The Bangsamoro Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao (BARMM), a predominantly Muslim autonomous region in the southern Philippines, held its first-ever parliamentary election on Monday, marking a historic milestone in a decades-long peace process that cost more than 150,000 lives and left the country's poorest region mired in conflict and underdevelopment.

The election, which had been postponed at least four times since 2022, saw voters across five provinces, three cities and 63 villages choose representatives for 80 seats in a newly formed regional parliament. Turnout was expected to reach 80%, with nearly 2.4 million registered voters participating. The region's chief minister — who heads the executive branch — will subsequently be chosen by parliament in its first session. The vote stems from a 2014 peace agreement in which the Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF), the largest Muslim rebel group in the region, abandoned its decades-long goal of an independent Muslim state in the south of the largely Roman Catholic Philippines in exchange for meaningful self-governance. The group's roughly 40,000 fighters agreed to demobilise and reintegrate into civilian life.

The election was largely peaceful, though not without incident. Four people died in election-related violence: three were killed and 15 wounded in a shooting in Cotabato City late Sunday, and one more person died following a disturbance at a polling station in the same city on Monday. Supporters of one political party also damaged vehicles belonging to a rival candidate. On Basilan Island, the town of Maluso required intervention after pre-shaded ballots were found in 36 of 68 precincts, prompting election authorities to order ballot reprinting and delay voting there. More than 20,000 soldiers and police were deployed across the region to ensure security. Early results showed that MILF-aligned candidates performed strongly, with former Maguindanao del Norte vice governor Abdulnasser Maliga Abas, running under the MILF's United Bangsamoro Justice Party, among the first candidates proclaimed as winners.

The significance of Monday's vote is difficult to overstate. Since the 1970s, Mindanao — the large southern island grouping that forms the heart of the Bangsamoro region — was a battlefield between government forces and multiple insurgent groups. A 2017 siege of Marawi City by Islamic State-linked militants triggered five months of devastating urban warfare that killed more than 1,100 people and reduced much of the city to rubble. Western and Asian governments long feared the conflict could serve as a breeding ground for Islamist extremism in Southeast Asia. The successful conduct of these elections, however imperfect, represents a tangible test of whether the institutions built over the past seven years of transitional governance can deliver the self-determination that generations of Bangsamoro people have sought. As one young voter in Marawi put it: "Whoever wins, hopefully we will see change. Hopefully they can implement their promises."