22 Sept 2019
Addis Ababa, Ethiopia
CCM cadre Humphrey Polepole in Ethiopia delivering greetings to EPRDF party chairperson Dr. Abiy Ahmed from CCM chairman John Magufuli
MORE about EPRDF PARTY
The Ethiopian Peoples’ Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF) was once Africa’s largest, and arguably most powerful, political party. It was also, thanks to its business interests, its richest. Since coming to power in 1991, the coalition party controlled
each tier of government in Africa’s second most-populous nation. In the last national election, held in 2015, it won
every seat in the federal parliament.
Until as recently as 2016, it seemed indomitable, its leadership boasting that the vision set out by former Prime Minister Meles Zenawi would guide the country for decades into the future. Yet, on
Dec. 1, 2019, the EPRDF quietly disappeared
—“demolished,”
according to one of its former leaders, “with betrayal.”
In its place a new party was formed, led by Ethiopia’s new prime minister and the EPRDF’s last chairman,
Abiy Ahmed—heralding, according to its supporters, an entirely new mode of politics. The
Prosperity Party (PP) has done away with the four-part ethnic coalition structure which made up the EPRDF: the Tigrayan Peoples’ Liberation Front, the Amhara National Democratic Movement (later Amhara Democratic Party), the Oromo Peoples’ Democratic Organization (later Oromo Democratic Party), and the Southern Ethiopian Peoples’ Democratic Movement. It will instead be a single organization spanning the entire country.
To its supporters, the PP offers an escape from the divisive and, increasingly
deadly, ethnic politics which characterized three decades of EPRDF rule. To its critics, it is the thin end of the wedge towards abandonment of the 1995 constitution and the principle of ethnic self-rule—
ethnic federalism—which it enshrines. It is perhaps the single most significant—some say boldest—move yet from the
Nobel Peace Prize-winning prime minister. But it could also tear an already desperately polarized country even further apart.
Mulugeta Gebrehiwot Berhe, Hurst & Co., 376 pp., $70, January 2020.
Two new books provide some insight into how Ethiopia reached this epochal juncture. In
Laying the Past to Rest, former insider
Mulugeta Gebrehiwot Berhe narrates the history of the EPRDF from its origins in the student movement of the 1960s through the untimely death of Meles, its chief ideological architect, in
2012. Appropriately, given his background as one its early founders, the book focuses on TPLF, the ethnic Tigrayan guerrilla movement which created the EPRDF in the late 1980s during the struggle against the Marxist junta known as the Derg, and dominated it from the latter’s overthrow in 1991 until Abiy’s appointment in early 2018.
Though the book stops before the EPRDF’s final act, it nonetheless helps explain the mindset—a mixture of conviction and arrogance—that led the TPLF to announce
this month that it alone among the EPRDF’s four constituent organizations would not join the PP...... READ MORE :
Will Abiy Ahmed’s Bet on Ethiopia’s Political Future Pay Off?
