NAIROBI: Ethiopians will vote in parliamentary and regional elections on Monday that Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed’s party is expected to dominate despite significant unrest across much of Africa’s second most populous country.
Abiy, 49, has consolidated his grip on Ethiopia’s politics since being appointed in 2018 on the heels of mass protests against the long-ruling EPRDF coalition. His newly formed Prosperity Party won a landslide victory in the last elections in 2021, taking 410 seats out of 484 in parliament. But he has faced years of violent unrest in several of the country’s ethnically organized regions, including his native Oromiya, Ethiopia’s largest, and the second-biggest region, Amhara, where a militia known as Fano has seized swathes of the countryside since 2023.
A civil war in the northern Tigray region from 2020-2022, which stemmed from a breakdown in relations between Abiy and the Tigrayan leaders who dominated national politics before his rise, resulted in hundreds of thousands of deaths, researchers say. Though a 2022 peace deal ended the conflict, a move this month by Tigray’s main political party to reassert control over the region’s political administration in violation of the agreement has led Ethiopian officials and analysts to warn of the risk of fresh unrest.
