The ballots have been counted, the victory speech delivered, and the champagne bottles (or their local equivalent) uncorked. But for those of us who have watched history’s pattern of hubris and calamity, Ethiopia’s latest electoral farce sends a chill down the spine. Abiy Ahmed has secured a landslide, his party claiming over 400 seats in a parliament of 547.
The usual platitudes have been trotted out: ‘a triumph for democracy’, ‘the will of the people’. Let us call it what it is: a dangerous consolidation of power in a nation that is—I do not need to remind you—a volatile collection of ethnic factions, historical grievances, and mutual suspicion. The opposition boycotted.
The Tigray region, still smouldering from a two-year war, was barely represented. And London, in its reflexively paternalistic style, has ‘urged restraint’. Restraint?
One wonders if the Foreign Office has any sense of the powder keg they are urging to be handled with care. The parallels to the late Roman Republic are stark: central authority expanding, local loyalties hardening, and an emperor-pretender promising order while inadvertently stoking the fires of identity. The tragedy is that Ethiopia, once a symbol of anti-colonial resistance, now seems destined to repeat the ethnic bloodletting of the 1990s Balkans.
Abiy’s ambition is not matched by his control over the country’s fractious regions. His reformist reputation is tarnished by the brutal war in Tigray. The landslide is not an endorsement; it is a warning.
The spectre of ethnic bloodshed is not a distant fear; it is the inevitable outcome of a state that pretends to be a nation. History, gentlemen, is not a series of accidents. It is a ledger of consequences.
And this electoral avalanche is writing the next tragic chapter.