: What Happens Next in Ethiopia’s Political Turmoil #WorldNEWS This week Ethiopia’s government entered the controversial sixth year of its five-year mandate. But the administration of Abiy Ahmed

What Happens Next in Ethiopia’s Political Turmoil #WorldNEWS
This week Ethiopia’s government entered the controversial sixth year of its five-year mandate. But the administration of Abiy Ahmed isn’t going anywhere… not even after a particularly violent summer. Covid-19 has produced plenty of political drama these last few months, but Ethiopia has experienced more than most—here’s why.
Why It Matters:
Ethiopian politics operates in a system of “ethnic federalism”—while there is a central government to this federation, its constituent parts are carved out along ethnic lines and jockeyed over by parties promising the best deal for the ethnicities within them (of which there are dozens throughout a country of 112 million). Yet for all its diversity, political power in Ethiopia has long been concentrated in the hands of the few—first a string of emperors and eventually a Marxist military junta that attempted to centralize power and homogenize the country. When the junta was overthrown in the early 1990s, the ethnic federation prevented the breakup of Africa’s oldest nation state. Enter current prime minister Abiy Ahmed, who ascended to power in 2018 on a wave of activism spearheaded by his own Oromo—Ethiopia’s largest ethnic group, accounting for roughly a third of the population—seeking to finally have one of their own hold the premiership after years of feeling marginalized.

But while ethnic federalism might have helped propel Abiy to the premiership, it was also holding the country back… at least from Abiy’s perspective. Abiy is a reformer, but to enact those political, economic and social reforms he had in mind for one of Africa’s most repressive nations, he needed the central government to have more power. To that end, Abiy began pushing a national political vision, dissolving several ethnic parties into his pan-Ethiopian Prosperity Party last year. What may seem intuitive—the less ethnic politics in federal government, the better—divides Ethiopians, many hailing from ethnic groups wanting greater recognition and a bigger seat at the table. Abiy’s pan-Ethiopian orientation was particularly frustrating to the Oromo, who had high expectations for the Abiy government and the windfall it would bring them.
There were more frustrations to come. With the eruption of Covid-19, the election board postponed elections indefinitely, beyond the expiry of Abiy government’s mandate in October 2020. To regularize the decision, the government proceeded to use parliament’s ruling party-dominated upper house to extend Abiy’s mandate. In what the opposition considered a power grab, it was now up to the administration to decide when elections would be and for how long it would govern.