On February 24, a former television journalist in her early thirties stood on the stage of Ethiopia's first televised multi-party debate and did something the Prosperity Party had not prepared for. Mistresilasie Tamerat, secretary of the Ethiopian People's Revolutionary Party and representative of the Cooperation for Ethiopian Unity coalition, told a national audience that the conditions for a free and credible election do not exist. She cited political prisoners. She cited ongoing war. She cited the gap between what the election machinery produces and what democracy requires. The Prosperity Party's representatives had expected the debate to validate the process. Mistresilasie turned it into a trial of the process. They had no answer.
The numbers explain why. Data from the National Election Board show that the Prosperity Party has fielded 466 candidates for 547 parliamentary seats, leaving 81 constituencies empty. Zero candidates in Tigray — none for the 38 parliamentary seats, none for the 152 regional council seats. In Amhara, the abandoned constituencies include Raya Kobo, where NAMA Chairman Belete Molla is running, and Lay Gayint 1, Kutaber, and Este 1, where party executives Melkamu Tsegaye, Yusuf Ibrahim, and Gashaw Mersha have registered. In Addis Ababa, three constituencies were left open — including those where EZEMA Chairman Iyob Mesafint and Deputy Chairman Nigatu Wolde are standing.
Look at which seats the ruling party surrendered and the strategy becomes obvious. These are not random gaps in a registration spreadsheet. The Prosperity Party has chosen to hand specific seats to specific opposition leaders. Give NAMA its chairman's constituency. Give EZEMA its leader's district. Let the final count show sixty or seventy opposition members in a 547-seat parliament — enough for the African Union observation mission to note "improved pluralism" in its report, not enough to hold the executive accountable for anything. The opposition gets name recognition. The government gets the supermajority. Everyone performs their role. June 1 is not an election. It is a seating chart.
In May 2025, the National Election Board revoked the legal status of the Tigray People's Liberation Front — the party that governed Tigray for three decades and signed the Pretoria Agreement that ended a war which killed an estimated 600,000 people. NEBE cited the TPLF's failure to hold a general assembly under its provisional registration. This is a technical requirement imposed on a party operating in a region where over 1,300 displaced people have died of hunger in IDP camps over three years, where Eritrean troops still cross the border, and where the federal government cut off funding several months ago. The TPLF insists the Pretoria Agreement guarantees its political reinstatement. NEBE says that argument is "not acceptable." So Tigray will vote in June with six opposition parties and two coalitions fielding 101 candidates — and the region's dominant political force banned from the ballot. A peace deal that was supposed to bring political reintegration delivered political elimination instead.
In Oromia, the Oromo Federalist Congress — the largest legally registered Oromo opposition party — is participating because the alternative is organizational death. The OFC's vice chairman, Mulatu Gemechu, told The Reporter that the party fielded candidates solely to retain its legal status after NEBE imposed a December 2 registration deadline. Miss two consecutive elections and you are automatically deregistered. The OFC's chairman, Merera Gudina, has said publicly that the conditions for a free and credible election do not exist. His party is on the ballot anyway, because the system is built to punish boycotts with extinction. Participate and lend legitimacy to a process you believe is fraudulent, or refuse and lose the legal right to exist. That is the choice Ethiopian opposition parties face in 2026, and it deserves to be called what it is: coercion dressed in administrative language.
The armed opposition has drawn its own conclusions. On March 23, the OLF-OLA dismissed the election as "a performance staged for foreign consumption," claiming over seventy percent of the country is inaccessible for credible voting. A week earlier, the Amhara Fano National Movement warned that any entity assisting the electoral process would be considered an enemy of the Amhara people "equal to the government." I have argued before and I maintain now that armed groups threatening people who participate in elections are contributing to the state failure they claim to oppose. But the uncomfortable fact that neither the government nor its critics want to acknowledge is that both statements rest on something true: large parts of Amhara and Oromia cannot hold credible elections because the government does not control them. The government's answer has been to hold the election anyway and call the result national.
NEBE's own internal system confirms the problem. The Board developed a green-yellow-red security classification for constituencies — an official admission that some areas are too dangerous for voting. Ethiopia's seventh general election will be concentrated in government-controlled cities while rural populations in the country's two most populous regions sit it out. A mandate produced under these conditions covers the parts of the country the government already holds. It says nothing about the parts it does not.
I am not a liberal democrat and I do not pretend to be. I have argued in this column that premature multiparty competition in countries with Ethiopia's structural conditions produces ethnic mobilization, not democratic accountability. I have defended managed political transitions where the state directs development and opens the system gradually as institutions mature. I hold these positions still.
