Addis Ababa, Ethiopia – Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed has been locked in a bitter dispute with the political party that used to dominate the country’s politics for decades, raising questions about his ability to hold Ethiopia together through a fraught political transition.
On October 7, legislators at Ethiopia’s upper house of Parliament – known as the House of Federation (HoF) – voted to withhold budgetary subsidies to the Tigray regional state in the country’s north.
The move by the HoF, which is dominated by allies of Abiy, came two days after Tigray’s regional leaders – and Abiy’s political rivals – decided to recall their representatives at the federal level.
Tensions were already running high since September when the Tigray region held an election in defiance of a decision by central authorities earlier this year to postpone all parliamentary and regional elections scheduled for August due to the coronavirus pandemic.
Abiy’s opponents said the postponement was a move by the prime minister to prolong his rule and pressed ahead with the election, in which the Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF) – the dominant political force in the Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF), a multi-ethnic, four-party coalition that had run the country for almost 30 years – won a landslide victory.
The TPLF had already split from the EPRDF in 2019 when it refused to merge along with the three other coalition parties into the newly formed Prosperity Party (PP) under Abiy.
The HoF, however, declared the September 9 vote null and void, indicating the new Tigray regional assembly will not be recognised by the federal government.
The latest moves, seen as part of a campaign of mutual de-legitimisation, have sparked fears the political turmoil could spiral into a security crisis, the latest challenge to the federal system that stitches Ethiopia’s more than 80 ethnic groups together.
Wondimu Asaminew, a former diplomat and currently the head of the Tigray Friendship Liaison Office based in the Tigray regional capital of Mekelle, is adamant the federal government in Addis Ababa is to blame for the current situation.
“Abiy’s team, from the start, had a strategy of trying to sideline, make irrelevant and even criminalise TPLF,” Wondimu said.
