Quo vadis, BARMM? (2)
Cotabato City—In June 2022, a new president assumed office after former President Rodrigo Duterte ended his term. President Marcos was elected together with his then UniTeam running mate, Sara Duterte, who assumed the position of Vice President.
This could have sent shivers down the spine of Moro leaders who were at the forefront of the armed struggle against the draconian policies of the elder Marcos.
It was through the elder Marcos’ ironclad martial law regime that victimized thousands of Bangsamoro men, women, and children in several massacres; burning of houses; gender-based violence; and other massive human rights violations, including marginalization through land dispossession.
But the former rebel leaders, now turned high-ranking regional government officials, had to come to terms with the results of the national presidential election then despite reported irregularities like massive vote buying and ballot-shading.
With a Marcos-led national government came new appointees to the Bangsamoro Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao (BARMM) interim Parliament as some appointed members became local government officials in that year’s local elections. Some were also removed in favor of new appointees courtesy of local and regional interlocutors peddling the avowed “virtues” of new appointees, many of whom were either relatives or close friends of powerful political families in the region. Expectedly, these families had close ties to the Marcoses not only in the present but also in the past, as they were part of the elder Marcos’ local martial law enablers and complicit government officials.
Fast forward to 2026, after the historic first regular Bangsamoro Parliamentary Elections last Sept. 14.
As of this writing, the top two regional political parties that garnered the two highest numbers of seats in the regular Parliament are still engaged in several competitive political schemes to create a coalition that translates to having majority members—enough for this coalition to elect the region’s top officials. These are the Bangsamoro Federalist Party (BFP) and the United Bangsamoro Justice Party (UBJP), the political party of the Moro Islamic Liberation Front.
BFP got 31 seats, while UBJP got 30. Not one of them had a majority of the seats. In a parliamentary government, a political party must get a majority of the seats to entitle it to choose from among them the top officials of the region. This required each of them to create a coalition with political parties that got only 15 or fewer votes.
Given presidential support, including pecuniary and political leverage and future access to both regional development funds and a regional version of the national pork barrel, the BFP held an ace over the UBJP in their respective efforts toward creating a coalition of the region’s political parties. Earlier, the UBJP wanted to have a “rainbow coalition” but this did not materialize.
The new BFP-led coalition is composed of political parties organized by traditional politicians. These are leaders of political fiefdoms in provinces comprising the region, with their siblings, sons and daughters, and other relatives as local political bosses. Provinces in the region are bailiwicks of both deep and fat political dynasties that have existed for more than three generations that consider government positions as family heirlooms.
These have been the realities of local government political dynamics then and now.
With some members of these dynasties among the elected members of the regular Parliament, will deep structural challenges like unstable peace and order; rampant violations of the rule of law; patronage politics; and serious fiscal anomalies that have been reported but for which nobody has been held accountable—among others—be addressed?
These realities do not bode well for BARMM constituents, especially those who have been marginalized even before the creation of the region. Their marginalization continues until the present.
Moreover, in a parliamentary government where the legislative and executive functions merge, it will be quite challenging to create an independent body that is able to audit how funds are disbursed when the lawmakers themselves are also heads of offices that disburse the funds.
Local and regional political dynamics have shown that the pecuniary sway is quite seductive and overwhelming, enough for formerly judicious and straightforward government officials to cave in, with a rationalization of “my hands were tied.”
Was it worth creating an asymmetrical form of government to rectify national historical injustices against the Bangsamoro? Will the impoverished and marginalized sectors in the region finally feel the difference between a regular parliamentary government and what they had in the past?
Where is this region going? Quo vadis, BARMM?
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