Status: 07/10/2021 9:07 p.m.
410 of 436 seats: Ethiopia’s ruling party clearly won the parliamentary elections. However, the largest opposition parties had boycotted the vote – and the embattled Tigray region was also left out.
Almost three weeks have passed since the parliamentary elections in Ethiopia, now the election commission has announced the result: According to this, the ruling party, the so-called Prosperity Party, won 410 of the 436 seats in parliament – the Prime Minister and Nobel Peace Prize laureate Abiy Ahmed, who has been in office since 2018, was confirmed in office.
The vote, boycotted by the main opposition parties, took place on June 21 after months of violence. The election was originally supposed to take place last year, but was then postponed twice. The European Union decided not to send any election observers to the East African country on the Horn of Africa.
The polls were overshadowed by the Tigray conflict, in which the government in Addis Ababa is repeatedly accused of using violence and rape against the population in Tigray. Abiy Ahmed had started a military offensive there in November against the People’s Liberation Front of Tigray (TPLF), which had been in power there until then. According to the UN, hundreds of thousands of people in Tigray are at risk of starvation.