Ethiopia’s ruling Prosperity Party won 438 of 501 contested seats in parliamentary elections held earlier this month, securing Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed another term in office. He is expected to be sworn in for a fresh mandate in early October. The scale of the victory echoed the party’s performance in 2021, when it took more than 90 percent of available seats. But the electoral map tells a more troubling story: 143 polling stations failed to open due to armed group activity, and the Tigray region — home to approximately 6 million people across 38 constituencies — was entirely excluded from the poll because of what the electoral board described as “unfavourable conditions.” Fano militias in Amhara and the Oromo Liberation Army in Oromia both rejected the election outright. Opposition participation was minimal. The African Union and international observers have called for immediate de-escalation in northern Ethiopia, and the United States has announced targeted visa restrictions on hardline members of the Tigray People’s Liberation Front.
The received wisdom
Abiy Ahmed arrived in power in 2018 as a genuinely transformative figure. He freed political prisoners, lifted bans on opposition parties, welcomed exiled journalists and activists home, and — most dramatically — ended the decades-long state of hostility with Eritrea, an achievement that earned him the Nobel Peace Prize in 2019. For a country long governed by the ethnically narrow coalition of the EPRDF, Abiy’s Prosperity Party represented a genuine attempt at national integration — dissolving the ethnic party federalism that had governed since 1991 into a single, pan-Ethiopian movement. His government’s economic record has been strong: Ethiopia projects growth of over 10 percent in 2026, one of the fastest rates in Africa, and the country has continued ambitious infrastructure investment. On this reading, Abiy is an imperfect but necessary leader for Africa’s second most-populous nation at a critical moment — the alternative to his consolidation of power is not democratic pluralism but fragmentation into competing ethnic armed movements, which is precisely what the civil war of 2020 to 2022 demonstrated.
A different read
The optimistic framing is not wrong about Abiy’s early record. It is wrong to treat 2018 as though it remains the relevant baseline. The two-year civil war in Tigray that ended with a peace deal in November 2022 was estimated by an African Union mediator to have killed approximately 600,000 people — a death toll that places it among the worst conflicts of the twenty-first century and that received a fraction of the Western media attention proportionate to its scale. The peace deal’s terms are now actively contested: Tigray’s main political party, the TPLF, moved in May to reassert control over the region’s political administration in what Ethiopian officials characterise as a violation of the 2022 agreement. Reports from Tigray describe forced recruitment of young men into TPLF forces. A young man in Adwa told BBC Africa that armed men in civilian clothes “told us that they were detaining us to join the armed struggle.”
The regional geometry is particularly dangerous. Eritrea — which fought alongside Ethiopia against the TPLF in the 2020–2022 war — has since shifted its alignment. Eritrea is now reported to be allied with the TPLF, a reversal driven by what Asmara characterises as Abiy’s imperial ambitions over Red Sea access. Abiy’s landlocked Ethiopia has repeatedly sought to regain a Red Sea port, lost when Eritrea became independent in 1993, and his pursuit of that objective has alienated not only Eritrea but Somalia and parts of the Gulf. Ethiopia is simultaneously accused of supporting the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) in Sudan’s ongoing civil war — a charge Addis Ababa denies. If accurate, it means Ethiopia is playing in both the Tigray conflict and the Sudanese conflict simultaneously, with Eritrea and the TPLF on the other side of both equations.
Magnus Taylor of the International Crisis Group does not expect an immediate return to full-scale war but describes the current situation as “a dangerous scenario” driven by highly polarised regional politics. Cameron Hudson, a former US State Department official and Africa analyst, is more direct: there is “a legitimate concern” that Abiy will use his electoral consolidation to resolve the Tigray problem by force rather than negotiation — an approach that would replicate the 2020 logic, potentially with Eritrea now on the opposing side rather than fighting alongside Addis Ababa.
The historical parallel that should concentrate minds is Nigeria’s 1964 election — another moment when a nominally federal state held a nominally national vote in which large swaths of territory were effectively excluded, in which the incumbent took an implausible share of seats, and in which the underlying ethnic and regional tensions were temporarily papered over rather than resolved. That election preceded the Biafran war by three years. Ethiopia is not Nigeria, and 2026 is not 1964; analogies are imperfect instruments. But the pattern of a centralising leader winning a landslide vote in a country where several regions are in active armed revolt, while excluding the most contested region from the ballot entirely, is not a pattern that history associates with long-term stability.
For Western policymakers, there is a particular accountability gap worth naming. The 2022 Tigray peace deal was heavily brokered by the United States and the African Union. The US has now imposed targeted visa restrictions on hardline TPLF members rather than any broader pressure on either side to honour commitments. This asymmetric pressure risks repeating the error of the pre-war period, when Western governments were slow to condemn the deterioration in Tigray until the scale of the catastrophe made silence impossible.
What to watch
Watch the Tigray region over the coming months for any escalation in the recruitment of fighters or movement of TPLF forces — both Hudson and Taylor describe the next few months as “decisive.” Watch whether Eritrea makes any formal military commitment to the TPLF, which would transform a domestic insurgency into an interstate conflict. Watch the US State Department’s designation of TPLF figures under its visa restriction authority — whether it broadens to include government officials on the Ethiopian side will signal how seriously Washington is engaging with its own brokered deal. And watch whether the EU translates its “immediate de-escalation” call into any tangible diplomatic or aid conditionality.
— J