Addis Abeba — Ethiopians went to the polls in June 2026. Six weeks later, the National Dialogue Commission opened its national conference, the culminating stage of the state-led process formally established in 2021. It invited the public to engage with the rules of political coexistence just as another election had confirmed the incumbent's overwhelming dominance. Through both moments, discussions were framed in a familiar language of deepening and sustaining Ethiopia's democracy. Panels of national dialogue experts, naturally a roomful of men (40 to be exact!), the sort of tableau that still passes without anyone batting an eye in Ethiopian public and political life, discussed the country's future as though the legitimacy and distribution of power were not themselves the central points of contention. The more fundamental question, whether Ethiopia's political system is democratic in any meaningful sense, remained politely untouched.
Discover moreStream History DocumentariesJoin Social CampaignsMaritime shipping news This disconnect is hardly unique to the present moment. For more than half a century, democracy has occupied a visible place in Ethiopia's political vocabulary. Successive governments, opposition movements and armed insurgencies have all claimed to govern, reform or struggle in democracy's name. Elections, constitutional reforms, transitions and now the national dialogue have each been presented as evidence of democratic progress. Yet the persistence of democratic language has stood in sharp contrast to the country's repeated failure to establish a political order in which power can be genuinely contested, shared and transferred.
Ethiopian city guide The National Dialogue Commission's own founding proclamation does not claim that democracy has already been achieved. In fact, it lists democracy and the rule of law among the principles of the dialogue and identifies the building of a democratic system as one of its objectives. The contradiction, then, is not that the Commission declares Ethiopia democratic, but that the dialogue operates within a political discourse in which terms such as democratic progress, inclusion, independence, equality and credibility are repeatedly invoked even while the political conditions that would give those words meaning remain contested and lacking. Unless the dialogue earnestly acknowledges and addresses the fundamental democratic deficit on which it stands, it risks perpetuating Ethiopia's long history of democracy-speak: projecting democratic process and legitimacy, while the autocratic roots remain deep and far from being uprooted.
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Dreams of democracy after millennia of autocracy
Ever since the language of democracy was popularised as the "democracy question" by the student movement in the 1960s, the idea has acquired such political salience that every government, opposition party and insurgency has since claimed to champion it.
Ethiopian politics analysisDiscover moreAddis Ababa tourismAmnesty International reportsNews subscription service Even the Derg, a military junta explicitly committed to establishing a "proletarian dictatorship," governed under the banner of The People's Democratic Republic and the doctrine of "democratic centralism". The claim was not entirely devoid of political meaning. It signalled a shift from the imperial regime's claim to divine authority to a claim of popular sovereignty. In practice, however, the Derg was no less autocratic.
The same pattern continued under the Ethiopian People's Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF). "Revolutionary democracy" and "democratic federalism" became central pillars of the coalition's political identity. The Prosperity Party has carried this tradition forward and, if anything, doubled down, presenting elections, dialogues and state-led reforms not merely as evidence of democracy, but of a democracy that is maturing, deepening and undergoing national renewal.
Yet, a stark distance remains between its language and its practice.
Ethiopian election 2026 One way to illustrate that distance is to look at Ethiopia's score on V-Dem's Electoral Democracy Index and its classification under the Democracy Report, which consistently classifies it as an electoral autocracy. Other assessments as well as the scholarly literature also support this conclusion. Given the dismal score and given the ubiquity of government-sponsored polemics that dismiss such evaluations as liberal or neoliberal impositions, one is well advised to also test these conclusions against a minimalist metric that strips democracy down to its bare essentials.
Vanhanen's Index of Democratisation does just that, measuring democracy through two basic elements: participation and competition. Put simply, do people vote, and can the opposition plausibly compete with or defeat the incumbent? Ethiopia struggles to meet even this minimalist measure.
The transition(s) to, and from, democracy
Ethiopia's failure to democratise does not mean that it never embarked on a democratic transition. If transition is understood as a credible commitment by an autocratic regime to democratise, that promise began to take institutional form in the early 1990s when the EPRDF introduced electoral politics complete with a liberal constitution and a progressive bill of rights.
Yet, in ways that foreshadow the deficiencies of the current National Dialogue, the foundations of that transition were fragile from the outset. Pan-Ethiopian political organisations were largely excluded from the transitional arrangement, while federalist and ethno-nationalist movements that the EPRDF could neither co-opt nor accommodate were gradually pushed out, withdrew or returned to armed opposition. By the 1995 election, the political opening had already begun to narrow.
Ethiopian election 2026 This trajectory remained uninterrupted until the months preceding the 2005 election, when negotiations between the ruling party and the opposition produced greater access to state media, public debates, and an unprecedented level of electoral contestation. Even going by the official count, the ruling party for the first and only time lost its supermajority in Parliament and suffered major regional and urban losses, including an almost complete defeat in Addis Abeba. On the Vanhanen Index, 2005 stands as the country's clearest democratic high point.
That possibility closed almost as quickly as it opened.
Ethiopian city guide The deadly post-electoral violence that followed, together with the failure of both opposition and the incumbent to negotiate a durable political settlement, transformed an apparent democratic breakthrough into a decisive authoritarian turn.
After 2005, electoral autocracy became an end rather than a transitional phase. Expanding the cadre system to what has been aptly described as a monolithic party-state, the EPRDF came to dominate and control all three branches of the government. Backed by the security apparatus and a neopatrimonial system of state capture and rent distribution, it sought to coerce, co-opt and control political, civic and economic life. Elections continued, but the popular choice and competitive uncertainty that give them democratic meaning largely disappeared. Democracy itself was recast as rule by a supposedly benevolent vanguard, with citizens expected to participate in implementing decisions rather than making or contesting them.
In 2018, facing sustained grassroots and youth-led protests, the EPRDF was compelled to return to its original democratic promise. The new, though still EPRDF leadership, presented itself as determined to undo the harms of what it repeatedly called "27 years of darkness." Political prisoners were released, exiled and armed opponents returned, and important legal and institutional reforms followed.
Ethiopian politics analysis Yet the transition unfolded and later collapsed within the same party-state and without a broader transformation. Whether one dates its collapse to the postponement of the 2020 election or to the conflicts and crackdowns that followed, the trajectory was ultimately similar to that of the early 1990s. The Medemer era transformed the ruling party's leadership, organisation and political rhetoric. In terms of democratisation, however, it largely restored the post-2005 trajectory.
This history matters because the National Dialogue is now being asked to address precisely the political problem that these successive democratic experiments failed to resolve. Ethiopia has repeatedly used democratic language without establishing a political settlement in which democratic politics can meaningfully take root. The question facing the current dialogue is therefore not simply whether it can generate agreement on the country's many disputes, but whether it can alter the political conditions that have repeatedly turned democratic openings into authoritarian consolidation.
National dialogue and the limits of democracy-speak
The National Dialogue is taking place in a political landscape already saturated with democratic language. Like elections and successive democratic transitions before it, the dialogue is presented as an exercise in participation, inclusion and democratic renewal.
Yet beneath that framing and its expansive agenda lie major democratic deficits in the process itself.
Ethiopian election 2026 The first challenge concerns inclusion. Established by a parliament with few democratic credentials, the Commission seems neither to acknowledge its autocratic origin story nor to overcompensate for it. It has presented broad participation as one of the defining features of the process, but several actors capable of making or breaking any eventual settlement remain outside it. Even as the national conference opened in July 2026, opposition parties continued to boycott or otherwise challenge the inclusiveness of the process. The Commission itself acknowledged that the dialogue had not taken place in regions such as Tigray, despite consultations with selected Tigrayan stakeholders in Addis Abeba. Similar challenges exist in conflict-affected parts of Oromia and Amhara. The historical parallel is hard to miss here: as in the 1990s, exclusions are visible in the process from the outset and are already beginning to shape how durable the political settlement may ultimately prove to be.
Ethiopia has repeatedly used democratic language without establishing a political settlement in which democratic politics can meaningfully take root."
Women's rights were likewise kept as a sub-item under a broader pillar rather than treated as a standalone agenda, despite sustained demands and early organising by women's rights groups, including a parallel consultation process that mobilised more than 6,000 women across the country and generated final agenda items for the Commission. For a process built around claims of inclusion, relegating the political demands of half of the country to a sub-category raises its own questions about whose concerns are treated as fundamental national questions.
Its position on armed groups presents a second problem. The Commission maintains that armed groups can participate only after setting aside the use of force. Yet armed actors are often brought into negotiations precisely to establish the conditions under which violence will end. Conditioning participation on prior renunciation risks excluding actors whose commitments are essential to any lasting settlement. It also rests on the unrealistic assumption that these groups would risk their lives and the causes they are willing to die for, surrendering the very same leverage that brought them to the negotiating table in the first place.
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These limitations do not imply that dialogue conducted amid conflict is meaningless, nor do they absolve non-state armed groups of their responsibility to pursue peaceful agreement. They do, however, make it much harder to call a process national when communities living through conflict and insecurity are left behind. In this case, separate but parallel negotiations may be necessary with armed groups. Their outcomes, however, should feed into the wider national process rather than being concluded through isolated elite bargains struck largely among men.
A third and related concern is what happens as the dialogue closes. Independent institutions, including media organisations, journalists and a genuinely diverse civil society including those identified in the participant selection, must be able to scrutinise their recommendations, follow their implementation and demand corrections where the process itself has fallen short. In some cases, that may require revisiting parts of the dialogue.
This matters because, by the Commission's own account, the national dialogue has now come to a close, with recommendations now moving toward plenary approval. Under its mandate, the Commission will now submit the final recommendations and an implementation strategy to Parliament and the executive. Yet without clear timelines, genuinely independent and diverse oversight, and a credible public mechanism for tracking compliance, even recommendations backed by broad agreement may carry little political force.
Ethiopian politics analysis The real test of a national dialogue, then, is not simply whether it can convene thousands of people and produce a catalogue of recommendations. It is whether the political order can be made answerable to what emerges from it, including when that requires those in power to concede, reverse course, or reopen questions they would rather consider closed.
Without that, the dialogue risks becoming another chapter in Ethiopia's long history of democratic language without democratic transformation. AS
Editor's Note:
Hilina Berhanu Degefa is a feminist researcher and gender and diversity expert.
The co-author of this article, Abadir M. Ibrahim is a human rights scholar and advocate, and the Associate Director of the Human Rights Program at Harvard Law School.
