When Abiy Ahmed swept to victory in Ethiopia’s elections last week, the streets of Addis Ababa were quiet. No parades. No jubilant crowds. Just a flat, knowing silence. The Prime Minister’s Prosperity Party won 410 of the 436 parliamentary seats, a landslide that, on paper, looks like a mandate. But in the highlands of Tigray, in the dusty towns of Oromia, people are stockpiling rice and checking the batteries in their radios. They’ve seen this before.
What troubles the British Foreign Office – which issued a carefully-worded call for ‘restraint’ this morning – is not the victory itself, but the map of the boycott. The Tigray People’s Liberation Front, the party that once ruled Ethiopia with an iron fist, did not even bother to field candidates. In Oromia, where anti-government protests have simmered for years, turnout was barely 30 per cent. A landslide, yes, but only in the places where people still believe the ballot box matters.
The human cost of this political geography is already visible. In the refugee camps of Sudan, where Tigrayan families have fled since the war began in 2020, there is no celebration. ‘A vote is a piece of paper,’ one woman told me via a crackling phone line. ‘It cannot bring back my son.’ Her words echo a deeper truth: that democracy, when imposed on a landscape of ethnic grievance, becomes a weapon.
Class dynamics, too, play their part. In Addis Ababa’s cafes, the urban elite sip macchiatos and discuss the prime minister’s ambitious infrastructure projects. In the countryside, farmers worry about the next harvest, the next raid, the next time their village might be cut off by a militia checkpoint. The disconnect is staggering. It’s as if two different Ethiopias exist in the same time zone.
Britain’s plea for restraint is a diplomatic nicety, a way of saying ‘please don’t let this spiral into another war’ without admitting that the spiral has already begun. The real conversation, the one that matters, is happening in the market squares and village councils where trust in the state has long since evaporated. The landslide doesn’t solve that. It merely confirms it.
As dusk falls over the Horn of Africa, a strange calm settles. It is the calm before the storm, the quiet that comes when people have decided that words no longer work. The UK can urge restraint until it is blue in the face. The only thing that will stop the next war is a reckoning with the one already buried, alive, under the rubble of the last one.