Ethiopia
has postponed parliamentary elections scheduled for August due to the
coronavirus outbreak, the electoral board said on Tuesday, a move endorsed by
some key opposition parties.
The vote had been regarded as an important test of
the reformist agenda of Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed in what was once one of the
continent’s most repressive nations.
“Due to the pandemic we were forced to suspend our
activities,” said an Amharic-language statement from the National Electoral
Board of Ethiopia. The board will announce a new timeline once the pandemic has
subsided, it said.
The Horn of Africa nation has 25 confirmed cases of
coronavirus so far.
Ethiopia is Africa’s second-most populous nation
with 105 million citizens. Abiy promised to liberalise the state-run economy
and oversaw reforms that freed thousands of political prisoners, journalists
and opposition activists.
Previous elections in Ethiopia, a parliamentary
democracy, have been marred by allegations of rigging and intimidation.
Abiy has promised to hold free and fair elections
and has been positioning himself as a unity candidate whose reforms could
replace repression as the glue holding Ethiopia’s often fractious federal
regions together.
But his party would have faced a stiff challenge
from many newly resurgent regional, ethnically based parties.
Representatives of some of the regional parties -
the Oromo Liberation Front (OLF) and the National Movement of Amhara (NAMA) -
said they would not oppose the delay.
“For now, our priority is how to overcome the
pandemic,” said Yesuf Ebrahim, NAMA’s spokesman. Opposition parties and the
government must discuss what will happen when parliament’s term ends in
September, Yesuf said.
Dawud Ibsa, OLF’s chairman, told Reuters that his
party was ready for further discussions.
But Jawar Mohammed, a prominent activist from
Abiy’s Oromo ethnic group, warned that the opposition must be consulted during
the next steps. Jawar has evolved from Abiy’s ally to one of his fiercest critics;
an unsuccessful attempt to arrest him in October caused protests that led to 78
deaths.
“The ruling party cannot and should not make
unilateral decisions,” he said.
William Davison, the International Crisis Group
think tank’s senior analyst for Ethiopia, said the election postponement could
be used to strengthen Ethiopian democracy.
“A start would be the ruling party discussing with
opponents critical topics such as the conditions for a fair election,
transitional justice and reconciliation, and the federation’s major political
fault lines,” he said.
The openness fostered by Abiy when he became
premier in 2018 won him plaudits at home and abroad. But it also fanned the
embers of long-repressed rivalries between ethnic groups as regional strongmen
sought to mobilise local voting blocs.
The resulting clashes, along with natural disasters,
forced more than 2 million people to flee their homes, according to the United
Nations, although some have now returned.
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