The ink on a voter’s thumb fades in a few days. But the silence left behind in a polling station lasts much longer.
On a quiet Sunday in June, officials gathered in a brightly lit auditorium in Addis Ababa to read numbers from a stage. They announced that Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed’s Prosperity Party had captured 438 of the 486 parliamentary seats up for grabs. Ninety percent. A mathematical landslide. In the official ledger, it reads as an absolute mandate, a sweeping endorsement of a government forecasting a massive ten percent economic growth rate for the year.
But numbers possess a strange power. They can state a literal truth while obscuring a deeper reality. To understand what ninety percent actually means in Africa's second most populous nation, you have to look away from the capital. You have to travel to the places where no one voted at all.
Consider a hypothetical shopkeeper named Tesfaye, living on the outskirts of the Amhara region. On election day, his shop shuttered early. The streets were not filled with lines of eager citizens waiting to cast ballots, but with an uneasy stillness. For months, a regional militia known as Fano has contested government control across the countryside. To the north, the scarred landscapes of Tigray are still trying to heal from a brutal two-year civil war that left hundreds of thousands dead. When the National Election Board looked at these regions, they saw what they termed "unfavourable conditions."
So, they skipped them.
Voting did not happen in Tigray. It was canceled in chunks of Amhara. In Abiy’s native Oromia region, fighting between federal forces and regional separatists kept millions of others isolated from the ballot box.
When a government wins ninety percent of the vote, the mind naturally visualizes nine out of ten people standing together in agreement. The reality is more fragmented. The ninety percent represents an overwhelming victory among those who were able, or permitted, to speak. For the rest, the election was a distant event happening to a country they currently inhabit but do not control.
This is the great paradox of modern governance in the Horn of Africa. The narrative broadcast to international investors is one of staggering velocity—highways expanding, agricultural yields rising, and urban skylines shifting under the weight of billions in infrastructure investment. The Prosperity Party campaigned heavily on these concrete achievements. They promised food security and modern development to a nation historically haunted by famine. For many who cast their ballots in peaceful districts, that promise of stability is worth everything.
But you cannot build a house by ignoring the fractures in the foundation.
The political opposition that remained after years of crackdowns was splintered, unable to even field candidates in a vast number of constituencies. Leaders spoke quietly of legal hurdles, arbitrary detentions, and an environment where dissent feels less like a political choice and more like a safety hazard.
It is a dizzying fall from the euphoria of 2018. When Abiy Ahmed first took the oath of office, the atmosphere was electric. He released political prisoners, welcomed exiled dissidents back to the country, and lifted suffocating bans on media outlets. The world watched in awe, culminating in a Nobel Peace Prize in 2019 for his efforts to resolve the long-standing border conflict with Eritrea. It felt like the dawn of a genuine democratic experiment.
Today, the political machinery looks entirely different. The unwieldy, ethnically divided coalition that ruled Ethiopia for nearly thirty years has been replaced by a singular, centralized political force. Power has been consolidated, but the country itself has fractured along ancient ethnic lines. The old 1995 constitutional settlement, which attempted to balance the country’s diverse ethnic groups through a system of ethnic federalism, is fraying.
The tension is palpable. Just last month, Tigray's primary political administration attempted to reassert its local authority, directly challenging the federal framework and stoking fears that the fragile 2022 peace agreement might dissolve back into violence.
A ninety percent victory does not erase these anxieties. It isolates them.
The danger of an overwhelming political majority is that it creates a feedback loop of absolute certainty. When the parliament opens, the seats will be filled almost exclusively by those wearing the same party colors. They will pass laws, approve budgets, and celebrate economic metrics.
Outside the capital, millions of people will continue to navigate life through the lens of local conflicts, blocked roads, and unrepresented grievances. True stability cannot be calculated by dividing the number of seats won by the number of seats available. It is measured by the degree to which a citizen believes their voice matters when they are not holding a weapon.
The election is over, the speeches have concluded, and the victory has been recorded in the history books. The Prosperity Party holds the mandate it sought. But as the sun sets over the highlands, the real test of power begins. It is not the power to win an election among the peaceful, but the capacity to govern the unseen, the unheard, and the untamed spaces in between.
