Ethiopia went to the polls on Sunday in its first national elections since the signing of the Pretoria Peace Agreement that ended the devastating Tigray civil war in November 2022. The vote encompasses federal and regional parliamentary seats across a country of more than 120 million people — Africa’s second most populous nation and one of its fastest-growing economies. Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed’s Prosperity Party is widely expected to dominate, having governed under significant emergency powers since 2020. Competing parties, coalitions, and candidates submitted their candidacies in a process that international and domestic observers described as procedurally more open than recent elections but still constrained by incumbent advantages, restrictions on opposition organising in conflict-affected regions, and ongoing human rights concerns in Amhara and Oromia. Al Jazeera’s coverage featured duelling perspectives: one calling the election “an affirmation of national commitment to democracy,” the other describing it as occurring against a backdrop of “deepening human rights crisis.”
The received wisdom
The mainstream Western framing tends toward cautious hope with attached caveats. Abiy Ahmed won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2019 for making peace with Eritrea and releasing political prisoners; that optimism was badly damaged when civil war erupted in Tigray in 2020, killing hundreds of thousands and displacing millions. The Pretoria agreement was a genuine diplomatic achievement, and the fact that elections are proceeding at all — in a country that was consuming itself in one of the world’s deadliest conflicts just four years ago — is genuinely remarkable. Human rights organisations including Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch have documented ongoing abuses in Amhara and Oromia, and opposition parties report harassment. But the received wisdom holds that imperfect elections in a post-conflict society are better than no elections, and that engaging with Abiy’s government is the surest path to incremental democratisation.
That framing is not wrong. It is incomplete.
A different read
The scale of what is at stake in Ethiopia dwarfs the Western attention it receives, and that attention deficit is itself a policy failure worth examining.
Ethiopia sits at the intersection of multiple crises that directly affect Western interests. It borders Sudan — where a devastating civil war has produced one of the world’s largest displacement crises — as well as Somalia, Eritrea, and South Sudan. The Horn of Africa is already the world’s largest humanitarian crisis zone. A politically stable Ethiopia with a credible electoral mandate is the single most important stabilising force in the region. A fractured Ethiopia — whether through renewed civil conflict in Amhara or Oromia, or through a contested election outcome — would be catastrophic not just for Ethiopians but for regional security from the Red Sea to Central Africa.
The Nobel committee that awarded Abiy the Peace Prize was not naive; it was making a deliberate bet that international recognition would constrain his worst impulses. The Tigray war demonstrated how poorly that bet paid off. But the appropriate lesson from that episode is not disengagement — it is more sophisticated engagement, with clearer conditionality and less Nobel-style moral blank-cheque issuance.
There is a broader pattern worth naming. The West — and particularly the United States and European Union — has systematically under-resourced its diplomatic and developmental attention to Africa even as China has systematically expanded its presence. Beijing does not lecture African governments about democratic standards; it builds railways and dams and presents bills later. This creates a choice for governments like Addis Ababa: accept Western democracy promotion with its attached conditions and inevitable media criticism, or accept Chinese infrastructure with its commercial terms and diplomatic silence. Al Jazeera’s coverage of the election notes that ten years have passed since Colombia’s FARC peace deal, but also draws an implicit comparison to Ethiopia’s own peace process — both requiring sustained international attention to prevent regression.
Abiy’s Prosperity Party consolidating power through elections — even flawed ones — is probably preferable to the alternatives: military coup, renewed Tigray-style conflict, or a Balkanisation of federal regions. But “probably preferable to the alternatives” is a low bar for a country of 120 million people in a strategically vital region. The elections provide an opportunity to reset the international relationship: to reward the holding of elections while establishing clear, pre-announced benchmarks for democratic progress over the next cycle. The window for that kind of engagement is now, not after the results are certified and Abiy’s mandate is consolidated.
What to watch
- Results from Tigray region specifically — if Tigrayan parties report systematic exclusion from the vote, the Pretoria process will face its most serious test.
- Abiy’s post-election governing coalition: whether he brings in opposition figures or governs exclusively through the Prosperity Party will signal his democratic intentions.
- US and EU response to the results — a reflexive condemnation will push Addis closer to Beijing; a constructive engagement framework with specified benchmarks is the more demanding but more effective option.
- Amhara and Oromia security situations: if elections in conflict-affected zones are credibly conducted, it represents genuine progress; if they are not, the human rights criticisms will be vindicated.
— J