Ethiopian prime minister’s party easily wins parliamentary election

Ethiopia’s Prosperity Party has comfortably won another parliamentary majority in this month’s elections, with Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed set to keep the top job.

The Nobel Peace Prize winner had been widely expected to win the national elections as his Prosperity Party candidates campaigned on the government’s economic record and on improving food security in a country that has experienced several famines in the past.

Abiy, who was appointed in 2018 following mass protests against the long-ruling Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF) coalition, created the Prosperity Party the following year. The party won more than 90 percent of the available seats in the last parliamentary elections in 2021.

The Ethiopian leader received widespread praise at home and around the world for freeing journalists, activists, and other political prisoners and revoking bans on many political parties after taking power. He was honoured with the Nobel Peace Prize in 2019 for ending hostilities with neighbouring Eritrea.

But his opponents and human rights activists accuse his government of reversing those gains in ⁠recent years by detaining journalists and shutting down civil society groups.

Ethiopia has faced years of violent unrest in several of the country’s ethnically organised regions, including Abiy’s native Oromia, Ethiopia’s largest, and the second-biggest region, Amhara, where a militia known as Fano has seized swathes of the countryside since 2023.

A civil war in the northern Tigray region from 2020-2022, which stemmed from a breakdown in relations between Abiy and the Tigrayan leaders who dominated national politics before his rise, ⁠resulted in hundreds of thousands of deaths, researchers say.

Though a 2022 peace deal ended the conflict, Tigray’s main political party moved in May to reassert control over the region’s political administration in violation of the agreement. That has led Ethiopian officials and analysts to warn of the risk of fresh unrest.

The elections were not held in Tigray, one of Ethiopia’s 12 regions, because of what the electoral board called “unfavourable conditions” there.

Abiy’s government projects economic growth of over 10 percent in 2026, one of the fastest rates in Africa.