Ethiopia Heads To The Polls As Abiy Ahmed Eyes Another Term

Ethiopians trooped out to vote on Monday in parliamentary elections that are widely expected to deliver another landslide for Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed and his Prosperity Party (PP).

Abiy, who has been at the helm of Africa’s second most populous nation since 2018, has faced mounting criticism over what many describe as a drift toward authoritarianism and an increasingly hostile stance toward dissent.

The trajectory stands in sharp contrast to his earlier years in office, when he earned the Nobel Peace Prize for restoring diplomatic ties with neighbouring Eritrea.

Both opposition parties and independent analysts warn that this election is shaping up to be more restrictive than any before it.

With the opposition in disarray and the country embroiled in multiple internal conflicts fuelled by ethnic tensions, the conditions for meaningful political contest appear severely limited.

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Analysts at the Chatham House think tank, Ahmed Soliman and Abel Abate Demissie, described the vote as “likely to be among the least competitive of the seven national elections held since multiparty democracy was introduced in 1991.”

The scale of the ruling party’s dominance is hard to overstate, Abiy’s PP swept 96 percent of parliamentary seats in the last elections held in 2021.

Ahead of Monday’s vote, opposition parties are stretched thin, divided across more than 40 factions and starved of financial resources.

In dozens of constituencies across the country, PP candidates are standing entirely unopposed.

Voting commenced at 6 am local time (0300 GMT) with polls set to close at 6 pm.

More than 50 million eligible voters were expected to participate across 48,000 polling stations spread throughout the country.

A member of the national electoral commission (NEBE) told AFP that “certain conditions could extend this timeframe by a few hours,” without elaborating further.

Official results are not expected until around ten days after polls close.

The northern Tigray region is sitting out the election entirely, a consequence of unresolved tensions between regional and federal authorities.

More than a million people remain displaced following the brutal civil war that ravaged the region between 2020 and 2022.

Chatham House painted a bleak picture of political participation, noting that “many challengers to the ruling PP will not contest the elections.

Some are in exile, some are banned, some are imprisoned, and many may see little incentive to abandon their armed struggle against the government.

This severely constrained political landscape and election process at best resembles an elite bargain.”

Ethiopia’s economy, meanwhile, continues to be a rare point of optimism, the country is forecast by the International Monetary Fund to record growth exceeding nine percent this year, placing it among the fastest-growing economies in the world.

Yet serious security challenges persist.

In Amhara state, home to an estimated 20 million people, Fano nationalist militias have engaged in sustained clashes with federal troops and threatened to disrupt the voting process.

Despite this, the National Election Board cancelled polling in only eight of the region’s 137 constituencies.

Further south, the Board maintained that voting would proceed across the entire Oromia region which covers a third of the country even as Oromia Liberation Army rebels have continued operations there since 2018.

The election is being observed by missions from the African Union, which is headquartered in Addis Ababa, as well as the East African regional bloc IGAD.

Notably absent, however, are European Union observers, the Ethiopian government rejected an EU offer to send a monitoring delegation, according to a source within the bloc.