Ethiopia held its seventh General Election on 1 June 2026. The process followed the Ethiopian Electoral, Political Parties Registration and Election’s Code of Conduct (Amendment) Proclamation No. 1394/2025 and other relevant laws. More than forty opposition parties registered and the African Union (AU) and The Intergovernmental Authority on Development (IGAD) sent observer missions. The National Election Board of Ethiopia (NEBE) announced results on 21 June 2026 which confirmed that the ruling Prosperity Party (PP) won 438 of 486 contested seats which is about ninety percent (National Election Board of Ethiopia, 2026).
This analysis asks: To what extent did Ethiopia’s 2026 General Election produce democratic legitimacy when significant parts of the country remained affected by insecurity and when political competition had been substantially weakened before the vote? The central argument is that the 2026 election provided the Prosperity Party (PP) with a legal electoral victory but a more limited democratic mandate. The legitimacy problem did not emerge only from the conduct of election day; it resulted from the interaction between long-term insecurity, restricted political competition, and the transformation of Ethiopia’s party system after 2019.
Historical Context: Ethiopia’s Political Transition after 2018
The legitimacy challenges surrounding the 2026 election are rooted in the political transition that followed the rise of Abiy Ahmed in 2018. His early reforms created expectations of democratic opening through the release of political prisoners, engagement with previously excluded actors, and commitments to political reform. However, the transition also intensified existing tensions over Ethiopia’s federal structure, the balance between ethnic autonomy and central authority, and the future organisation of the state.
A defining moment came in 2019 when Abiy Ahmed dissolved the Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF) coalition and established the Prosperity Party (PP). The reform was presented by the government as an effort to move beyond ethnic-based political organisation and create a more unified national party. However, critics argued that the restructuring reduced the institutional space available for regional political forces and strengthened executive centralisation (Aalen, 2020).
The Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF) refusal to join the Prosperity Party (PP) marked a major political rupture. The dispute between the federal government and Tigray authorities escalated into armed conflict in 2020, fundamentally altering Ethiopia’s political landscape. Although the Pretoria Agreement ended the main phase of the war in 2022, subsequent conflicts in Amhara and Oromia demonstrated that the relationship between state authority, regional power, and political inclusion remained unresolved.
Legitimacy as an Analytical Standard
Max Weber described legitimate authority as power accepted as rightful by those subject to it, distinguishing it from authority based only on coercion or domination (Weber, 1978). Under this framework, elections are important because they provide a mechanism through which governments claim public consent. However, an electoral victory alone does not guarantee legitimacy if the conditions necessary for meaningful participation and competition are absent.
Democratic theory similarly emphasises that elections require both participation and contestation. Dahl’s concept of polyarchy identifies inclusive participation and genuine political competition as essential features of democratic governance (Dahl, 1971). Therefore, assessing Ethiopia’s 2026 election requires examining two questions: whether citizens across the country were able to participate in selecting their government, and whether voters had access to credible political alternatives.
The following sections examine these two dimensions by analysing insecurity and exclusion first, followed by the weakening of opposition competition and the broader restructuring of Ethiopia’s political system.
1. Insecurity and Exclusion
Ethiopia has not experienced a sustained period of national stability since the political transition began in 2018. The Tigray war between 2020 and 2022 represented the most severe manifestation of this instability, resulting in mass displacement, extensive humanitarian suffering, and the destruction of civilian infrastructure (Council on Foreign Relations, 2025). Although the Pretoria Agreement ended large-scale hostilities between the federal government and the TPLF, it did not fully resolve wider disputes over political authority, regional autonomy, and security control. Armed confrontations involving Fano militias in Amhara and the Oromo Liberation Army (OLA) insurgency in Oromia demonstrate that state authority remains uneven across several strategically important regions (Council on Foreign Relations, 2025).
These security challenges have direct implications for electoral legitimacy because democratic elections depend on the state’s ability to provide equal opportunities for political participation. Where insecurity prevents citizens from accessing polling stations, organising politically, or participating safely, the resulting vote represents only those areas where electoral institutions can operate effectively.
The national election board of Ethiopia (NEBE) security classification ruled out voting in 46 constituencies, including all 38 in Tigray. On election day, insecurity closed 143 more polling stations in Amhara and Oromia. The exclusion of these areas is particularly significant because Tigray, Amhara, and Oromia are not peripheral political spaces. They represent some of Ethiopia’s largest populations and have historically played central roles in national politics. The inability to conduct voting across these regions therefore creates a representational gap between the electorate that participated and the wider population that the government claims to govern.
Democratic practice assumes that a government’s mandate comes from the country as a whole, not from whichever regions happened to be secure enough to vote. When millions of people in Tigray, Amhara, and Oromia could not take part, the result reflected only the part of the population the state could safely reach, not the population. This makes the election’s legitimacy questionable, and without legitimacy, it is difficult to conclude that the election was conducted under full democratic practice. A government can hold a lawful election and still fall short of showing that its right to rule has been agreed to by the country it governs.
This distinction between electoral administration and political legitimacy is central to understanding Ethiopia’s situation. A state may successfully organise polling procedures, count votes, and produce official results while still facing questions about whether the election captured nationwide consent. In divided political environments, territorial exclusion is not merely an administrative problem; it becomes a question about whose political preferences are included in the formation of state authority.
The Ethiopian case also illustrates a broader challenge in post-conflict states: elections can become instruments of political consolidation before underlying conflicts over inclusion and state legitimacy have been resolved. Rather than functioning only as mechanisms for accountability, elections held amid unresolved insecurity may reinforce existing power structures while leaving excluded populations politically disconnected from the state.
2. A Weakened Opposition and the Decline of Electoral Competition
Forty-eight parties were accredited for the 2026 election. Theoretically speaking this looks like real pluralism but in practice, none competed seriously with the Prosperity Party (PP), which won 438 seats and ran unopposed in 64 of 547 constituencies. The strongest opposition party, EZEMA, won only 13 seats. This can also be traced back to 2019 where Abiy Ahmed dissolved the ruling Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF) coalition and merged its ethnic-based regional parties into a single organization, the Prosperity Party. Only the TPLF refused to join, and it later became the government’s principal armed rival rather than an electoral one.
The creation of the Prosperity Party (PP) represented not only an organisational change but also a transformation of Ethiopia’s political competition. The Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF) system had been criticised for restricting democratic competition, but it nevertheless provided regional parties with established structures, networks, and political identities. The replacement of this coalition with a single national party altered the institutional environment in which opposition actors operated.
This merger absorbed the organizational base that regional opposition movements would otherwise have built on. In 2021, major opposition parties, including the Oromo Federalist Congress and the Oromo Liberation Front, boycotted the election, while figures such as Eskinder Nega, Jawar Mohammed, and Bekele Gerba were imprisoned before voting took place. By the time the 2026 election arrived, the parties capable of building a serious challenge had already been absorbed, deregistered, or removed through arrest.
From this perspective, the Prosperity Party’s (PP) overwhelming victory should be analysed as the product of both electoral support and structural advantage. The result may reflect genuine support among sections of the population, but the absence of a strong competing political force limits the extent to which the election can demonstrate broad-based democratic choice.
The next section examines how Abiy Ahmed’s Medemer philosophy shaped this political transformation and how the relationship between national unity, party consolidation, and centralisation influenced Ethiopia’s evolving political system.
Medemer, Political Centralisation, and Ethiopia’s Changing Party System
The political restructuring that followed 2019 was closely connected to Abiy Ahmed’s philosophy of Medemer, which emphasises unity, cooperation, and moving beyond Ethiopia’s historical divisions. Supporters of Medemer argue that Ethiopia’s ethnic-based political system contributed to fragmentation and that a stronger national political identity is necessary for stability and development. However, critics argue that the practical implementation of this vision has strengthened central government authority at the expense of Ethiopia’s federal political pluralism (Aalen, 2020).
The Prosperity Party (PP) became the institutional vehicle for this vision. By replacing the Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF) coalition with a single national party, the government sought to reduce ethnic competition within the ruling system. However, this transformation also narrowed the political space available for actors who viewed ethnic federalism and regional autonomy as essential mechanisms for representation. The tension between national integration and political inclusion has therefore become one of the defining features of Ethiopia’s post-2019 political order.
From a democratic legitimacy perspective, the issue is not whether Medemer is desirable as a political philosophy, but whether its institutional consequences have expanded or restricted meaningful competition. Political systems require mechanisms through which different social groups can organise and express competing interests. When political consolidation reduces those mechanisms, elections may continue to occur while the quality of democratic competition declines.
Election Observation and the Limits of Procedural Validation
The presence of international election observers from organisations such as the African Union (AU) and Intergovernmental Authority on Development (IGAD) provided an important external assessment of Ethiopia’s electoral process. However, election observation primarily evaluates procedural aspects, including voting procedures, administration, transparency, and compliance with electoral rules. It does not automatically determine whether an election has resolved deeper questions of political legitimacy.
A technically well-managed election can still face legitimacy challenges if significant populations cannot participate or if political competition occurs under unequal conditions. International observation therefore provides evidence about the conduct of an election, but it cannot by itself establish that citizens had a fully inclusive and meaningful choice.
This distinction is particularly relevant in Ethiopia, where the main challenges were not limited to polling procedures. The deeper issues concerned insecurity, political exclusion, and the imbalance between the ruling party and opposition forces. Procedural approval and democratic legitimacy overlap, but they are not identical concepts.
Conclusion
The distinction between procedural legality and substantive legitimacy remains a central challenge for contemporary electoral governance in post-conflict states. While the 2026 Ethiopian election satisfied specific statutory codes, it failed to fulfill the primary conditions necessary to establish unquestioned democratic authority. On the first count, systemic insecurity across Tigray, Amhara, and Oromia effectively disenfranchised major demographic centers, meaning the vote could not capture the consent of a population the state structurally could not reach. On the second count, the historical hollowing out and containment of independent political organisations since 2019 ensured that the choices available to the electorate were heavily narrowed and non-competitive.
Consequently, the Prosperity Party’s (PP)decisive victory serves as an indicator of administrative capacity and state security rather than a comprehensive expression of popular consent. The broader strategic implication demonstrates that in transitioning states marred by internal conflict, electoral continuity does not equate to democratic consolidation; without foundational security and genuine institutional competition, elections confirm formal governmental authority while leaving the underlying questions of political legitimacy fundamentally unresolved.
References
Aalen, L. (2020). The revolutionary democracy of Ethiopia: A public sphere perspective. Brill.
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Council on Foreign Relations. (2025). Conflict in Ethiopia. Global Conflict Tracker. https://www.cfr.org/global-conflict-tracker/conflict/conflict-ethiopia
Dahl, R. A. (1971). Polyarchy: Participation and opposition. Yale University Press.
Ethiopian News Agency. (2026, June 21). Ethiopia’s peaceful seventh general election marks major democratic progress, says African Union. https://www.ena.et/web/eng/w/eng_9073947
National Election Board of Ethiopia. (2026). Election results. https://nebe.org.et/en/electionresult
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