May 4, 2026
by Ayele Wolde
Surafel Getahun’s analysis arrives at a moment of genuine and verifiable crisis in Ethiopian politics, and its core argument — that the June 1, 2026 election cannot qualify as free or fair — rests on a foundation that is largely solid. The election date is confirmed. Tigray’s exclusion from the national ballot is confirmed. The TPLF’s rejection of Lt. Gen. Tadesse Werede’s extended mandate, its abrogation of the Pretoria Agreement, and the resulting constitutional standoff in Mekelle are all documented by independent sources ranging from by the Council on Foreign Relations and others. These are not contested points, and the author is right to build an argument around them. The Tigray exclusion alone — a region of over six million people shut out of a national parliament — is a structural indictment of the election’s democratic credibility that no quantity of polling stations elsewhere can offset.
The broader security picture the author paints is also, in its essential outline, accurate. The OLA insurgency in Oromia is real, protracted, and has produced documented atrocities on multiple sides. The Fano conflict in Amhara has resulted in the region’s people displacement and credible allegations of extrajudicial violence by federal forces. The claim that approximately 2.7 million Ethiopians are internally displaced — the fourth-highest figure globally — is consistent with what the Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre has reported. The Freedom House, the Global Centre for the Responsibility to Protect, and the Armed Conflict Location and Event Data Project all paint a picture broadly compatible with the author’s. When the diagnosis is that Ethiopia’s security environment is too fractured for a credible national election, the author is not alone, and he is not wrong. And yet the piece has real problems that any careful reader ought to name, because they affect the article’s reliability as analysis rather than advocacy.
The most consequential omission concerns Oromia. The author presents the OLA insurgency as uninterrupted and escalating, but says nothing about the December 2024 peace agreement between the federal government and a major OLA faction led by Jaal Senay Nagasa, which resulted in over 800 fighters entering designated camps and was followed — according to ACLED data — by a 60 percent reduction in recorded clashes by February 2025. This is not a footnote. It materially complicates the argument that Oromia is uniformly under low-intensity civil war and that no political openings exist. A political scientist who genuinely wants to diagnose a system is obligated to note when facts resist the thesis, not only when they confirm it. The omission here reads as deliberate rather than accidental.
The statistical claims also deserve scrutiny. The figure of 1,200 extrajudicial killings attributed to the Ethiopia Human Rights Commission for 2025 alone could not be independently verified in available sources. The EHRC has documented serious abuses, but this specific number, for this specific year, appears without a link or publication date in the article. Similarly, the $3.5 billion annual ODA (Official Development Assistance} figure is presented as established fact with no citation. These are not implausible numbers, but in a piece that deploys academic citation standards — Schedler, Levitsky and Way are properly referenced — the selective sourcing of big statistical claims is conspicuous. The Merawi massacre claim, attributed to satellite imagery and witness testimony, is likewise stated with more confidence than the available record supports; the incident was reported, but the precise casualty figure of “over 200” remains disputed.
There is also a more structural problem. The author presents what he calls five “non-negotiable preconditions” for a genuine election — ceasefire, an independent electoral board, freedom of assembly, territorial resolution, and IDP voting provisions — and then asserts that the Prosperity Party will agree to none of them “because they would likely lead to the PP losing power.” This may well be true. But the argument bypasses the genuine difficulty that any government, in any country emerging from ‘near-state-collapse’, faces in sequencing elections, security, and political reconciliation simultaneously. The comparative literature on post-conflict elections is divided on whether elections should precede or follow institutional consolidation; the author treats this as a settled question when it is not. Hybrid regimes sometimes generate meaningful competition even under flawed conditions. The 47 registered parties and over 10,000 candidates competing across parliamentary and regional seats — a fact the article does not mention — do not make the election legitimate, but they do make the picture more complicated than a simple facade.
Finally, readers should be aware of the publication context, as the outlet’s editorial slant does not make its contributors wrong — but it does help explain certain framings. Describing Tigray’s political claims as “secessionist” while treating the TPLF’s legally contested 2020 election as the region’s only “legitimate mandate” reflects a particular positioning that deserves to be made explicit rather than dressed in the neutral language of political science.
None of this is to say the article should be dismissed. It should not be. Getahun is asking the right questions, and the structural critique of holding elections while a third of the national territory is outside state control is a serious and defensible argument. But “serious” and “complete” are not the same thing. The piece is best understood as a well-informed, intellectually engaged critique written from a defined political standpoint — which is a perfectly legitimate form of commentary — rather than the dispassionate diagnostic exercise it presents itself as. Read it as such, and it is genuinely valuable. Read it as the final word, and you will miss what it chose not to say.
Editor’s Note : Views in the article do not necessarily reflect the views of borkena.com
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