Ethiopia's Ruling Party Wins Landslide, But Process Leaves Trail of Unresolved Disputes

By celebsam | Published June 21, 2026

Ethiopia's National Election Board (NEBE) announced final results on Sunday confirming Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed's Prosperity Party had won 438 of 501 contested seats in the House of Peoples' Representatives — an outcome NEBE Chairperson Melatwork Hailu delivered in person at Addis Ababa's Skylight Hotel, with President Taye Atske Selassie in attendance. Opposition parties and independent candidates split the remaining 48 seats. The result, following the June 1 vote, gives the Prosperity Party a commanding majority well beyond the 274 seats needed to form government, and sets up parliament to reconvene in October to select Abiy for another five-year term.

Key Facts

- Seats won: Prosperity Party, 438 of 501 contested; opposition parties and independents, 48

- Seats not contested: 46, excluded due to security conditions — 38 in Tigray, 8 in Amhara

- Turnout: 94%, according to NEBE, among more than 50 million registered voters

- Polling stations affected by insecurity: 143 failed to open, concentrated in Oromia and Amhara

- Results under dispute: NEBE has revoked outcomes in 15 constituencies citing "serious misconduct," with new voting to follow

- Government formation: Parliament expected to convene in October, after recess

NEBE's announcement closed out a results process that had been rolling out in stages since voting concluded on June 1. The board had already approved results from smaller batches of constituencies earlier in the month — 24 on June 9, and 723 of 1,139 total constituencies (covering both federal and regional council seats) by June 17 — while flagging that 253 results were still under verification and 120 remained under audit at that point. Melatwork Hailu, the NEBE chairperson, said at the time that political parties had lodged complaints in 129 constituencies and that the board had already resolved most of them.

By Sunday's final announcement, that process had narrowed to a specific and unusual outcome: NEBE did not simply certify the vote count, it also voided results in 15 constituencies outright over what officials described as serious misconduct, with new elections to be held there at a later date. The board did not detail the nature of the misconduct in the readout of the final results.

Of the House of Peoples' Representatives' 547 total seats, only 501 were up for election this cycle. Thirty-eight constituencies in Tigray and eight in Amhara were excluded entirely, a consequence of security conditions NEBE has cited since before the vote. Turnout among contested constituencies reached 94%, the board said, drawing from a pool of more than 50 million registered voters out of Ethiopia's estimated population of 130 million.

Opposition figures who did participate described an uneven playing field rather than a surprising result. Yitayal Assefa, who ran for a seat under the All Ethiopia Unity Party banner and lost, said his campaign was less about winning than about exercising a voice within a system stacked against him. Merara Gudina, an Addis Ababa University professor and opposition figure who declined to take part in the election at all, called the vote a "sham" and said the outcome would worsen the country's already fragile stability.

The government has denied opposition accusations that it has used arrests and legal obstacles to suppress rival parties' political activity.

Background

Abiy Ahmed has governed Ethiopia since 2018, taking office after mass protests forced the resignation of his predecessor, Hailemariam Desalegn, and the unraveling of the EPRDF coalition that had ruled for nearly three decades. He founded the Prosperity Party in 2019 from the merger of EPRDF's constituent regional parties, and it has held a parliamentary majority since the 2021 election, when it won 410 of 484 seats. Sunday's results track closely with that pattern, both in raw seat share and in the structural advantages — security exclusions, a fragmented opposition, and accusations of suppression — that have accompanied each cycle.

Abiy won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2019 for ending decades of hostility with Eritrea, but that rapprochement has since soured, with Addis Ababa and Asmara now trading accusations over alleged destabilization efforts and Ethiopia's long-stated ambition for direct sea access. Domestically, the government has spent the past several years fighting the Oromo Liberation Army in Oromia and the Fano militia in Amhara — conflicts that, per NEBE's own account, kept 143 polling stations closed on election day and were the stated reason for excluding dozens of constituencies from the vote altogether. A separate 2022 peace agreement ended the civil war in Tigray, but renewed friction between the federal government and the region's dominant party in the weeks before the election raised fresh concern about instability there.

International observers offered a mixed but largely procedural assessment. An African Union mission led by former Kenyan President Uhuru Kenyatta described the process as generally peaceful while acknowledging the security-driven disruptions, a characterization that lines up with NEBE's own account of polling station closures and excluded constituencies.

Analysis

*The following section is the author's own interpretation and is clearly distinguished from the sourced reporting above.

The headline number — 438 of 501 seats — is consistent enough with 2021 that it confirms continuity rather than signaling any shift in Ethiopia's political trajectory. What's more notable is what NEBE did on its way to that result: voiding 15 constituencies' results outright for misconduct is not a routine administrative footnote. Election boards in dominant-party systems rarely annul results in double digits unless the irregularities were too visible, or too contested, to quietly certify. That NEBE did so anyway — while still delivering an overwhelming majority to the ruling party — suggests the board may be trying to preserve some procedural credibility around the edges of an outcome whose central result was never genuinely in doubt.

The opposition's own posture reinforces that reading. A candidate who ran and lost framing his campaign as a moral exercise rather than a competitive one, and a prominent academic who didn't run at all calling the process a "sham," are not the words of a fragmented opposition surprised by the result — they're the words of participants who entered already convinced the outcome was determined in advance. That doesn't necessarily mean the vote count itself was falsified; it means the conditions surrounding the vote — arrests, legal restrictions, security exclusions covering nearly 50 constituencies — did enough work before a single ballot was cast that the count became close to a formality.

The more consequential open question is what Abiy does with this mandate. The pre-election concern, noted in background reporting on this cycle, was whether he might use a fortified parliament to pursue a shift toward a presidential system. A 438-seat majority gives him more than enough votes to attempt constitutional changes if he chooses to. Whether he does will likely matter more to Ethiopia's near-term trajectory than the seat count itself.

Open Questions

- What specifically constituted the "serious misconduct in the 15 voided constituencies, and when will new voting there take place? NEBE has not detailed this.

- Whether Abiy intends to pursue constitutional changes toward a presidential system, a concern raised before the election but not confirmed or addressed in the final results announcement.

- The status of contested results beyond the 15 annulled constituencies — NEBE had described results in over a hundred constituencies as disputed or under audit earlier in June; it's unclear how many of those disputes carried through to Sunday's final tally.

- Whether renewed tension in Tigray, flagged by Ethiopian officials and analysts before the vote, will escalate now that the election cycle excluding the region has concluded.

Sources: National Election Board of Ethiopia statements as reported by Ethiopian News Agency (ENA) and Fana Media Corporation (FMC); The Reporter Ethiopia; The Associated Press (via The Hill and WINK News); Al Jazeera;

Wikipedia's article on the 2026 Ethiopian general election.