Ethiopia’s 2026 “Election” : Abiy Ahmed’s Coronation amidst National Polycrisis, Not a Democratic Mandate

Neamin Zeleke

There are moments in a nation’s life when words such as election, reform, democracy, and mandate stop clarifying reality and begin to conceal it. Ethiopia is now in such a moment. The vote being staged in 2026 should not be understood as a democratic contest in any meaningful sense. It is better understood as a managed coronation: a theatrical exercise designed to convert coercive power, bureaucratic control, and political closure into the appearance of constitutional legitimacy.

This is not a minor flaw in an otherwise normal political system. Nor is it simply a case of an incumbent enjoying unfair advantage. The deeper problem is that Ethiopia under Abiy Ahmed has moved into a condition where the form of democracy is increasingly being preserved while the substance is being emptied out. Ballots remain. Electoral slogans remain. But real competition, free expression, territorial inclusion, and civic trust are being hollowed out before the vote even takes place. CNN’s recent reporting captures the country’s condition in blunt terms: Ethiopia, Africa’s second most populous country with more than 135 million people, is heading toward the election deeply divided, amid violent ethnic conflicts, restrictions on free speech, and crackdowns on dissent.

The recent Economist article and the Journal of Democracy essay, when read together, are unusually revealing. The Economist shows Abiy as a leader of immense ambition — a man with a vast developmental, geopolitical, and quasi-civilizational vision for Ethiopia. It notes movement on macroeconomic reform: currency liberalization, the opening of telecoms and banking to foreign investment, projected GDP growth of 9.2% according to the IMF, projected exports of $17.5 billion, and inflation falling to 9.7% from 15%. It also highlights large infrastructure projects and a $4 billion-plus fertilizer plant deal. But that is only half the story — and not the decisive half.

The other half is that these ambitions are being pursued through a political model that is increasingly centralized, coercive, exclusionary, and unstable. The Economist itself admits the contradiction: foreign direct investment remains weak, manufacturing’s share of GDP has fallen by one-third since Abiy took office, 43% of Ethiopians are estimated to be living on $3 a day or less, and 7 million people remain in urgent need of food aid. Ethiopia still imports 97% of its fuel from the Middle East, leaving it exposed to external shocks. In other words, beneath Abiy Ahmed’s often repeatedrhetoric of food sovereignty, self-sufficiency, and unstoppable progress lies a far more brittle reality: poverty is deep, humanitarian need remains acute, the productive base is weak, and the country’s vulnerability to crisis is severe.

CNN adds another critical dimension: the divide between the glossy showcase of Addis Ababa and the country beyond it. In the capital, the government can project a social-media-friendly image of progress — new towers, widened roads, parks, city lights, and even a new stock market. But outside Addis, that urban gloss evaporates into a harsher landscape of war, massacres, and mass displacement in Tigray, Amhara, and Oromia. It is a contrast between narrated modernity and prosperity and a sad condition of suffering and agony under which majority of Ethiopians are forced to endure. CNN also underlines the reform-to-repression arc: the same leader once celebrated as a peacemaker and democratic reformer is now widely seen by critics as a principal driver of the country’s divisions.

The Journal of Democracy article takes us from contradiction to mechanism. It shows how this system reproduces itself politically. NEBE advertises 47 registered political parties and nearly 11,000 candidates, numbers meant to project pluralism and democratic vibrancy. But the article argues that these figures conceal more than they reveal. Many of the parties are either effectively aligned with the Prosperity Party or too constrained, harassed, under-resourced, or bureaucratically blocked to function as real opposition. Major parties with actual grassroots presence — the TPLF, OLF, OFC, and ONLF — are described as being trapped in a maze of administrative sabotage, arrests, intimidation, licensing barriers, and state-managed fragmentation. This is not democratic competition. It is the architecture of predetermination.

The pattern was already visible in 2021, when Prosperity Party won 96.8% of the 547 parliamentary seats. In 2026 it appears even more extreme. The Economist reports that in 64 of 509 districts outside Tigray, only Prosperity Party candidates are standing. CNN adds that the ruling party has refrained from fielding candidates in more than two dozen constituencies, a move interpreted not as democratic generosity but as a tactical effort to manufacture a more diverse parliament and boost the election’s legitimacy without risking real competition. As one activist told CNN, opposition may enter parliament this time because the Prosperity Party allows them to run without its competition. That is not pluralism. It is curated opposition.

EU affiliated The Clingendael policy brief sharpens this analysis further by naming the core contradiction directly: managed elections, unmanaged conflicts. Its argument is devastating in its clarity. The elections are being held in a repressive political environment and amid widespread instability, including active conflicts in the country’s two most populous regions. In this context, the elections are unlikely to be free and fair, and they are even less likely to address the real drivers of instability. Those drivers — the insurgencies in Amhara and Oromia, and the unravelling of the Pretoria Agreement in Tigray — operate largely outside formal political processes and will not be resolved by any electoral outcome. The brief warns that international support to the electoral process risks legitimising the government’s military-centred approach and reducing the urgency of negotiation.

This matters because Abiy Ahmed’s strategy is not simply to win, but to manufacture legitimacy at minimum cost. The Clingendael brief argues that the ruling party is using elections to shore up its authority at home and abroad without making meaningful political concessions. It even notes that the government appears willing to allow a limited number of seats to opposition groups closely aligned with it, so that any small increase in opposition representation can later be marketed as evidence of democratic opening. It is stage management.
The brief also supplies important measures of the regime’s legitimacy crisis. According to the 2023 Afrobarometer survey, 56% of respondents said the country was heading in the wrong direction; only 14% said they felt close to the Prosperity Party; and 75% said they did not feel close to any political party at all. A 2023 Harvard Humanitarian Initiative survey found that only 18% rated the country as peaceful, only 28% trusted the federal government to act in their best interest, and 50% blamed federal government members primarily for the country’s violent conflicts. Those are not the indicators of a healthy democratic order. They are the indicators of a state whose political center has lost trust faster than it can accumulate formal mandates.

This is why Ethiopia’s current condition must be understood through the lens of polycrisis. The sham election is not an isolated political abuse. It is one expression of a wider systemic disorder. There is a political crisis: shrinking political space, weakened opposition, and over centralized executive power. There is a security crisis: insurgency in Amhara, armed challenge in Oromia, exclusion and volatility in Tigray, and declining state control over vast swath of the country. There is a humanitarian crisis: food insecurity, displacement, and social devastation affecting millions. There is an economic crisis, or at least a structural fragility beneath headline growth figures. And there is a regional crisis: tensions with Eritrea, dangerous entanglement in Sudan, and the real possibility that domestic fragility may spill into interstate confrontation. The Clingendael report is especially sobering here: it says the government’s authority is being violently contested in regions home to roughly two-thirds of the population.

Under such conditions, elections do not heal crises automatically. They can just as easily become tools for managing them symbolically. That is what appears to be happening here. The election is being used to generate a democratic-looking mandate for continued rule, and perhaps for something more: a deeper constitutional and institutional restructuring from above. The Journal of Democracy piece suggests that a commanding Prosperity Party “victory” may be used as cover to further centralize power, weaken ethnic-federal arrangements, and reduce regional autonomy. If so, June 2026 is not merely about re-election. It is about laying the groundwork for a new political order — one imposed in the name of electoral legitimacy but built on the erosion of meaningful political choice.

There is also a wider African and international question here. As Jawar Mohammed, a prominent activit, has argued in Addis Standard , Ethiopia’s election is not just a test of Ethiopia’s democracy; it is also a test of the African Union’s credibility. If continental institutions endorse or normalize a vote held amid war, repression, territorial exclusion, and shrinking civic space, then democratic principle in Africa is reduced to procedure without substance. Worse, the ballot itself risks becoming a weapon of conflict — not a mechanism for peaceful political competition, but an instrument for formalizing exclusion and intensifying grievance. The Clingendael brief reaches a similar conclusion from a European policy angle: Ethiopia’s partners should resist treating the elections as a marker of democratic progress or stability and instead redirect diplomatic capital toward negotiated settlements to the country’s active conflicts.

Ethiopians, especially those who still care about justice, democracy, national survival, and the long-term peace of the Horn, must resist the temptation to treat this as routine. It is not routine. The issue is not simply whether Abiy wins. He almost certainly will. The issue is what kind of state is being consolidated through that victory. A state can hold elections and still become more authoritarian. A government can speak the language of sovereignty and still deepen dependency, exclusion, and conflict. A leader can claim national unity while governing in ways that intensify fragmentation. CNN’s conclusion is telling: many observers now see the vote not as a democratic milestone but as a mere coronation.

That is why this moment demands clarity. Ethiopia does not need another ritual of procedural legitimacy while the country bleeds, fragments, and drifts toward deeper crisis. It needs an open political horizon, genuine civic space, restored trust, credible inclusion, and ultimately a national settlement broad enough to address the intertwined polycrises now consuming the multiethnic nation. Without that, this election will not be remembered as a democratic milestone. It will be remembered as the formal enthronement of power in a state already losing cohesion, credibility, stability and peace.

Sources :

The Economist: “Abiy Ahmed is throttling free expression in Ethiopia” / election analysis.
Muktar Ismail, Journal of Democracy: “Ethiopia Is About to Hold Another Sham Election.”
Nimi Princewill, CNN: “Ethiopia’s PM won a Nobel Peace Prize, stoked a civil war – and is set for re-election.”
Addis Standard: “Ethiopia’s election is a test of the African Union’s credibility — don’t allow ballot become a weapon of conflict.”
Amanuel Dessalegn Gedebo & Guido Lanfranchi, Clingendael Institute: Managed elections, unmanaged conflicts: Ethiopia at the polls in 2026.

Editor’s Note : Views in the article do not necessarily reflect the views of borkena.com  

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