Ethiopia holds parliamentary and regional elections on Monday that analysts expect Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed's party to win by a large margin, despite significant unrest across much of the country.
More than 50 million of Ethiopia's 135 million people are registered for the elections, in which voters will choose the 547 members of the House of People's Representatives, the lower house of the Federal Parliament. Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed, 49, is confident of victory. He was appointed in 2018 following mass protests against the long-ruling EPRDF coalition, and on taking office moved to liberalise Ethiopia's tightly controlled economy and freed journalists, activists and other political prisoners. He won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2019 for ending hostilities with neighbouring Eritrea. His Prosperity Party won 410 out of 484 seats in parliament in the 2021 elections. Ethiopia election overshadowed by war, instability and muted opposition Prosperity Party candidates have campaigned on the government's economic record, citing improved food security and economic growth in Africa's second most populous country. Ethiopia's economy is expected to grow by 7.8 per cent in 2025-26 and 8.5 per cent in 2026-27, according to the African Development Bank. "It is obvious that the PP will win these elections," an expert working for ACLED on the Horn of Africa told RFI, on condition of anonymity. "The elections were also much more open in 2021, and even more so in 2005, the most democratic polls in the history of Ethiopia so far." One region excluded The country is voting without participation from the northern Tigray region, where the electoral board has cited "unfavourable conditions" following a civil war from 2020 to 2022 and continuing political turmoil. More than 750,000 people remain displaced by the war. "Organising an election remains impossible in Tigray," Muauz Gidey, a researcher at the Tigray Institute of Political Studies, told RFI's correspondent in Addis Ababa, "due to an extremely degraded security context and the collapse of the political system."
