Ethiopia Votes as Abiy's Party Eyes a Landslide Win
Ethiopia held its seventh general election on June 1, with Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed's ruling Prosperity Party expecting to crush a fractured opposition.
- Ethiopia held its seventh general election on June 1, with more than 50.5 million registered voters.
- Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed's ruling Prosperity Party expects a landslide over a divided opposition.
- The entire Tigray region was unable to vote because of conditions left by the 2020 to 2022 civil war.
- Final results are due by June 11, and questions over the vote's legitimacy are already surfacing.
Ethiopia staged its seventh general election on June 1, and the ruling Prosperity Party of Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed went into the vote openly aiming to repeat its commanding win from 2021. Africa’s second most populous nation, home to more than 120 million people, ran a process for which the electoral board, known as NEBE, registered upwards of 50.5 million voters. For readers in Belgrade, Ethiopia is not a distant abstraction: it is a pillar of the Horn of Africa and an increasingly assertive voice inside the African Union, so its stability carries weight well beyond its borders.
Abiy Ahmed, 49, entered this cycle as a favourite without a serious rival. The opposition is splintered, and several once influential parties have spent years under pressure, with arrests and internal rifts thinning their ranks. In the 2021 vote, the Prosperity Party took 410 of 484 seats in the federal parliament, leaving little room for institutional balance. Every forecast ahead of this ballot pointed to another dominant result, yet the very scale of the expected victory is what raises doubts about how genuinely open the race ever was.
Why couldn’t the whole Tigray region vote?
The heaviest shadow over this election falls across the country’s north. The entire Tigray region, the battleground of a brutal civil war between 2020 and 2022, was unable to reach the polls. The conflict between federal forces and Tigrayan authorities killed an enormous number of people by various estimates and left the region in a state where an election was neither technically nor politically workable. The peace deal signed late in 2022 halted the fighting, but it did not restore normal political life.
The disruption did not stop at Tigray. In the Amhara region, voting was absent in at least eight of 138 constituencies because of activity by the armed group Fano, which turned against the federal government after the war. When whole areas are left outside the ballot, the resulting parliament struggles to claim full national legitimacy.
- Tigray: the entire region excluded from the process because of the war’s aftermath.
- Amhara: at least eight of 138 constituencies without voting because of the Fano group.
- Opposition: divided and weakened, with no unified challenger.
The Prosperity Party said it expected a decisive victory and that it would use a fresh mandate to continue reforms and consolidate the state after years of internal conflict.
What comes after the vote?
The electoral board said final results would be published by June 11. Until then, international observers are watching how the authorities present turnout and how they explain the parts of the country that did not vote at all. For Abiy Ahmed, the 2019 Nobel Peace Prize laureate, this win should secure another full term, but it also carries an obligation to prove that peace is more than an election slogan.
Seen from Belgrade and the wider European vantage point, Ethiopia is a reminder of how thin the line can be between a vote that is formally held and a process that is genuinely inclusive. Polling can pass quietly in the capital while entire regions stay silent. Can you imagine an election declared a landslide in which a whole province was never even able to cast a ballot?
