the elections will almost certainly proceed. The Court will not stop them.
The calendar debate is settled. The question that has not been asked loudly enough: who wins these elections, and what does that mean for the agreement supposed to end this conflict?
The redistricting context
BAA No. 86 matters because district maps shape outcomes. The Supreme Court struck down its predecessor, BAA No. 77, in September 2025 for specific constitutional violations. The BTA had until October 30, 2025 to produce a compliant replacement. They missed that deadline by two and a half months, and when BAA No. 86 finally passed in a marathon session on January 13, 2026, it replicated the same problems: Kapai grouped into a non-contiguous Lanao del Sur district that already met the 100,000-person threshold without it; a fifth district manufactured in Maguindanao del Norte from barangays that could not constitutionally support one; residents of Cotabato City barangays placed in administrative limbo between city jurisdiction and provincial parliamentary voting.
The petitioners are right to challenge these provisions. But even if the Court trims the worst configurations, the underlying intent — tilting the district map toward particular political actors — cannot be fully undone by surgical legal corrections.
Why the question of who wins is the question about peace.
The Bangsamoro conflict did not arise from nothing. It arose from dispossession, from the systematic denial of the right of the Moro people to govern their own lands and lives. The CAB exists to dismantle those structures — specifically, operationally. Full implementation requires actors committed to it. Many of the traditional politicians positioning for September’s elections were opposed to the CAB. Their political interests align structurally against its implementation.
Start with decommissioning. The MILF suspended it in July 2025, citing government failures on normalization. An estimated 14,000 combatants and 2,450 weapons remain outside the process. MILF combatants will not allow themselves to be disarmed while traditional politicians — many of whom maintain their own armed groups — retain their weapons and power. Asking one side to lay down arms while the other stays armed is not normalization. It is unilateral surrender. A Bangsamoro parliament dominated by traditional politicians would not restore confidence in the normalization track. It would confirm what the suspension already signals: that the peace process is being managed against the MILF, not with it.
The problem compounds when you look at land. A core element of the CAB’s transitional justice framework concerns the historical dispossession of Bangsamoro communities — who took what, and whether it can be addressed. The TJRC Land Report is unsparing on this point: dispossession was not only the work of Christian settlers and outside elites. Certain Moro leaders and elites also secured titles to large tracts of land, actively engaged in land grabbing, and in some documented cases deliberately triggered rido — clan feuds — as instruments of dispossession, using horizontal conflict to clear land and consolidate control. The establishment of the ARMM compounded this by creating what the sources describe as a “new set of Moro elite” who accumulated large landholdings while holding political office. If September’s elections deliver the Bangsamoro parliament to the same class of traditional politicians, the BARMM will follow the same script — producing not self-determination for Bangsamoro communities, but another round of elite accumulation under a new institutional name. The politicians competing for seats in September are not neutral parties to a reckoning about land. A transitional justice process that reaches its intended depth will implicate some of them directly. They will not fund the mechanisms, appoint the commissioners, or legislate the mandates that a genuine process requires. Those provisions will be staffed minimally and left to expire.
Underneath both failures is something more fundamental. Traditional politicians in Mindanao have long operated as brokers between their constituents and Manila — mediating access to resources, contracts, and political favor in exchange for loyalty. Genuine autonomy threatens that model. A Bangsamoro parliament that actually exercises its fiscal and legislative powers — that negotiates with Manila as a partner rather than a supplicant — reduces the value of the broker function. These politicians would rather govern as junior partners of Malacañang than fight for the self-determination the CAB promised. They have every structural incentive to preserve dependence, not dismantle it.
What is at stake on the ground
The 2026 Bangsamoro budget is ₱114.7 billion. Internal revenue is less than ₱500 million. In a region where decades of conflict have left the private sector thin, the government is the economy. Control of the regional parliament means control of contracts, employment, services, opportunity. When elections are that zero-sum, the factions that lose do not concede and prepare for the next cycle. They calculate whether the democratic path still serves them.
This is the pattern that precedes relapse in post-conflict transitions. Elections held before political agreements are solid do not settle contests. They crystallize them.
What must happen before September
The national government, especially OPAPRU, must stay out of the BARMM elections. Every credible signal of Manila’s preference for particular candidates — through administrative decisions or the direction of public resources toward favored actors — delegitimizes the outcome before the first vote is cast. President Marcos must make this choice deliberately and visibly.
COMELEC must operate without political direction. Its independence in BARMM is not a procedural nicety. It is the minimum condition for results the losing side accepts.
The use of government resources in the campaign must be actively constrained, not just prohibited on paper. The gap between BARMM’s budget and its internal revenues makes the incumbent advantage structural. International partners should name this explicitly in their engagement.
IFIs, bilateral donors, and diplomatic missions invested in this peace process should fund independent election monitoring. They witnessed the CAB being signed. They have standing to insist that the elections implementing it are credible.
The closing question
The September 2026 elections will produce BARMM’s first parliament. Whether that parliament has the will and the mandate to implement the CAB — or whether it becomes an institution that manages the Bangsamoro while quietly shelving the agreement’s most transformative commitments — depends on who wins.
The Bangsamoro people have waited since 2022 for this vote. They are owed elections that decide something real about their future, not just about who controls the budget.
(MindaViews is the opinion section of MindaNews. Camilo “Bong” Montesa of Cagayan de Oro is a lawyer and professor based in Pasig City. He has spent three decades in conflict and peacebuilding work in the Philippines.)
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