12 | Beyond power, politics, and 41 votes, building a governing coalition in BARMM
The post-election context of a fractured, multi-party Bangsamoro Parliament demand an effective coalition building as a process where competing political parties and independent or sectoral representatives negotiate a stable governing arrangement based on shared policy priorities, mutual commitments, inclusive representation, and mechanisms for managing political disagreements.
Evidently, the first regular Bangsamoro parliamentary election has produced a fragmented political landscape in which no single party or bloc commands the 41 seats needed to control the 80-member Parliament. The Bangsamoro Federalist Party (BFP) emerged with 31 seats, followed by the United Bangsamoro Justice Party (UBJP) with 30 and the BARMM Grand Coalition (BGC) with 15, leaving the smaller parties and sectoral representatives with the remaining seats.
This configuration makes coalition-building unavoidable.
The political process will be more than assembling the 41 votes required to elect a Chief Minister. For it to be effective, the coalition must also reconcile competing political interests while protecting the institutional gains of the peace process and create sufficient political stability to complete outstanding commitments under the Comprehensive Agreement on the Bangsamoro (CAB).
This is particularly important because a fragmented Parliament creates a situation in which no single political party can govern alone, making negotiation and compromise ineluctable and irresistible. Coalition building therefore involves identifying areas of common interest among parties that may have competed against one another during the election and converting those interests into a shared governing program. Rather than distributing government positions solely as political rewards, an effective coalition should establish agreed priorities for peace-process implementation, normalization, socioeconomic development, public-service delivery, institutional reform and accountable governance. The coalition should also provide political space for parties that remain outside government to perform their parliamentary oversight functions.
In the Bangsamoro setting, effective coalition building rest on five interconnected principles: inclusion, policy coherence, mutual commitment, accountability and durability. Inclusion means ensuring that coalition arrangements reflect the region's political, geographic and sectoral diversity. Policy coherence requires the coalition partners to agree on a limited but clearly defined governing agenda. Mutual commitment connotes that participating parties accept both the benefits and responsibilities of governing rather than treating coalition membership simply as access to positions. Accountability requires transparent decision-making, parliamentary oversight and mechanisms to prevent coalition agreements from becoming purely transactional. Durability requires procedures for resolving disagreements and maintaining cooperation when political interests inevitably diverge.
Thus, coalition building must be understood as an extension of peacebuilding into democratic politics. The transition from an armed conflict environment to electoral competition does not eliminate political divisions; it changes the mechanism through which those divisions are managed. Effective coalition can help institutionalize this transition by ensuring that political competition takes place through negotiation, legislation and parliamentary oversight rather than destabilizing confrontation.
Its teleology therefore is not merely to produce a government that can command a parliamentary majority, but to create a stable, inclusive and accountable governing partnership capable of advancing the remaining peace-process commitments and building sustainable Bangsamoro self-government.
The inter and intra-party negotiations should therefore go beyond simply assembling the 41 votes needed to elect a Chief Minister and instead focus on building a governing coalition capable of sustaining the peace process and delivering effective governance. Coalition theory suggests that a narrow "minimum winning coalition" may be sufficient to control Parliament, but a post-conflict society such as BARMM requires a broader and more durable political compact that provides legitimacy, representation and stability. The BGC's 15 seats give it considerable bargaining influence because either of the two major blocs could potentially reach a parliamentary majority with its support, but its role should not be reduced to that of a "kingmaker"; it could instead become an important bridge between competing political forces and help establish a more inclusive governing arrangement.
The coalition-building process therefore must be connected directly to the three broad dimensions of the Bangsamoro transition: political consolidation, normalization and governance. The political track has now moved into an elected parliamentary phase, with the 80 members scheduled to assume office on October 30 and elect the region's Chief Minister. The normalization track, however, requires continued attention to commitments involving former combatants, security and socioeconomic reintegration, while the governance track requires the new political leadership to demonstrate that autonomous institutions can provide effective, transparent and accountable government. A coalition agreement that explicitly links parliamentary cooperation to these objectives would help prevent the peace process from becoming disconnected from the everyday work of government.
For the coalition to become sustainable, negotiations should shift from office-sharing to policy-sharing. Rather than focusing primarily on the Chief Minister, speakership, ministries and committee positions, the parties should negotiate a written governing compact that establishes common priorities for the first Parliament. Such an agreement could include commitments on completing outstanding elements of the Comprehensive Agreement on the Bangsamoro (CAB), advancing normalization and the reintegration of former combatants, strengthening accountable institutions, improving public services and ensuring inclusive representation of women, youth, indigenous peoples, settlers and other sectors.
This is particularly important because the parliamentary election marks a major step in the political transition from the interim government to elected self-government, but the broader peace process still involves unfinished normalization and governance commitments. A coalition based on a shared program would also reduce the risk that political bargaining becomes primarily transactional, with parties exchanging parliamentary support for positions, resources or patronage.
An integrative bargaining approach would be particularly useful in this environment. Instead of treating political power as a fixed resource in which one party's gain necessarily represents another's loss, competing parties could identify areas where their interests overlap and construct institutional arrangements that allow them to maintain political representation while sharing responsibility for government. Coalition partners could, for example, agree on transparent criteria for ministerial appointments, parliamentary committee leadership, budget priorities and government appointments rather than simply dividing positions among parties. A formal coalition council or similar coordinating mechanism could also help manage disputes, coordinate legislation and monitor implementation of the coalition agreement. Such mechanisms would create credible commitments among political partners and reduce the possibility that every disagreement becomes a threat to the survival of the government.
The greatest challenge will be preventing electoral competition from reproducing the divisions that characterized the political contest. The election has brought competition among factions and political networks into the parliamentary arena, but the purpose of a parliamentary system is to provide institutional mechanisms through which those competing interests can negotiate, compromise and govern peacefully. Coalition-building can therefore become part of the peacebuilding process itself. If political actors establish rules for consultation, dispute resolution, power-sharing and parliamentary accountability, political competition can increasingly be managed through institutions rather than through confrontation outside them. Conversely, if coalition negotiations become dominated by patronage, personality politics and short-term deals, the Parliament could become vulnerable to instability and factional fragmentation.
The first Bangsamoro coalition, therefore, should not be measured simply by whether it produces the 41 votes necessary to elect a Chief Minister. The more consequential test will be whether it can establish structured political pluralism—a system in which competing parties can share responsibility for government while retaining meaningful parliamentary independence and accountability. A durable coalition that has profound understanding of combine inclusive power-sharing with a clear governing program, transparent appointments, parliamentary oversight, sustained implementation of peace-process commitments and mechanisms for resolving disputes. In this sense, the first elected Parliament has an opportunity to demonstrate that the transition from armed conflict to democratic competition is not merely a change in political institutions but a deeper transformation in how political differences are managed. The long-term objective should be a Bangsamoro government in which coalition-building strengthens, rather than undermines, the unfinished work of peace, normalization and sustainable self-governance. 💜
