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ADDIS ABABA, ETHIOPIA – Ethiopia will hold parliamentary elections on June 5, the electoral board said on Friday, as Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed seeks to quell political and ethnic violence in various regions.
The Abiy Prosperity Party, a pan-Ethiopian movement he founded a year ago, faces challenges from increasingly strident ethnic-based parties seeking more power for their regions.
Africa’s second most populous nation has a federal system with 10 regional governments, many of which have border disputes with neighboring areas or face low-level unrest.
In the northern region of Tigray, thousands of people are believed to have died and 950,000 have fled their homes since clashes between regional and federal forces broke out on 4 November. Tigray held its own elections in September in defiance of the federal government, which declared the ballot box. illegal.
The National Electoral Board said next year’s election calendar does not include an election in Tigray. He said the date for the Tigray vote would be set once an interim government, which was established during the conflict, opens electoral offices.
The national vote was postponed from August this year due to the coronavirus crisis. The head of the winning party becomes prime minister.
For nearly three decades until Abiy’s appointment, Ethiopia was ruled by a coalition of four ethnically-based movements dominated by Tigray’s party. That administration ruled in an increasingly autocratic fashion until Abiy came to power in 2018, after years of bloody street protests against the government.
The first months after Abiy’s appointment saw an avalanche of political and economic reforms, including the release of tens of thousands of political prisoners.
‘Restoring peace’
Abiy merged three of the major regional parties last year to form the Prosperity Party. The fourth, the Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF), refused to join.
Voter registration for the June ballot would take place from March 1 to March 30, the electoral board said.
Abiy’s peace accord with Eritrea, which won Ethiopia’s independence in 1993 after years of conflict, helped him win the Nobel Peace Prize in 2019. But his moves to loosen the tight grip of the Ethiopian government were followed by outbreaks of violence as politicians and regional groups jostled. for resources and power.
Abiy on Thursday ordered troops to head to the western Benishangul-Gumuz region, which borders Sudan, after attackers set fire to houses and killed more than 200 people in a village.
The prime minister is also dealing with a longstanding insurgency in Ethiopia’s most populous region, Oromiya.
The opposition Oromo Liberation Front, considered a terrorist movement until Abiy lifted the ban on the group, had said on December 12 that the government wanted to hold elections to divert attention from Ethiopia’s security problems.
“We recommend that the repair of the fractured administrative regions and the restoration of peace and security should be undertaken before the elections are held,” he had said.
Many Oromo politicians are in jail, such as Jawar Mohammed, a prominent media mogul and a member of the Oromo Federalist Congress party.
He and other party leaders were charged in September with terrorism offenses following the murder of popular Oromo musician Haacaaluu Hundeessaa, whose death sparked protests that killed at least 178 people in Oromiya and the capital Addis Ababa.
