Abiy Ahmed's party wins Ethiopian election as analysts warn of renewed conflict
Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed’s Prosperity Party won a comfortable majority in parliamentary elections held this month, with results announced on June 21. The outcome keeps Abiy — the 2019 Nobel Peace Prize laureate — in power, but it lands against a backdrop of fragmenting security rather than national consolidation.
Voting did not take place in Tigray, where conditions were deemed unfavorable, and the region’s dominant party has moved to reassert control over its administration in ways officials say breach the 2022 peace agreement that ended the two-year war there. In the Amhara region, the Fano militia has seized stretches of countryside since 2023 and continues to fight government forces. Critics also accuse the administration of narrowing political space by detaining journalists and shutting down civil society groups, which weakens the credibility of the result as a mandate.
The practical concern is less the vote count than what follows it: a governing party with a renewed majority but limited control over two of the country’s most volatile regions. Analysts warn that unresolved disputes in Tigray and Amhara leave open the risk of fresh, wider conflict in Africa’s second-most-populous nation.