Ethiopia’s election was meant to be the crowning moment for Nobel Peace Prize-winning Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed, a popular recognition of his efforts to break open one of Africa’s most entrenched one-party states and liberalize its tightly controlled economy.
Instead, the country of 110 million people headed to the polls Monday in turmoil, fighting a bloody civil war in the northern province of Tigray and escalating ethnic uprisings elsewhere that are reverberating across the strategic Horn of Africa region.
Voting in the election, already delayed by a year due the coronavirus pandemic, won’t take place in one-fifth of Ethiopia’s 547 electoral districts, due to violence or logistical problems. While some regional votes have been scheduled for September, there is no prospect for ballots being cast in Tigray, where Ethiopian forces are fighting alongside troops from neighboring Eritrea against separatist militias resisting more centralized control. International observers, including U.S. officials, have reported atrocities and an expanding famine. In the Oromia region that surrounds the capital, Addis Ababa, opposition parties are boycotting the vote, citing repression of its candidates and supporters by Mr. Ahmed’s new Prosperity Party.
Prosperity, which Mr. Ahmed formed from the Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Democratic Front that ruled the country for three decades, will almost certainly come first once results are announced over the next month—although it might fall short of the 100% of parliamentary seats the EPRDF won in 2015. The prime minister, who won international plaudits for releasing thousands of political prisoners after rising to power in 2018 and was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize the following year, has described the vote as Ethiopia’s “first attempt at free and fair elections” that will help create a more unitary state to replace ethnic federalism.
But many observers fear that the election has unleashed the opposite: deepening violent conflicts within Ethiopia and generating volatility across a fragile geography perched next to some of the world’s most vital shipping lanes. Long an anchor of stability in the Horn of Africa, Addis Ababa is also now in an increasingly tense standoff with Egypt over a dam it is building on the Nile River and Sudan over a disputed border section.
