This article assesses political developments in Ethiopia after its 2005 federal and regional watershed elections. Although an unprecedented liberalisation took place ahead of the contested and controversial 2005 polls, a crack-down occurred in the wake of the elections, when the opposition was neutralised. Subsequently, the government rolled out a deliberate plan to prevent any future large-scale protest against their grip on power by establishing an elaborate administrative structure of control, developing new legislative instruments of suppression and, finally, curbing any electoral opposition as seen in the conduct of the 2008 local elections. As a result, Ethiopia has by 2008 returned firmly into the camp of authoritarian regimes.
Considering the widespread pre-election interest and excitement the 2005 election attracted, and the vigorous role played by the opposition both during the campaign and in the post-election turmoil, the 2010 process was a huge let-down. The general impression among Ethiopians was that the outcome was a foregone conclusion, so the electorate was rather passively, or perhaps reluctantly, following the campaign and election discourse. The only excitement was related to how overwhelmingly the incumbent Ethiopian Peoples Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF) would win; the general guesstimate was that the huge opposition gains in the 2005 elections, giving them one-third of the seats in the House of Representatives, would be pushed back in order for EPRDF to secure a solid victory of between 75-85 percent of the seats. It thus raised some eyebrows both domestically and internationally when the National Election Board of Ethiopia (NEBE) declared that EPRDF had secured 99.6 percent of the seats in Parliamentall but two, one going to the opposition and one to an EPRDF-friendly independent candidate.What happened in the 2010 electoral process, or before, that can explain the radical setback for the opposition and the total victory of EPRDF? Does the election outcome represent the genuine will of the Ethiopian electorate? Is it true, as Prime Minister Meles Zenawi asserts, that EPRDF actually is that popular? This briefing offers three broad categories, each with three sets of interconnected and reinforcing factors, explaining the shift of political climate in Ethiopia since the 2005 elections, making sense of the 'better-than-Soviet-style' 2010 election result. First, however, a brief background to Ethiopia's electoral transition is presented and an analysis of the political context prior to the run-up to the *Kjetil Tronvoll (kjetil.tronvoll@nchr.uio.no) is Professor of Human Rights, University of Oslo, Norway.
The journey of nation-building is long and complicated. Even though
the
bases of Eritrean nationalism have been firmly established through our
long
liberation struggle, it has yet to be concluded. It is known that to build
[a]
peaceful and rich country is the hardest, and more complicated than to
get
success in war. The National Charter of Eritrea, EPLF (1994)
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.