Ethiopia will hold a parliamentary election on June 5, 2021, the National Electoral Commission said on Friday, after the votes scheduled for 2020 were delayed by the coronavirus pandemic.
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The aborted election was a factor that led to tensions between Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed and the opposite northern Tigray region, which eventually saw him send federal troops there in a military offensive in November that left thousands dead and created tens of thousands of refugees.
The election in Ethiopia, Africa’s second most populous country with about 110 million people, is largely seen as an important political transition process announced by Abiy, last year’s Nobel Peace Prize winner.
According to the Agence France-Presse (AFP), Abiy, who came to power in 2018, had promised free, fair and democratic elections in 2020. The elections were scheduled for August 29, but the election commission postponed them indefinitely after the outbreak of the coronavirus pandemic.
The Prime Minister’s Prosperity Party, a pan-Ethiopian movement he founded a year ago, faces challenges from increasingly stringent ethnic-based parties seeking more power for their regions. The country has a federal system and ten regional governments, many of which have border disputes or face low-level unrest.
In the northern Tigray region, thousands of people are believed to have died and 950,000 have fled their homes since fighting broke out between regional forces and the federal government on November 4. Tigray held its own elections in September in defiance of the federal government, which declared the votes illegal.
The Election Board said that the calendar for next year’s votes does not include an election in Tigray. It said it would announce a date for elections there when the interim government set up during the conflict could support the opening of polling stations there.
For almost three decades before Abiy’s appointment, Ethiopia was ruled by a coalition of four ethnically based movements dominated by the Tigray party. That administration ruled in an increasingly autocratic way until Abiy took power after years of bloody anti-government protests.
In the first months after Abiy’s appointment, it saw a storm of political and economic reform, including the release of tens of thousands of political prisoners. Last year, Abiy merged three of the old parties to form the Welfare Party – only the Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF) refused to join.
Voter registration will take place from March 1 to March 30, the election board said.
“Political disasters”
Abiy’s peace deal with Ethiopia’s arch-enemy Eritrea helped provide him with the 2019 Nobel Peace Prize, but the release of the government’s iron grip was also followed by outbreaks of violence when regional power brokers threw for resources and power.
On Thursday, Abiy said he was sending troops to the western Benishangul-Gumuz region, which borders Sudan, the day after unidentified assailants torched homes and killed more than 100 people in a village there. There is also a prolonged uprising in the Oromiya region, Ethiopia’s most populous region, as reported by Reuters.
The Oromo Liberation Front, an opposition party from the Oromiya region that was once declared a terrorist movement before being banned by Abiy, said on December 12 that the government used the prospect of an election to divert attention from the myriad security concerns. .
“Although the ruling party wants to hide the existing problems and draw attention to the national elections, it is clear that the country has gone into complex security crises and political disasters,” it said. “We recommend that repair of the broken administrative regions and restoration of peace and security be made before the election takes place.”
Many Oromo politicians are in prison, such as Jawar Mohammed, a prominent media mogul and member of the Oromo Federalist Congress Party.
He and other party leaders were charged with terrorist offenses in September following the assassination of popular Oromo musician Haacaaluu Hundeessaa. Haacaaluu’s death sparked protests that killed at least 178 people in Oromiya and the capital.
The chairman of the winning party becomes prime minister.
