The Thumbs-Up Revolution

How a Young Woman from EPRP is Rewriting Ethiopian Political Theatre and What the Ruling Party’s Silence on That Debate Stage Truly Revealed

By Sewasew Teklemariam the Ethiopian Tribune Columnist

 

There is a particular kind of silence that speaks louder than argument. It is the silence that descends upon a room when someone has said the unsayable with perfect precision, when an accusation is so well-documented, so calmly delivered, and so unanswerable that the only available response is the panicked shuffle of papers and the avoidance of eye contact. That silence fell upon the representatives of Ethiopia’s ruling Prosperity Party during the country’s first major televised multi-party debate of the 2026 election cycle. The person who produced it was not a veteran statesman, not a celebrated economist, not a familiar face from the long and exhausted gallery of Ethiopian opposition politics. She was a former television journalist in her early thirties, representing a coalition whose symbol is a thumbs-up, whose name is Mistresilasie Tamerat, and who, in one broadcast hour, did more damage to the government’s democratic pretensions than two decades of politely worded opposition press releases ever managed.

Ethiopia is preparing to hold its seventh national election in June 2026, with 24 national and 45 regional political parties contesting for power in what many analysts describe as a critical test of the country’s democratic evolution, a description that grows more ironic the more closely one examines the conditions under which that evolution is supposedly occurring. The scale is impressive on paper: 1,300 candidates nationwide, 936 for regional councils, a National Electoral Board with a mandate and a calendar. The substance is considerably less so. Political prisoners remain detained. Conflicts rage in the Amhara region and beyond. The media landscape is captive. International observation is uncertain. In this context, Mistresilasie Tamerat stood before the cameras and said, with the composure of someone who had been waiting for precisely this moment: we do not believe that the electoral process can be described as fair, democratic, or independent. She did not flinch. Neither did the camera.

Her background is essential to understanding the force of the moment. She trained as a journalist and worked as a reporter and political affairs analyst at Asham TV, a career that gave her something most Ethiopian opposition politicians conspicuously lack: the ability to communicate complex arguments clearly, quickly, and under the pressure of broadcast conditions. When she transitioned from journalism into active politics, the Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Party one of the country’s oldest opposition formations, founded in the radical crucible of the 1970s student movement received her and, unusually for a party in a political culture dominated by elderly men, entrusted her with its most senior administrative post: secretary-general. The party also made her coalition secretary for the “Cooperation for Ethiopian Unity,” the five-party alliance that now stands before the Ethiopian electorate with its thumbs raised.

She has said as much herself. The political space, in her own precise formulation, is dominated by long-established figures, and penetrating its leadership structures requires persistence and resilience. Being both young and female in that environment means perpetual proof-of-concept, an exhausting requirement applied to no comparable male colleague of similar ability. What the debate demonstrated is that she has cleared that bar so comprehensively that the requirement itself begins to look absurd. She did not participate in the debate. She commanded it.

“Being both young and female often means having to prove oneself repeatedly in environments where experience is measured narrowly and leadership is traditionally defined.”

The four arguments she deployed were not improvised. They were the product of a politician who understands that in a televised debate, the purpose is not to persuade the other side but to expose it. Her first line of attack concerned political prisoners, specifically, the more than 300 ordinary citizens reported detained in the Amhara region alone, some in connection with the Fano armed movement, others for no apparent reason beyond identity. This was not rhetoric. It was documentation. The Prosperity Party has invested considerable effort in framing the Amhara conflict as a security matter: a necessary state response to armed rebellion, regrettable but inevitable. Mistresilasie relocated that framing to the electoral arena, where it becomes something else entirely evidence that the conditions for a free election do not exist, that citizens are being detained for who they are rather than what they have done, and that any government which presides over this whilst simultaneously claiming democratic legitimacy is engaged in a contradiction it cannot resolve in front of a camera.

Her second argument, that one cannot speak credibly of democratic competition while war continues, was delivered with similar precision. She went further than most opposition politicians dare, calling not merely for ceasefire but for genuine, inclusive negotiations that encompass armed groups currently excluded from peace processes. This is the argument that sustainable peace cannot be achieved through exclusion, and it is one that speaks directly to the lived reality of millions of Ethiopians whose relationship with the state has been defined by violence rather than representation. The Prosperity Party’s representatives had nothing to offer in response that would not have required them to publicly justify policies they had spent considerable energy trying not to discuss.

The arguments on media independence and international observers were, in some ways, the most devastating precisely because they were the least dramatic. They required no statistics, no documentation of specific abuses, no emotional appeal. They required only the observation that these are the minimum conditions for any democratic process worthy of the name conditions so basic that their absence does not require lengthy argument, merely acknowledgement. The government’s representatives could not acknowledge them without conceding the point. They could not deny them without appearing to endorse a system of managed elections. They were, in the language of debate, trapped. The silence that followed was the sound of that trap closing.

The Prosperity Party excels at spectacle. What it struggles with is the rough-and-tumble of genuine democratic accountability and on that stage, there was nowhere left to hide.

It would be too simple to attribute this merely to the personal failings of the individuals who represented the ruling party on that stage. The deeper truth is structural. A party that has governed with the concentrated authority of the Prosperity Party, that has systematically dismantled independent judicial oversight, suppressed critical media, and treated dissent as a category of disloyalty , cannot easily produce, on short notice, the kind of confident, substantive defenders that open democratic debate requires. The machinery of authoritarian governance is not designed to generate intellectual accountability. It is designed to suppress the need for it. When that suppression fails — when someone stands before the cameras and refuses to be managed, the system has no response prepared, because it had convinced itself the moment would never come.

The Ethiopian Citizens for Social Justice , EZEMA, occupies a different position in this story, and in some respects a more troubling one. EZEMA is, by most measures, the most institutionally coherent of the major opposition formations. It has a recognisable leadership, an urban electoral base, and a track record of participating in the formal processes of Ethiopian politics. It also has a track record, less frequently discussed, of accommodation. During the 2021 elections, EZEMA positioned itself against the formation of a transitional government at the precise moment when such a government represented the most credible alternative to the ruling party’s dominance. The practical effect of this position was to align EZEMA, at a critical juncture, with the preferences of the party it nominally opposed. In Addis Ababa in 2021, EZEMA and Balderas together received approximately 32 per cent of the capital’s vote and won zero seats in parliament a result that tells you everything you need to know about the electoral system, but also something important about the limits of a strategy built on institutional respectability rather than principled confrontation.

One of EZEMA’s own representatives captured this posture with an inadvertent candour before this year’s election. Despite the ongoing conditions the detentions, the lack of media freedom, the contested electoral environment the party acknowledged it had “no option but to participate in the election, if the government proceeds on its current track.” It is a sentence worth reading twice. It concedes the entire argument. It acknowledges that the conditions are inadequate. It then proceeds to participate anyway, not out of confidence but out of resignation. Compare this to Mistresilasie’s formulation: the process cannot be described as fair, democratic, or independent and here are the specific conditions that must change before it can be. One is a statement of principles with demands attached. The other is a statement of defeat dressed as pragmatism. The contrast, aired before a national television audience, was merciless.

The social media dimension of this story is not a footnote. Ethiopia is a country with a median age below 20. An overwhelming majority of its population has known no political dispensation other than the EPRP’s former enemies and, since 2018, the Prosperity Party. This is a generation whose relationship with politics has been defined by spectacle without accountability, by promises without delivery, and by the particular exhaustion that comes from watching one’s country torn apart by conflicts that feel simultaneously inevitable and entirely unnecessary. The appetite for a political figure who is young, female, articulate, and genuinely confrontational was not manufactured by social media. It was waiting. Mistresilasie gave it somewhere to go.

By contrast, the opening statements by ESDP and EZEMA, positioned at [00:04:53–00:08:15], produced what the analytics reveal as a characteristic “dip”: that moment, well known to anyone who has studied long-form political broadcast data, when casual viewers make their decision to stay or leave. ESDP’s pitch of gradual reform and EZEMA’s invocation of social justice are not unworthy positions. But they are positions that a viewer already fatigued by years of unfulfilled political promises will recognise and, the data suggests, will choose not to engage with further. The drop-off at this juncture is a verdict rendered not in ballot boxes but in closed browser tabs, and it is a verdict that the parties concerned would do well to examine. A political platform that cannot hold a free audience’s attention for eight minutes of prime-time debate is a platform with a communication problem that no amount of ideological refinement will resolve. The audience did not leave because the arguments were wrong. They left because the arguments felt familiar in the worst possible sense: competent, cautious, and utterly unexciting.

The TikTok virality, the comment threads declaring “she is who we wanted to become” these are not merely expressions of admiration for a single politician. They are an expression of political hunger: the demand of a generation for representation that actually looks like them, speaks like them, and is willing to say in public what they say to one another in private. That this hunger has found its focus in someone representing a coalition whose electoral history is modest and whose internal consolidation is incomplete is, simultaneously, the most interesting and the most precarious aspect of the current moment.

Because this column owes its readers scepticism as well as appreciation, certain questions must be put. Mistresilasie Tamerat has demonstrated, with considerable flair, the capacity to articulate what is wrong with Ethiopian politics and the electoral environment in which it currently operates. She has been notably less specific about what her coalition’s governance would look like in practice. Social democratic ideology and a commitment to equitable development are principles. They are not, in themselves, a programme for managing a country with rampant inflation, a currency under significant pressure, endemic unemployment, and a security situation that cannot be wished away with negotiations, however inclusive. The debate stage rewards the sharp identification of failures. Governing requires the harder discipline of proposing credible remedies.

The coalition’s internal cohesion presents a further question. Of the five parties that formed the Cooperation for Ethiopian Unity alliance, only three remain actively engaged in the electoral process. A coalition that cannot fully consolidate before the election begins is one whose ability to hold together under the pressures of governance or even the pressures of a contested result must be considered uncertain. And whilst the demand for minimum conditions before participation is principled, the coalition has not yet articulated the clear red line that would tell the public: if these conditions remain unmet, we will withdraw and say publicly why. Without that line, the demand for conditions risks becoming a rhetorical position rather than a constitutional one.

None of which should obscure the significance of what has already happened. In a debate that the ruling party entered expecting to perform its usual controlled dominance, a young woman representing a minority coalition with a thumbs-up symbol and a name that translates as the Secret of the Trinity walked onto the stage and turned the performance inside out. She exposed the Prosperity Party’s inability to defend its record under genuine scrutiny. She implicitly indicted EZEMA’s decades of dignified accommodation. She gave the youngest generation of Ethiopians a face to attach to the possibility of a different kind of politics. She did all of this calmly, precisely, and entirely on her own terms.

“In a political landscape where the bar for meaningful opposition is depressingly low, she cleared it with visible ease and the camera caught every moment.”

The numbers, as it happens, are not merely anecdotal. An analysis of the YouTube broadcast of the seventh general election’s first debate officially titled “የ7ኛው ጠቅላላ ምርጫ የመጀመሪያው የክርክር መድረክ” reveals a viewing pattern that tells its own story about where public attention truly resided during more than two hours of broadcast. The Coalition for Ethiopian Unity, known by its Amharic designation TIBIBIR, did not merely win the argument in the room. It won the audience at home, repeatedly, and at the moments that mattered most.

The broadcast’s viewership data identifies four distinct peaks where audience engagement spiked, and the pattern is instructive. The first came at [00:02:18], barely two minutes into proceedings, when inter-party friction first surfaced during the direct questioning phase the segment in which each party had two minutes to put questions directly to its opponents. YouTube’s retention analytics consistently show that confrontational exchange drives re-engagement: viewers who have wandered lean back in; those who had the broadcast running in the background pick it up. The second, and arguably most consequential, peak arrived at [02:05:12] the precise moment at which the TIBIBIR representative delivered her direct assessment of the Prosperity government’s economic record. The single word “failed” is, in broadcast terms, what analysts call a high-engagement unit: a declaration short enough to clip, sharp enough to share, and specific enough to be held accountable. The critique of the cost of living, the inability to pay rent, to afford daily meals, moved the debate from the abstractly political to the viscerally personal, producing the kind of resonance that generates not just initial views but re-watches, the metric that most accurately measures genuine impact. Within one minute, at [02:06:13], a second peak followed, driven by the explanation of the coalition’s campaign symbol, the raised thumb, and the closing appeal to voters. Audiences who skip to the end of long political broadcasts are not disengaged; they are specifically seeking the summary, the verdict, the moment of meaning. The fact that TIBIBIR’s symbol and final statement produced a measurable viewership spike at exactly this point suggests that the coalition had successfully generated sufficient curiosity earlier in the broadcast that viewers returned to hear how it concluded.

The coalition did not merely win the debate. According to the broadcast’s own viewership curve, it owned the moments the audience came back to watch twice.

There is a lesson here that extends well beyond the mechanics of YouTube analytics. Political communication in the digital age does not reward the measured and the moderate. It rewards the specific, the confrontational, and the emotionally resonant. Mistresilasie Tamerat did not go viral because she was young or because she was female, though both facts added to the novelty of the moment. She went viral because she said something true, in plain language, to a camera, without flinching. In a media environment flooded with managed statements and rehearsed equivocation, that quality, the quality of simply meaning what one says, is rarer and more powerful than any focus-grouped slogan. The viewership data confirms what the debate room already knew: when she spoke, people stopped scrolling.

The thumbs-up is, in the end, a simple gesture. It means: yes. Yes, there is something worth approving of here. Yes, this is possible. Yes, we see you. In the context of an Ethiopian election whose integrity remains in serious doubt, whose conditions remain deeply problematic, and whose outcome remains controlled by forces that have never willingly relinquished power, this small affirmative gesture is either a political act of considerable bravery or a symbol that will be crushed, like so many before it, beneath the weight of the system it challenges.

Which of these it turns out to be will be determined not in one debate, however memorable, but in the months that follow in whether the coalition holds, in whether the conditions are partially met or entirely ignored, in whether the international community chooses to observe or to avert its gaze, and in whether a generation of young Ethiopians can convert the emotional energy of a TikTok moment into the harder, slower, more dangerous work of political organisation. Mistresilasie Tamerat has earned the right to be taken seriously. Ethiopia has not yet earned the right to call what is happening a democracy. Between those two facts lies the entire story of this election.

The debate has begun. Whether it will be permitted to conclude on the people’s terms is the only question that matters.

The Ethiopian Tribune is an independent publication. This column reflects political analysis and does not constitute endorsement of any party or candidate.