Ethiopia’s electoral board did not open a single polling station in Tigray this month, even as Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed’s Prosperity Party swept to another parliamentary majority across the rest of the country. The board cited what it described as “unfavourable conditions” in the region, without specifying further.
The exclusion lands at a delicate moment. Tigray’s main political party moved in May to reassert administrative control over the region in what Ethiopian officials and independent analysts have described as a breach of the 2022 peace agreement that ended the territory’s civil war. That conflict, which ran from 2020 to 2022 and stemmed from a collapse in relations between Abiy and the Tigrayan leadership that had dominated Ethiopian politics before his rise, killed hundreds of thousands of people, according to researchers who have studied the war’s toll. Officials and analysts have since warned that the political maneuvering in May raises the risk of renewed fighting, though no firm timeline or specific trigger has been identified.
Outside Tigray, the result was not close. Prosperity Party candidates ran on the government’s economic record and on a pledge to strengthen food security in a country that has endured repeated famines, and the party was widely expected to win even before voting began. It had taken more than 90 percent of available seats in the previous parliamentary election, in 2021, and this month’s contest extended that dominance.
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Abiy’s own trajectory has tracked unevenly against the party’s electoral strength. He was appointed prime minister in 2018, in the aftermath of mass protests that brought down the long-ruling Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Democratic Front coalition, and founded the Prosperity Party the following year as its successor. In his early years in office, he freed jailed journalists and activists, lifted bans on opposition parties, and negotiated an end to two decades of hostility with neighboring Eritrea — a deal that earned him the Nobel Peace Prize in 2019.
Opposition figures and human rights organizations say that record has not held. They accuse his government of detaining journalists and shutting down civil society groups in recent years, a reversal, in their account, of the early opening that defined his first term. Ethiopian officials have not directly addressed those specific accusations in public statements cited by local reporting.
Violence has spread beyond Tigray during Abiy’s time in office. In Amhara, Ethiopia’s second-largest region, a militia known as Fano has taken control of stretches of countryside since 2023, according to security assessments referenced by regional analysts. Abiy’s home region of Oromia, the country’s largest, has also seen years of unrest tied to its ethnically organized political structure. Neither conflict was resolved in time to affect this month’s vote, though both regions did take part in the election, unlike Tigray.
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The government is projecting economic growth above 10 percent for 2026, a figure that, if it holds, would rank among the fastest expansion rates on the continent. That projection has featured prominently in the Prosperity Party’s pitch to voters, alongside its food security commitments, though independent verification of the full-year figure will not be possible until well after the growth period it describes has ended.
The contrast between the scale of Abiy’s parliamentary mandate and the limits of his government’s territorial reach is not new, but this month’s election gave it a sharper, more literal form: a national vote in which one of the nation’s twelve regions cast no ballots at all. Electoral officials framed that absence as a temporary condition.
Tigrayan political leaders, by reasserting administrative control outside the terms of the 2022 settlement, have given Ethiopian officials and outside analysts reason to treat it as something less temporary.
Abiy enters his new term with a parliamentary majority few governments in the region could match and a peace agreement in its most uncertain state since the fighting stopped four years ago. Tigray remains the only one of Ethiopia’s twelve regions where no one voted this month, a fact the size of the Prosperity Party’s win elsewhere does nothing to change.