Voters in the Philippines’ only Muslim-majority region were to go to the polls Oct. 13 to choose the first-ever delegates to their parliament, a body established in 2019 to bring a measure of self-government to the Bangsa Moro (or Moro Nation) in the southwest of the island of Mindanao. The parliament’s creation was a pillar of the 2014 peace agreement that ended the government’s 40-year civil war with a revolutionary movement that fought for independence but ultimately settled for a semi-autonomous jurisdiction to which Manila has devolved extensive powers and resources.
But just two weeks before voting day, Bangsamoro residents were informed that the elections were being postponed until March 2026. Given the Philippines’ history of strongman rule and attempted coups, as well as recent speculation concerning undue military influence in politics, it was reassuring to learn the postponement had not been ordered by either President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. or the armed forces’ chief of staff.
It came instead from the Supreme Court. A lawsuit filed by local politicians claimed the method for apportioning parliamentary districts in the Bangsamoro was unlawful and unconstitutional. The court agreed, invalidating the relevant law and directing the body charged with drawing the electoral map to pass a new law by Oct. 30, this time with due regard for geographic contiguity and municipal borders.
The body in question is the Bangsamoro Transition Authority (BTA), the interim government of the six-year-old Bangsamoro Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao (BARMM), consisting of 80 members appointed by the Philippines president, with an interim Chief Minister serving in the executive role. In 2019, in accordance with the terms of the peace deal, the former rebels of the Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF) were placed in charge of the BTA. Their primary task was to formulate foundational laws – or “codes” – covering such matters as how the BARMM civil service would be organized, how local tax revenues would be shared, and how the rights of women and indigenous groups would be safeguarded.
The Bangsamoro Electoral Code, unsurprisingly, proved to be the most contentious agenda item facing the rebels-turned-legislators. In 2022, when the MILF’s three-year term was almost over, the electoral code still had not been passed. MILF leaders claimed the Covid-19 pandemic had prevented them from completing the code and seeing to other aspects of the transition. This was a dubious excuse, especially since the MILF-led administration had devoted a good deal of its scarce legislative resources to far less-essential matters such as establishing a Sports Commission. Without an election law, the parliamentary elections scheduled for May 2022 could not be held.
Elections were rescheduled for May 2025, and voters were told the delay would permit the building of a stronger foundation for peace and democracy by giving the MILF more time for the transition from revolutionary movement to political party. In effect, the national government rewarded the MILF for its tardiness with another three years in charge of the BARMM (and its $1.8 billion annual budget).
In March 2023, the MILF-run transitional administration finally adopted the Bangsamoro electoral code, and in May 2024 passed a law delineating the parliament’s geographic constituencies. By August 2024, new regional parties, including the MILF’s United Bangsamoro Justice Party (UBJP), had registered with the election commission and named their candidates. The official campaign period had not yet begun, but party leaders had already started shoring up support among local officials.
Suspicious Timing
It was then, in September 2024, just as the parliamentary elections appeared finally to be on the horizon, that the Supreme Court made its first intervention in the Bangsamoro electoral process. It upheld a petition claiming that one of the BARMM’s eight constituent parts, the island province of Sulu, should never have come under the region’s jurisdiction. The 2019 referendum on whether to join the BARMM had been administered in a way that invalidated Sulu’s accession, the court held. An integral part of the Bangsamoro, central to claims of historical Moro nationhood, would no longer be part of the region, despite having operated within it for the previous five years. The court’s ruling was more than just a technical redrawing of administrative boundaries: it upended the terms of a negotiated settlement through which the government had resolved an armed conflict that killed 120,000 people and displaced millions.
The court’s decision to remove Sulu from the BARMM appeared to have been based on sound legal reasoning. What made it suspect in the eyes of many observers was its timing. The lawsuit had been filed more than five years earlier. Courts in the Philippines, as elsewhere, can move slowly. But when faced with an urgent matter of constitutional importance, especially one involving institutional arrangements on which governmental and other actors must be able to rely, such as whether a province is rightfully part of a specially created jurisdiction, the court can (and does) act much more quickly. An excellent example of judicial alacrity was in fact the aforementioned Supreme Court ruling from September 2025 that postponed parliamentary elections until early 2026: it was issued within weeks of a case being filed.
But the September 2024 order that removed Sulu from the BARMM was suspicious not just because it took five years for the case to be decided, but because of the political context in which the ruling was, without warning, issued. At the time, the MILF’s prospects for the May 2025 parliamentary elections appeared grim. A formidable alliance of traditional clan leaders from the region, who support autonomy but distrust the MILF’s designs on their political turf, had been formed. Their Bangsamoro Grand Coalition was expected to dominate the parliamentary elections.
During June and July 2024, leaders from these longstanding political dynasties claimed to have been pressured by presidential surrogates to forge electoral alliances with the MILF. Among the reported coercive tactics were threats of investigations into the financial affairs of the local government units they controlled. It was only after these heavy-handed tactics failed that the Supreme Court order removing Sulu from the BARMM materialized. The ruling had the effect of depriving these very same traditional politicians of one of their main electoral strongholds. Without Sulu’s parliamentary seats, the “Grand Coalition” looked decidedly less grand — and less likely to win a parliamentary majority. Some clan politicians eventually allied with the MILF.
This all represented a remarkably fortuitous turn of events for the MILF as well as for President Marcos, whose party went on to form an electoral alliance with the MILF. And it was all made possible by the Supreme Court. Few observers think a presidential administration can force the court to rule in its favor on any matter it chooses. But affecting a decision’s timing is considered not necessarily beyond the capabilities of a president willing to deploy informal influence as well as the office’s formal powers. Over the past 15 years, the court’s independence has been undermined by both liberal and populist presidents. Public trust has suffered accordingly: in 2020, the chief justice had the lowest approval rating, by far, among the five most important national offices (including president, vice-president, house speaker, and senate president). By 2023, under a new chief justice, public approval of the office was even lower.
Sulu’s court-ordered removal from the BARMM in September 2024 provided an excuse for Manila to postpone the elections a second time — from May to October 2025. The extra five months was ostensibly to give the MILF-led (but still never-elected) administration time to amend or replace the law delineating the region’s parliamentary constituencies. Sulu’s seven seats had to be reallocated among the BARMM’s remaining provinces before elections could be held.
Marcos’ Calculations
The delay suited Marcos in part because he was eager to prevent a recurrence of armed conflict. Analysts have considered an upswing of organized violence a distinct possibility if the MILF were to lose the elections and get shut completely out of power, though some see this as too pessimistic.
Keeping the peace process at least nominally on track is central to Marcos Jr’s preoccupation with rehabilitating his family’s image. He claims to be completing a project of national reconciliation initiated by his father, Ferdinand Marcos Sr, whose martial law government did sign the first-ever peace agreement with Moro revolutionaries, in 1977, but only after provoking the war in the first place and prosecuting it with the ruthlessness that characterized his regime. As part of the Philippines’ current bid for a two-year term on the United Nations Security Council, the late dictator’s son has, in recent speeches to the U.N. General Assembly, trumpeted the country’s success in resolving the Bangsamoro civil war through a negotiated settlement that, unlike most peace agreements, has survived for more than a decade after it was signed. It would be very bad optics for the Marcos Jr administration if the peace process were to suddenly break down on his watch.
To no one’s surprise, the MILF-led administration did not use the extra five months it was given to carefully redraw the parliamentary districts so that Sulu’s seven seats were reassigned in conformity with prevailing law. Instead, a perfunctorily drafted bill distributed one seat to each of the BARMM’s remaining seven provinces, despite their widely varying populations. No systematic procedure was followed when re-drawing the district boundaries. The law was passed after the deadline set by the election commission, five days into the official campaigning period.
It is almost as if MILF leaders intentionally crafted legislation that could not possibly withstand legal challenge, expecting that a court-ordered postponement of the elections would buy them even more time to consolidate their political bases.
This most recent court-ordered election postponement was politically convenient for President Marcos, too. In early 2025, the outcome of the election had become more unpredictable than ever and the potential for election-related violence was considered extremely high. The president’s office nevertheless downplayed the significance of this latest delay, labeling it a “pivotal step toward constitutional order” in the war-torn region.
To be fair, postponing regional elections for a few months hardly seems a major infraction given the scale and brazenness of the electoral abuses perpetrated by other regimes. But only if we ignore the larger pattern: elections to the Bangsamoro Parliament, were, under the 2014 peace agreement’s timeframe, supposed to take place in 2019; legislative delays in Manila meant they had to be put off until 2022, and then (as we have seen) a series of avoidable “crises” delayed them until May 2025, October 2025, and as of this writing, March 2026.
These postponements are particularly discouraging if one takes seriously the statements made over the years by government and MILF leaders to the effect that lasting peace can be built only on a foundation of democracy, human rights, and the rule of law. Despite these rhetorical commitments to the principles of “liberal peacebuilding,” neither the MILF nor the national political actors with which it engages wants to contest an election whose outcome they cannot control. Both, moreover, are willing to subvert democratic norms and institutions to avoid having to do so.
The Risk of Renewed Violence
The two most recent delays, both in 2025, are also the most troubling because they reveal the perilous state of the Bangsamoro peace process and the real possibility of a return to widespread violence. One reason the Marcos administration welcomed last month’s court-ordered election postponement was that it knew the MILF was in severe danger of undergoing a major split. It knew this because it was the administration’s own officials who had driven a wedge between the movement’s leaders.
In March 2025, the government unilaterally announced it was replacing the BARMM’s interim chief minister, longtime MILF Chairman Murad Ebrahim (known as Murad), who had been in office since the BARMM’s inception in 2019, with Abdulraof Macacua, who had been Murad’s successor as the MILF’s military chief and served in a number of official roles during the transition. Murad and some of the senior leaders around him were reportedly seen as less willing than Macacua to reach an accommodation with the traditional clan politicians that Marcos’s advisors had been trying to lure into an alliance with the MILF.
Senior officials also reportedly were fed up with Murad’s negotiating team, whose leading members would not authorize steps that would allow the peace process to be declared formally concluded, despite the government’s non-fulfillment of important outstanding commitments. For instance, little to no action has been taken to establish a truth and reconciliation commission or to disband the private militia maintained by the traditional clan leaders who MILF leaders have good reason to fear.
Though the MILF’s governing body immediately rejected Manila’s unilateral appointment of Macacua, Murad stepped down quietly. But just before this month’s planned election, Murad let it be known that his removal from office had been involuntary, leading to questions about whether Macacua conspired with the president’s advisors to oust his boss, or if not, why organizational discipline and revolutionary solidarity did not lead him to reject Manila’s offer to appoint him chief minister, and to publicly reassert the right of the MILF’s central committee to choose its own nominees for leadership positions.
As interim chief minister, Macacua continues to pledge loyalty to Murad as MILF chairman, but he has also forced out BARMM officials considered close to his predecessor. A raft of recent corruption investigations have targeted BARMM officials associated with Murad’s faction of the MILF – possibly with Macacua’s silent assent even when, technically, they are initiated and conducted by national government agencies. More recently, financial decisions taken during Murad’s tenure have come under intense scrutiny and even received indirect mention by his successor, another sign that scores are being settled and potential rivals neutralized.
It is not clear how far down into the MILF organization these kinds of factional divisions extend or, crucially, whether they have affected the MILF’s armed forces. Worrying signs have emerged, such as the suspension in September of a prominent MILF commander. There is enormous potential for renewed violence in the region should the emerging fault-lines in the MILF prompt either a definitive split or a protracted leadership struggle in which commanders would be forced to choose sides. A non-specific statement of support for the MILF leadership issued by most but not all MILF commanders soon after Macacua was appointed was meant to be reassuring but felt ominous to some observers. Academic research on the durability of post-civil war peace agreements has found that when rebel movements fragment, a recurrence of armed conflict is common, as enforcing commitments agreed by non-state parties becomes increasingly difficult and spoilers emerge.
The political violence that is endemic in the Bangsamoro region provides a steady supply of dry tinder. The recent beheading of an indigenous leader, who had resisted encroachment on tribal lands by powerful local politicians, was only the most gruesome example. There have been more than 100 killings of activists from indigenous communities since 2019. Drive-by assassinations of candidates for office and of BARMM administrators, from all communities, are a common occurrence. Extended gun and artillery battles between the police and MILF fighters have occurred in recent years. A deadly 2015 encounter that led to the deaths of dozens of police officers and MILF fighters came close to derailing the peace process.
These hazards are on top of the security threats posed by local organized crime rackets, some of which reportedly receive protection from freelancing MILF members, and by the many violent-extremist groups that operate in the region. In 2017, ISIS-inspired terrorists seized control of Marawi, the Bangsamoro region’s leading city of Islamic culture. The five-month military operation to retake the city and round up the perpetrators of this audacious attack was another blow that the peace agreement somehow survived.
Overconfidence in the Peace Process?
These examples of resilience may be breeding overconfidence among stakeholders about how much strain even a well-institutionalized peace process can withstand. The precariousness of the situation was underscored this summer when ousted Chief Minister Murad instructed MILF military units to cease cooperating with the peace agreement’s decommissioning program. While 26,000 MILF combatants had been processed, another 14,000 are still scheduled to be decommissioned. The MILF, it should be noted, retains a network of operational “base commands” and a number of large, heavily guarded camps from which government forces are normally excluded. Suspension of decommissioning is the MILF’s remaining point of leverage against what it perceives as the government’s failure to fulfill its obligations.
The Supreme Court gave the MILF-led transitional administration until Oct. 30 to devise a new parliamentary-districts law. This deadline is widely seen as unlikely to be met. The only action so far has been a bill proposed by non-MILF members of the transitional administration.
The impression that, despite its pledge to respect regional “autonomy,” the national government is not only interfering in Bangsamoro politics but meddling in the internal affairs of the MILF itself, can potentially delegitimize the entire peace process and fuel renewed armed conflict. The chief minister’s recent insistence that Manila does not control his administration indicates the extent of the skepticism he faces. If the promise of devolved self-government is perceived to be stage-managed from Manila, the numerous extremist groups in the BARMM who reject the peace deal will find it easier to recruit among the region’s vast reservoir of disillusioned youth. If that begins to happen on a large scale, it may be peace, too, and not just democracy, that is sacrificed.
