As Ethiopians voted on Monday in what Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed touted as proof of his unwavering commitment to multiparty democracy, it is difficult to ignore an avalanche of problems that have cast a shadow over the elections.
Most prominent among them is the seven-month war Abiy has been waging in the northern Tigray region against his former comrades, the Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF), which rules the state of roughly 6-million people.
Since the conflict began in November 2020, when Abiy ordered military action in retaliation to what he has described as an attack on an army base by the TPLF, thousands of people have been killed, 2-million have been forced from their homes and 91% of the population are in need of aid.
Consequently, millions of people in Tigray did not vote on Monday.
What’s more, simmering violence elsewhere, including one involving two of the Oromo and Amhara ethnic groups, coupled with delays in voter registration due to widespread security concerns, means voting in a fifth of constituencies will be delayed until September.
Reuters reported that one candidate was contesting the election from jail, enough to put into question Abiy’s assertion that these will be the country’s first free and fair polls after three decades of repressive rule. A cynic would say the incumbent has done what a despot would need to do for guaranteed victory.
Abiy’s pan-Ethiopian Prosperity Party (PP), formed in 2019 by merging groups that made up a coalition of ethnically based political parties that had ruled the country since 1991, is widely expected to win. He is up against a raft of candidates from smaller, ethnically based political parties that analysts say stand no chance of unseating him.
Perhaps the most obvious sign that the election was being run with little competition was that senior leaders of the largest opposition in Oromiya, Ethiopia’s most populous province with more than 40-million people, are in jail and their parties are boycotting the vote. The parties alleged intimidation by regional security forces.
On Sunday, a day before the vote, five opposition parties issued a joint statement saying campaigning outside the capital, Addis Ababa, “has been marred by serious problems, including killings, attempted killings and beatings of candidates”.
It’s true opposition parties could well be seeking to discredit the election because they have little to offer the voters, and would have lost out to Abiy’s PP anyway. But concerns are rightly growing elsewhere in the world about whether the vote would be “the nation’s first free and fair elections”, as proclaimed by Abiy last week.
Amnesty International has said the government was still quashing dissent using a revised antiterrorism law and new hate speech legislation that can lead to prison terms for online content.
Last week the US state department expressed grave concerns about the environment under which the elections are being held, citing detention of opposition politicians, harassment of independent media, partisan activities by local and regional governments, and the many inter-ethnic and intercommunal conflicts across Ethiopia.
Before that, the EU scrapped plans to send observers to the vote after its requests to import communications equipment were denied, prompting an angry response from the Ethiopian government that external observers are not necessary to certify the credibility of an election.
It is down to the AU to see if the vote on Monday meets the democratic standards of free and fair. We doubt it would come up with anything other than the fact the election was a sham.
After coming to power as prime minister in 2018, Abiy embarked on far-reaching economic and political reforms, including ending what seemed an intractable military standoff with Eritrea, which earned him the Nobel peace prize and sparked hopes of a better future in the troubled region.
Elections conducted under present conditions can only reverse those gains and dim hopes that Ethiopia has moved on from its past of autocratic rule.
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