ABIY WINS SECOND TERM AS PM IN ETHIOPIAN POLLS LANDSLIDE
▶ Parliamentary majority looks assured despite vote not being held in about a fifth of seats
Ethiopia’s ruling party won parliamentary elections in a landslide, ensuring another five-year term for Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed despite a war in the northern region of Tigray.
Mr Abiy hailed the outcome of what he described as a “historic” election, the first time he faced voters since being appointed prime minister in 2018 after years of anti-government protests.
The winner of the 2019 Nobel Peace Prize hoped to portray victory at the ballot box as a mandate for political and economic reforms and military operations.
The poll was held during a conflict in Tigray that battered Mr Abiy’s reputation on the world stage and raised fears of widespread famine.
His Prosperity Party won 410 federal parliament seats out of 436 where elections were held, according to results issued on Saturday by the National Election Board of Ethiopia, which said there would be a rerun in 10 constituencies.
The figures showed that opposition parties and independent candidates won a small number of seats.
The vote was meant to affirm a promised democratic revival in Africa’s second-most populous nation, with Mr Abiy seeking to make a clean break with the repression that tarnished past electoral cycles.
The ruling coalition that preceded him claimed majorities in 2015 and 2010 polls that observers said fell far short of international standards for fairness.
A more open contest in 2005 resulted in big opposition gains but led to lethal repression of protests over contested results.
This time, the polls were delayed twice, once because of the coronavirus pandemic and again to allow officials longer to prepare.
Nevertheless, voting did not go ahead in about a fifth of the country’s 547 constituencies because of ethnic violence or logistical problems. A second batch of polling is scheduled for September 6 in many of those left out.
However, there is no election date set for Tigray, where fighting marked by atrocities raged for eight months before federal troops withdrew at the end of June in the face of rebel advances and Mr Abiy’s government declared a unilateral ceasefire.
Analysts issued warnings of possible further fighting in Tigray and some world leaders denounced a siege blocking aid shipments for a region where hundreds of thousands of people face famine.
The World Food Programme said that it was sending 50 lorries of aid into Tigray. It was not clear if the convoy had arrived.
In some areas where voting did take place, opposition parties complained of a tilted playing field.
In Mr Abiy’s native Oromia region, Ethiopia’s largest, two of the most prominent opposition parties – the Oromo Federalist Congress and the Oromo Liberation Front – pulled out completely, saying their candidates were arrested and their offices vandalised.
Tsadik Domoz, 34, an ethnic Amhara sesame farmer in Humera in western Tigray which fell under Amhara regional control during the war, said he was delighted with the result.
“We can’t get anyone better than the PM at this time,” he said.
“He is the one who saved Ethiopia from the internal and external forces that tried to destabilise it,” he said, referring to the Tigray People’s Liberation Front and mounting pressure on Ethiopia over its dam project on the Nile.
There were “no serious or widespread human rights” offences on election day at stations observed by the state-affiliated Ethiopian Human Rights Commission.
However, it said some constituencies experienced “improper arrests”, voter intimidation and “harassment” of observers and journalists. It reported killings in the days leading up the vote in Oromia.
The opposition National Movement for Amhara filed a complaint to the electoral board over “serious problems” during the vote.
“A lot of our observers were beaten and chased down by militias of the ruling party,” said senior party member Dessalegn Chanie.
Addisu Lashitew of the Brookings Institution in Washington said even low opposition representation in parliament could fend off future instability.
“People, especially the youths, they need to be heard, so they should have a voice in the process,” Mr Addisu said.
“Even if it may not be always successful in influencing political decisions, the fact that they are heard itself is important.”
Incorporating opposition voices into formal political processes means they are less likely to become radicalised or spur a large-scale protest movement, he said.
Tegbaru Yared, a researcher with the Institute for Security Studies, wrote last week that there remained “deep political cleavages”.
The Prosperity Party “should focus on stopping intercommunal conflicts, managing inflation, engaging the opposition and initiating an all-inclusive national dialogue”, said Mr Tegbaru. “This could earn it popular legitimacy.”
Ethiopians in a fifth of constituencies will go to the polls on September 6 for the second batch of voting in this election