Addis Abeba — In my recent article, titled "Ancient Pride, Modern Paralysis: Deciphering Ethiopia's Long Struggle for Democracy," published by Addis Standard, I examined the successive regimes that have governed Ethiopia and the deeper societal patterns that continue to reproduce democratic failures. I argued that these failures stem from a legacy of inherited rather than reconstructed power and from a political culture shaped more by domination than negotiation--dynamics that extend from the household to the battlefield.
Discover moreEthiopian election coverageNewsEthiopian political analysis This article constitutes the second part of the series, focusing on organised political opposition and a pattern that complicates narratives placing sole responsibility for Ethiopia's failure to establish competitive politics on the ruling party. Opposition movements have not merely been victims of state repression. At critical moments when they possessed significant political leverage, their own strategic decisions--including ideological rigidity, internal rivalries, and an inability to build sustainable coalitions--also contributed to the restoration of centralised power, alongside the impact of state crackdowns.
Part Two explores three additional questions: Why have organised opposition movements repeatedly failed to transform moments of political leverage into lasting influence? What do Ethiopia's institutions--including the judiciary, electoral system, and economy--reveal upon closer examination? And what, if anything, distinguishes the current political moment from previous periods?
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Addis Ababa guide The failure to establish competitive politics is not an exclusively Ethiopian phenomenon, which is precisely why it warrants serious examination rather than dismissal. Exclusionary elite governance, patronage networks, and weak institutional accountability are widely documented features of post-authoritarian transitions, and Ethiopia's opposition movements have not been immune to these challenges. Alliances among both opposition groups and ruling actors have frequently been shaped as much by competition for political power and access to resources as by genuine commitments to accountability. This helps explain why political transitions in Ethiopia have so rarely produced meaningful changes in political culture.
An organisation's success is often measured by its ability to gain office, mobilise support, and control resources before it is evaluated against democratic principles. When these incentives define both governing parties and those seeking power, replacing one political actor with another may alter leadership but leave the underlying political culture largely unchanged.
From EPRP and MEISON to Today: The unfinished struggle for competitive politics
The first and bloodiest instance came in the mid-1970s, when the two main civilian movements that had helped topple the emperor, the Ethiopian People's Revolutionary Party (EPRP) and the All-Ethiopia Socialist Movement, known by its native acronym MEISON, turned on each other rather than on the military junta both claimed to oppose. MEISON allied with the Derg to isolate the EPRP; the EPRP responded with urban assassinations of Derg officials and MEISON cadres. The Derg then destroyed both in turn. Two of the only civilian forces with a genuine national following spent their leverage fighting each other, and Mengistu Haile Mariam consolidated personal control as a direct result.
News subscription service The second instance did not require a hostile ruling party to succeed, only a divided opposition to fail on its own. In 2005, the Coalition for Unity and Democracy (CUD), also known as Kinijit, ran an unusually strong campaign, sweeping every seat in Addis Abeba and coming within reach of a national majority. Its leadership then split over whether to take up the seats it had won or boycott them in protest of alleged fraud; hardliners favouring boycott prevailed, followed by unrest, a crackdown that killed 193 people and led to more than 30,000 arrests, and the coalition's own disintegration. Kinijit did not lose its opening because the Ethiopian People's Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF) out-argued it. It lost an opportunity it had already created because it could not resolve a fundamental disagreement over how to use its electoral gains.
Discover moreWorld news updatesAddis Ababa guideAfricans & DiasporaLocal NewsMedia freedom advocacyNational dialogue resourcesEthiopia travel guidePolitical imprisonment memoirsIndependent media support What connects these episodes is not simply bad luck or the hostility of the state. It is also a recurring weakness inside opposition movements: the failure to build organisations capable of managing disagreement before political competition becomes a struggle for survival. Leadership often centralises early, while dissent is treated as disloyalty rather than as an ordinary feature of coalition politics. Organisational discipline becomes more important than mechanisms for debate, compromise and succession. The result is a movement that may mobilise people effectively but cannot necessarily survive disagreement among its leaders. EPRP and MEISON had ideology and political reach but no mechanism for resolving their conflict short of violence. Kinijit had popular support but could not survive a strategic disagreement over how to use its electoral gains. The circumstances were different; the organisational failure was strikingly similar. But this is only half of the problem. Opposition weakness cannot be separated from the political environment in which opposition parties operate. A fragmented opposition makes it easier for a ruling party to dominate; a restricted political environment, in turn, makes it harder for opposition organisations to develop the experience, resources and internal institutions needed to compete effectively. The two problems therefore reinforce each other. One cannot be used to excuse the other: opposition parties must learn to manage disagreement democratically, while governments must allow genuine political competition to take place.
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Ruling parties in Ethiopia have rarely had to defeat a unified opposition."
The pattern is visible again in the 2026 election. Opposition parties faced both sides of this problem at once: the difficulty of organising coherent political alternatives and the narrowing of the space in which those alternatives could compete. The Oromo Federalist Congress struggled to organise outside Addis Abeba; Balderas faced a raid on its headquarters and challenges to its political activities; and several smaller parties divided a vote that was already difficult to translate into seats under the first-past-the-post system. These parties cannot simply be understood as passive victims of state repression, even where state pressure was real. Their organisational weaknesses and strategic divisions also mattered. But neither should those weaknesses obscure the structural constraints imposed on political competition.
Political science courses The pattern is not confined to national politics either: Addis Standard's coverage of post-war Tigray describes an opposition that is "fragmented, organisationally weak, and strategically hesitant", unable to convert public frustration with the TPLF into a credible alternative -- the same dynamic playing out one level down.
The June 2026 election illustrates the structural half of that dynamic in granular detail. Record registration figures reflect something real. But in Tigray, the region's dominant party was formally deregistered by NEBE in May 2025, excluding its people from representation as well as security--an exclusion that Addis Standard's election-year reporting has described Tigray as facing "elections without participation, once again". This raises a broader problem: when one party stands in for an entire region, and representation becomes tied to monopoly rather than competition, democracy is weakened rather than strengthened. The exclusion was not confined to Tigray: the Oromo Federalist Congress could not safely campaign outside Addis Abeba, Balderas saw its headquarters raided, and the Ethiopian Social Democratic Party was removed by court ruling days before voting began. The point is not to endorse or reject any single deregistration in the abstract, but rather to show that once competition is narrowed through legal or administrative means, the result is managed exclusion, not impartial governance. The irregularities were not incidental. They were structural. A process narrowed before the first ballot was cast will not produce a surprising result once the last one is counted.
Addis Ababa guide This is where the two halves of Ethiopia's problem meet. An opposition movement that cannot manage internal disagreement may destroy its own chances of competing. But a ruling system that restricts the organisations capable of competing removes the incentives and opportunities for opposition movements to become stronger. Fragmentation then becomes both a cause and a consequence of political exclusion.
More broadly, the analysis should distinguish between representation and monopoly. If a party claims to speak for a region by default, especially in a system built around ethnic quotas or regionalised power, it can end up reproducing the very authoritarian logic democracy is meant to overcome -- the TPLF standing in for Tigray is one version of this; the Prosperity Party's near-total seat count nationally is another, larger-scale version of the identical logic. The question is not whether one political actor "deserves" to be questioned more than another, but whether any political actor, anywhere in the system, should be allowed to convert historical identity or historical struggle into permanent political entitlement.
Why regimes change but political culture endures
There is a sentence worth returning to: the problems we face today are problems our ancestors also faced. It sounds as though we are stuck in a time machine without the ability to change ourselves and this is analytically true, not merely a rhetorical flourish. Every society accumulates structures that then limit what is possible; progress happens when a society can muster the collective will to reshape structures that are failing it. Ethiopia has never managed this. We have changed regimes many times. We have not changed the regime of our political imagination.
The student uprisings against Haile Selassie produced genuinely brave organisers and also the Derg, a junta that hijacked their revolution. The EPRDF fighters who defeated the Derg were, many of them, motivated by authentic hunger for justice; within a decade they had built a one-party state. Abiy Ahmed came to power in 2018 on a wave of jubilation, made peace with Eritrea, and won the Nobel Prize; within two years the country was at war with one of its own regions. The cycle reflects a political culture that does not know how to sustain institutions or distribute power without hoarding it.
The capacity to forgo an immediate reward for a larger future benefit is foundational to institution-building, which requires consistent investment and restraint from those who hold power in the present. A political culture orientated toward present-time rewards will always struggle to build durable institutions, a pattern Habtamu Wondimu's 1989 study of gratification patterns among peasants and workers measured directly, comparing how strongly people preferred an immediate reward over a larger, delayed one. Although the study is old, its central insight remains relevant in 2026. This is not a condemnation of any group; it is a structural challenge that education and sustained civic investment can address, but only if made honestly. They have not been.
Democracy Deficit: Elections without accountability
Democracy is not simply a voting mechanism. It is a culture of accountability, a set of shared expectations that power will answer to those it governs and that losing an election is not an existential threat requiring armed response. Ethiopia has none of these things in stable supply. Freedom House's 2025 report dropped Ethiopia's political rights score to zero, noting that detentions and restrictions have left the opposition virtually no ability to engage in meaningful political activity. We have constitutions without enforcement and citizens who have learned to navigate this landscape through private opinions and public silences.
Foreign policy news One more structural condition deserves naming, since accounts that focus only on elections and institutions tend to leave it out: the economy. Young Ethiopians are being asked to build a political future within. Headline growth looks strong, but youth unemployment has hovered near 27% even as the topline economy expanded -- leaving many of the same young people registering to vote in record numbers with little material stake in the system they are being asked to legitimise. Addis Standard has warned that this combination of elite excess and youth economic desperation risks becoming its own "looming lesson" if the gap is left to widen. Democratic reform and economic inclusion are not separate projects; in a country this young, they are the same project, viewed from two different rooms.
The judiciary illustrates the pattern with unusual clarity. Ethiopia's constitution assigns final authority over constitutional interpretation not to any court but to the House of the Federation, a political body advised only by a non-binding council, meaning there is no independent judicial forum empowered to strike down a law that violates the constitution it is sworn to uphold, as Ethiopian legal scholars cited by Addis Standard have also argued. When the federal government postponed the 2020 election, and Tigray proceeded with its own vote anyway, no court existed to adjudicate the resulting standoff, only politics, and then war. A judiciary that cannot rule on the legality of the government's own conduct is not a check on power. It is a witness to it.
Political science courses None of this makes Ethiopia exceptional, even if it feels like a uniquely Ethiopian failure. The V-Dem Institute's 2026 Democracy Report found that autocracies now outnumber democracies worldwide for the second consecutive year, with the average person living under a level of democracy that has fallen back to roughly 1978. Ahead of Tanzania's October 2025 election, that country's electoral commission barred the main opposition party after its leader was charged with treason, in a country governed by a single dominant party since before most of its voters were born. The specific instruments differ, deregistration here, a disputed code of conduct there, but the underlying grammar is the same: a ruling party secure enough in its advantages to make opposition participation conditional on rules it alone controls. This is not offered as comfort. It is a correction to the idea that what is happening here is a peculiarly Ethiopian pathology when it is a regional and global one.
The exclusion of entire regions from the June 2026 election is a continuation, not an anomaly. Tigray's unresolved territorial disputes, Amhara's armed conflict, and Oromia's counterinsurgency campaigns, these are not footnotes to a democratic exercise. They are the text. And here is what is most devastating: the international community watches, issues statements of concern, and continues doing business. Ethiopia's strategic importance in the Horn of Africa gives it an immunity our leaders have learned to exploit faster than we have learned to resist.
Uncertain future, unfinished hope
Some honesty is due about where this argument arrives, after years of watching this country and this pattern. There is little reason to expect that the next election will be substantially different from this one, or that a change in leadership alone will produce a change in political culture. Every framework tried so far, ethnic federalism, unitary nationalism, ethnically blind universalism, has been captured and weaponised by whichever group momentarily controls it. Scholars disagree about why: some, like Lovise Aalen, argue ethnic federalism itself was never genuinely decentralised, only centrally administered through a dominant party that never intended to share power, meaning the failure belongs to the execution, not the framework. Which reading is correct remains open. But it matters for what comes next: if the framework is the problem, a different one is needed; if a party's centralised grip on it is the problem, what is needed is less centre and more federalism, not less.
But ending on that note would be a mistake, because it is not where the evidence actually leads. Fanon argued that liberation could not be a programme handed down from new leaders -- it had to be a practice, built in the ordinary spaces where people govern themselves. One of Ethiopia's indigenous systems of governance did not disappear; it persisted at the margins of a state that never fully absorbed it and is now internationally recognised as exactly the accountable, term-limited governance Ethiopia's centre has never built. The system's own custodians have said as much directly: when unrest spread through Oromia, the Union of the Oromo Gadaa Councils publicly offered to help seek solutions rather than being consulted as one -- an inheritance volunteering itself, largely unanswered. The young people registering to vote in record numbers are not naive; they are early. And the gap between how many women sit in parliament and how much power they actually hold is not only an indictment -- it is a legible, fixable target, precisely because it is so exactly measured.
Ethiopia has changed regimes many times but not the regime of its political imagination."Foreign policy news
There is little reason to expect the diaspora to deliver change through remittance and commentary alone -- it has too often funded conflict instead, pouring money into armed factions that mirror its members' ethnic loyalties. And it is not only money: diaspora-run outlets that shaped much of the homeland's political conversation built their editorial identities around the same ethnic loyalties, rewarding emotional solidarity over professional restraint. The diaspora is not simply an external actor bankrolling a homeland pathology; in its media life at least, it has reproduced that same pathology at a comfortable distance from its consequences. But a diaspora capable of that mobilisation is also capable of a different one, and some of it already is: the same networks that have funded factions have also funded independent journalism and civic education.
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Fairness requires acknowledging what infrastructure actually means in a country where it has been scarce for so long; visible physical improvement is a legitimate form of dignity, and that recognition is owed plainly. But dignity delivered without consent is a contradiction that undoes itself. We have seen what that looks like: grand boulevards carved through neighbourhoods where families lived for generations, evicted overnight, and never treated as parties to the decision. A government that improves the physical environment while leaving residents uncertain until the bulldozers arrive has not dignified them; it has redecorated over them. That outcome will not be easily reversed -- but naming it precisely, rather than accepting either "corruption" in the abstract or "development" in the celebratory sense the government prefers, is itself a form of the political education Fanon thought is indispensable.
Political science courses Conclusion: Long road to democratic renewal
Why make an argument this bleak? The diagnosis matters even when the prognosis is uncertain. A society that cannot name its disease cannot begin to treat it. We spend enormous energy attributing our failures to the correct villain -- the current prime minister, the previous party, and the ethnic group currently in power. All of these attributions contain partial truth. None is the whole story. The whole story requires that we look at ourselves: not the version we perform at national holidays, but the version that emerges in how we treat political opponents and what we tolerate when it benefits our side.
The young people registering to vote deserve to know what they are up against -- not to discourage them, but to equip them with something more useful than outrage at whoever currently holds power. If they believe the problem is simply the current government, they will replace it and expect the replacement to be different. It will not be, automatically, unless something changes upstream. None of that is a single election away. It means an education system that rewards a child for asking a hard question instead of penalising them for it -- the same household-to-classroom-to-state chain this article traced earlier, run in reverse. It means a civil society sector rebuilt faster than the state can dissolve it. It means extending -- not merely admiring -- the plural, indigenous democratic practices some of our own communities already possess. It means treating the gap between women's formal presence and actual authority as a target with a number attached, not a grievance to gesture at. And it means learning to talk to each other, across the lines that divide us, about what we actually saw at the ballot box -- not what our own side needed to believe about it. All of it is, in Fanon's sense, a task rather than a programme -- something built, not something won.
And the song still resonates, decades on. Africa, where is your freedom? Boukaka wrote it in sorrow, not resignation -- a distinction worth preserving. Sorrow is a response to something lost that was real. Resignation is a decision to stop trying to find it. This argument stays, deliberately, on the side of sorrow -- and on the side of the harder, slower work Fanon insisted liberation actually requires: not the next election, but the next thousand ordinary decisions, in households and classrooms and community meetings, about who gets to speak and who has to listen.
Ethiopia has almost everything it needs to build a functioning democracy -- including, if its surviving indigenous governance traditions were deliberately drawn upon rather than merely admired, older and more homegrown democratic instincts than we usually credit ourselves with. It has been almost half a century since the emperor fell and over three decades since the EPRDF took power on a promise of liberation. And here we are: 50 million registered voters, 46 constituencies dark, conflicts in three major regions, a civil society law being rewritten to formalise state control, and journalists who have learned that leaving the country is safer than staying to report on it.
We are a very old civilisation, with democratic inheritances of our own that we have spent a century burying under a single centralised story. Digging them back up is not nostalgia. It is, arguably, the only version of this project that has a chance. AS
Editor's Note: Tesfatsion Dominiko (PhD) is a freelance consultant whose work addresses contemporary social issues, specifically identity politics, higher education, climate change, and migration. He can be reached at tesfatsiondominiko@gmail.com
