Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed’s Prosperity Party \u200bwon another large parliamentary majority in\u00a0this month’s elections, results released by the national election board on Sunday \u200cshowed.<\/p>\n
Abiy, whose party had been widely expected to dominate the elections against a fragmented opposition, was appointed in 2018 following mass protests against the long-ruling EPRDF coalition. He created the Prosperity Party the following year.<\/p>\n
Abiy’s party won 438 seats, roughly 90% of those for which results \u200bwere announced at a ceremony broadcast on Facebook. It needed 274 to secure a majority.<\/p>\n
Not all the \u200blower house of parliament’s 547 seats were up for grabs, as voting did not happen in \u2060the Tigray region and some parts of Amhara.<\/p>\n
At the last elections in 2021 the Prosperity Party won a similar \u200bpercentage of the available seats.<\/p>\n
ABIY HAS CONSOLIDATED POWER DESPITE INSURGENCIES<\/strong><\/p>\n The Prosperity Party replaced an often unwieldy multi-party coalition that governed \u200bEthiopia for more than a quarter-century and has helped Abiy, 49, to consolidate his grip on national politics even as he has faced violent opposition in some of the country’s largest regions.<\/p>\n Prosperity Party candidates this time touted improved food security and strong economic growth in Africa’s \u200bsecond-most populous country that officials forecast will top 10% in 2026, one of the fastest rates on the continent.<\/p>\n More than \u200b50 million people were registered to vote, but there was no election in the northern Tigray region, where organisers had cited “unfavourable conditions” \u200cin the \u2060aftermath of a two-year civil war and amid continuing political turmoil.<\/p>\n The government also faces insurgencies in the country’s two biggest regions, connected to grievances among different ethnic groups about alleged marginalisation within Ethiopia’s federal system.<\/p>\n NO VOTING IN SOME PARTS OF COUNTRY<\/strong><\/p>\n In Abiy’s native Oromiya in the south, fighting between government forces and the Oromo Liberation Army separatist group has killed \u200bhundreds of people in the \u200bpast few years.<\/p>\n In neighbouring Amhara, \u2060a militia known as Fano has captured swathes of the countryside since 2023. As a result, voting did not take place in at least eight of Amhara’s 138 constituencies.<\/p>\n Though a \u200b2022 peace deal ended the civil war in Tigray, which researchers say caused hundreds \u200bof thousands of \u2060deaths, a move last month by the main political party there to reassert control over the region’s political administration led Ethiopian officials and analysts to warn of the risk of fresh unrest.<\/p>\n Opposition parties accuse the federal government of undermining them by arresting \u2060their leaders \u200band imposing legal roadblocks to their political activities, charges denied by the \u200bgovernment.<\/p>\n Reuters has not been able to report from inside Ethiopia since mid-February, when the Ethiopian Media Authority declined to renew the accreditation for its three \u200bAddis Ababa-based journalists.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed’s Prosperity Party \u200bwon another large parliamentary majority in\u00a0this month’s elections, results released by the national election board on Sunday \u200cshowed. Abiy, whose party had been widely expected to dominate the elections against a fragmented opposition, was appointed in 2018 following mass protests against the long-ruling EPRDF coalition. He created the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":14545,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"iawp_total_views":4,"jnews-multi-image_gallery":[],"jnews_single_post":{"format":"standard","override":[{"template":"1","parallax":"1","fullscreen":"1","layout":"right-sidebar","sidebar":"default-sidebar","second_sidebar":"default-sidebar","sticky_sidebar":"1","share_position":"top","share_float_style":"share-monocrhome","show_featured":"1","show_post_meta":"1","show_post_author_image":"1","show_post_date":"1","post_date_format":"default","post_date_format_custom":"Y\/m\/d","show_post_reading_time":"0","post_reading_time_wpm":"300","post_calculate_word_method":"str_word_count","show_zoom_button":"0","zoom_button_out_step":"2","zoom_button_in_step":"3","show_post_tag":"1","show_comment_section":"1","number_popup_post":"1","show_post_related":"1","show_inline_post_related":"1"}],"image_override":[{"single_post_thumbnail_size":"crop-500","single_post_gallery_size":"crop-500"}],"trending_post_position":"meta","trending_post_label":"Trending","sponsored_post_label":"Sponsored by","disable_ad":"0","source_name":"Reuters","subtitle":""},"jnews_primary_category":[],"jnews_social_meta":[],"jnews_override_counter":{"view_counter_number":"0","share_counter_number":"0","like_counter_number":"0","dislike_counter_number":"0"},"footnotes":""},"categories":[29,2362,33],"tags":[124,114,4060],"class_list":["post-21194","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-east-africa","category-featured","category-politics","tag-abiy-ahmed","tag-ethiopia","tag-prosperity-party"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/qiraatafrican.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21194","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/qiraatafrican.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/qiraatafrican.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/qiraatafrican.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/qiraatafrican.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=21194"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/qiraatafrican.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21194\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":21195,"href":"https:\/\/qiraatafrican.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21194\/revisions\/21195"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/qiraatafrican.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/14545"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/qiraatafrican.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=21194"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/qiraatafrican.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=21194"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/qiraatafrican.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=21194"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}