2025-05-19
The Commission on Elections on Monday proclaimed 52 party-list groups as winners in the Philippines' 2025 national and local elections, but it stopped short of completing the full roster it had initially expected to announce. The body said proclamations for Duterte Youth and Bagong Henerasyon were suspended because both groups still face pending disqualification cases, leaving four seats unresolved in the new House of Representatives.
The proclamation came at Manila Hotel Tent City and brought the formal count closer to completion after the May 12 vote. Comelec had been preparing to name 54 party-list winners, but the legal status of the two suspended groups prevented the commission from sealing the last part of the list. The result leaves the House party-list composition partly settled, but not fully finalised, until the separate cases are resolved.
The numbers show how significant the party-list race remains in shaping the next Congress. Akbayan, the leading party-list group in the vote, will receive three seats, alongside Tingog, which also secured three. The commission's list also included several groups earning two seats each, such as 4Ps, ACT-CIS, Ako Bicol, USWAG-llonggo and others that crossed the threshold for multiple House slots. Smaller blocs will enter with one seat, but the overall picture is that the party-list vote will continue to influence legislative bargaining once the 20th Congress convenes.
The unresolved proclamations are notable because they are tied not to vote totals alone but to separate legal proceedings. That means the commission is not merely finalising a tally; it is navigating how election results interact with disqualification challenges that can still alter representation. In practical terms, the outstanding cases keep a small but important slice of House membership open while the legal process runs its course.
The event also underscores how central the party-list system has become to Philippine electoral politics. Designed to give sectoral and underrepresented groups a direct route into Congress, the system now regularly produces contests with national consequence. In this case, the commission's announcement immediately confirms the bulk of the winners while leaving enough uncertainty to keep attention on the two suspended groups and on whatever the disqualification rulings may still change.
For now, the confirmed outcome is straightforward: 52 party-list groups were proclaimed, two were put on hold, and four seats remain unresolved. The rest will depend on what the pending cases decide next.
The unresolved cases will keep attention on how the commission handles the final seat math in the next Congress. If the suspensions are lifted or the disqualifications are upheld, the balance inside the party-list bloc could still shift, which is why the proclamation was only a partial close to the election story rather than the final word.
Because the suspension covers a three-seat bloc and a one-seat bloc, the final party-list arithmetic still matters for the shape of committee work and House alliances. Even without those proclamations, the commission's announcement gives parties a clearer sense of how the next Congress will look, while also keeping pressure on the pending cases to reach a legal conclusion that can settle the last four unresolved seats.
