Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed’s Prosperity Party won another large parliamentary majority in this month’s elections, results released by the national election board on Sunday showed.
Abiy, whose party had been widely expected to dominate the elections against a fragmented opposition, was appointed in 2018 following mass protests against the long-ruling EPRDF coalition. He created the Prosperity Party the following year.
Abiy’s party won 438 seats, roughly 90% of those for which results were announced at a ceremony broadcast on Facebook. It needed 274 to secure a majority.
Not all the lower house of parliament’s 547 seats were up for grabs, as voting did not happen in the Tigray region and some parts of Amhara.
At the last elections in 2021 the Prosperity Party won a similar percentage of the available seats.
ABIY HAS CONSOLIDATED POWER DESPITE INSURGENCIES
The Prosperity Party replaced an often unwieldy multi-party coalition that governed Ethiopia for more than a quarter-century and has helped Abiy, 49, to consolidate his grip on national politics even as he has faced violent opposition in some of the country’s largest regions.
Prosperity Party candidates this time touted improved food security and strong economic growth in Africa’s second-most populous country that officials forecast will top 10% in 2026, one of the fastest rates on the continent.
More than 50 million people were registered to vote, but there was no election in the northern Tigray region, where organisers had cited “unfavourable conditions” in the aftermath of a two-year civil war and amid continuing political turmoil.
The government also faces insurgencies in the country’s two biggest regions, connected to grievances among different ethnic groups about alleged marginalisation within Ethiopia’s federal system.
NO VOTING IN SOME PARTS OF COUNTRY
In Abiy’s native Oromiya in the south, fighting between government forces and the Oromo Liberation Army separatist group has killed hundreds of people in the past few years.
In neighbouring Amhara, a militia known as Fano has captured swathes of the countryside since 2023. As a result, voting did not take place in at least eight of Amhara’s 138 constituencies.
Though a 2022 peace deal ended the civil war in Tigray, which researchers say caused hundreds of thousands of deaths, a move last month by the main political party there to reassert control over the region’s political administration led Ethiopian officials and analysts to warn of the risk of fresh unrest.
Opposition parties accuse the federal government of undermining them by arresting their leaders and imposing legal roadblocks to their political activities, charges denied by the government.
Reporters has not been able to report from inside Ethiopia since mid-February, when the Ethiopian Media Authority declined to renew the accreditation for its three Addis Ababa-based journalists.
(Reporting by Nairobi Newsroom; )
