[ad_1]
Ethiopia will hold its legislative and regional elections on June 5, 2021, the Election Commission announced on Friday. The elections that were scheduled for 2020, were postponed due to the coronavirus outbreak.
The postponement had contributed to increasing tensions between Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed’s government and the northern region of Tigray.
Voters will have a one-month period to register to vote, between March 1 and March 30, according to a schedule posted on the Facebook page of the Ethiopian Election Commission on Friday.
The elections in Ethiopia, the second most populous country on the continent with some 110 million inhabitants, are widely seen as a crucial step in the political transition announced by the Prime Minister.
The 2019 Nobel Peace Prize winner, who came to power in 2018, promised free, fair and democratic elections in 2020. The 2015 legislative and regional elections described by opposition parties as a “farce”.
At that time, the Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF), the coalition that had ruled the country for nearly 30 years, won all 547 seats in the lower house of parliament.
The elections were set for August 29, 2020, but in late March the Commission announced that they would be postponed indefinitely due to the pandemic.
The federal parliament then voted to extend the parliamentarians’ terms, including Abiy’s, which were due to expire in October. The decision was rejected by the Tigrayan leaders of the Tigray Popular Liberation Front (TPLF), which dominated the EPRDF, and has been gradually marginalized since Abiy came to power.
The TPLF held its own regional elections in September, which Addis Ababa deemed illegal. On November 4, the federal government launched a military operation in the region that had defied its authority for months.
There is no precise assessment of the conflict in Tigray, but the fighting has forced more than 50,000 people to seek refuge in neighboring Sudan. The United Nations says that more than 63,000 have been displaced within the region.
