Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed’s Prosperity Party has won a majority of seats in Ethiopia’s parliamentary election held this month, ensuring the Nobel Peace laureate remains in power. The outcome was widely expected, with the party’s campaign focusing on economic gains and improved food security—a critical issue in a country that has suffered repeated famines.
Abiy came to power in 2018 amid mass protests against the long-ruling Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Democratic Front coalition. He founded the Prosperity Party a year later. In the most recent parliamentary election in 2021, the party won over 90% of seats.
Early in his tenure, Abiy earned praise at home and abroad for freeing journalists, activists, and political prisoners, and lifting a ban on many political parties. In 2019, he won the Nobel Peace Prize for ending a conflict with neighboring Eritrea.
However, political opponents and human rights activists accuse his government of reversing those gains in recent years, stepping up arrests of journalists and shuttering civil society organizations.
Ethiopia has faced years of violent unrest in several ethnically organized regions, including Oromia—Abiy’s home region, the largest—and Amhara, the second-largest. Since 2023, a militia called Fano has held large swaths of Amhara’s countryside.
A civil war in the northern Tigray region raged from 2020 to 2022, stemming from a rift between Abiy and Tigrayan leaders who once dominated Ethiopian politics before he took office. Researchers say the conflict killed hundreds of thousands of people.
Although a 2022 peace deal ended the war, in May this year Tigray’s main political party moved to reassert control over the region’s administration in violation of the agreement. Officials and analysts warn that this could trigger fresh instability.
The parliamentary election was not held in Tigray, one of Ethiopia’s 12 regions, because the electoral commission said conditions there were “adverse.”
Abiy’s government projects economic growth of more than 10% by 2026, one of the fastest rates in Africa.
