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1. Introduction
‘God rest the soul of my mother who told me as a young boy that I will be Ethiopia’s seventh King’1 (Prime Minister Abiy’s Speech to the Ethiopian Parliament, April 2, 2018)
Ethiopia is one of the most diverse countries in the Horn of Africa with an estimated 110 million people and host of ethno national groups. It remained a centralized authoritarian state for the most part of the last century and went through a civil war that came to an end with the defeat of the military junta in 1991. Ethiopia went through a transitional process (1991-1995) dominated by the Ethiopian Peoples Liberation Front (EPRDF), a coalition of four ethno national based parties,2 and adopted a federal system with ten regional states mainly based on language. The principal objective of the federal system is the management of diversity in response to the age old demand for self-government by sub-state groups. Despite several efforts to democratize, the country’s political elite continue to spoil opportunities.
Transition from authoritarianism to democracy is not a linear path and is vastly complicated process.3 Indeed, the ousting of an authoritarian regime or its collapse and holding routine elections does not automatically translate to democracy.4 In the worst cases and as it happened in Ethiopia several times, it may end up only changing an old master by a new one, sometimes the new master becoming worse than its predecessor.
There have been several missed opportunities in Ethiopia in the past to open up the political space and make political participation more inclusive and democratic– such as in 1974 when the popular revolution removed the imperial regime. But the military takeover of power (1974-1991) and the resultant limitations on political participation gave birth to many class- and ethno-national based liberation movements in the 1970s ending with the overthrow of the military regime in 1991. After the EPRDF coalition took power in 1991, despite a more open transition (1991-1992), it led to the withdrawal and exile of key political actors, such as the Oromo Liberation Front (OLF) and the transition in the end became an authoritarian de facto one party rule. Another opportune moment was in 2005 when disputes over the results of the country’s most...