Ethiopia · General Election 2026

Hail Macbeth Ahmed: King Hereafter

Ethiopia’s electoral commissioners have hailed their Macbeth. Behind the coronation: 106,280 votes for a prime minister, one upheld complaint in a hundred and twenty-nine, and an entire region that never voted at all.

By E. Frashie

“All hail Macbeth, that shalt be king hereafter.” The witches on the heath gave Macbeth no crown. They told him only what he had already resolved to seize, and dressed the theft in the language of prophecy. This week, in a conference room in Addis Ababa, the National Election Board of Ethiopia performed the same small service for Abiy Ahmed Ali. Three commissioners read the figures into the record, certified them beneath the seals of Proclamation 1162, and called the performance democracy. The audience had been handed the ending long before the first ballot was cast on 1 June.

The headline number, when it finally arrived, was almost modest. In the Goma 2 constituency of Oromia — Beshasha, the prime minister’s birthplace — Abiy Ahmed was certified the winner for the Prosperity Party with 106,280 votes. It is worth pausing on the arithmetic. In a country of more than fifty million registered voters, the personal mandate of the man who will govern for the next five years rests on a hundred and six thousand ballots cast in a single district he has represented before. Under the first-past-the-post system Ethiopia inherited and never reconsidered, that is enough. The premiership is not won at the ballot box but assembled afterward, seat by seat, in the chamber those seats compose.

And here the play turns on its irony. In Bahir Dar, the deputy prime minister, Temesgen Tiruneh — former director of national intelligence, former president of the Amhara region, the security architect of the war that followed — was read in at some 156,000 votes, outpolling his own premier by half as much again. The number is not the scandal. The geography is. Temesgen banked his fatter mandate in the capital of a region where thirty constituencies were cancelled outright, where a state of emergency has run since 2023, and where the countryside that might have swollen or shrunk his tally was never permitted to vote. The deputy harvested his majority from the one Amhara city still allowed to go to the polls.

The deputy harvested his majority from the one Amhara city still allowed to go to the polls.

The arithmetic of certification

The Board’s own accounting tells the rest. Of 1,139 electoral districts — 501 federal seats and 638 regional ones — the commissioners had formally certified 723, with a further 253 awaiting entry into the database and 120 still under active audit, their conflicting tallies unreconciled. The Board declared its winners, in other words, with better than one district in ten still being argued over in a back room.

The grievance process is where the machine shows its workings. Political parties lodged complaints in 129 districts. The Board reports resolving 86 of them. Seventy-five were investigated and rejected for insufficient evidence; ten were quietly withdrawn by the parties themselves; and exactly one — a single complaint, in a single district, anywhere in the country — was found supported by concrete enough evidence to compel a recount, now proceeding under the eyes of party observers. Forty-three remain outstanding, the Board says, with resolution promised inside forty-eight hours.

One complaint in a hundred and twenty-nine. The Board believed exactly one.

What were the parties complaining about? The catalogue is wearily familiar to anyone who has watched a dominant-party state hold a vote: voters pressured at the booth, party observers blocked or removed from stations before the counting began, campaigning on polling day, underage ballots, secrecy breached by the very officers sworn to protect it, and the heavy administrative thumb of local district authorities. The Board weighed written submissions, photographs, video and witness testimony, and found in all of it a single grievance worth acting upon. The figure is its own verdict. It is not the verdict the Board intended to deliver.

The seats that were never in play

The result was decided not by what was counted but by what was excluded. No vote was held in Tigray at all — the Board cited “unfavourable conditions” left by a war that killed a number no one has dared finalise. Thirty constituencies in Amhara went dark for fear of the Fano militia; districts across Oromia were suspended for what officials called security problems. Only 501 of the 547 seats in the House of Peoples’ Representatives were contested; a party needs 274 to govern. The Prosperity Party, which took roughly 410 of 484 seats in 2021, is once again projected toward a total in the high four hundreds, though the official tally is not yet sealed and ought to be treated as provisional until it is.

The international imprimatur arrived on schedule. The African Union mission, led by Kenya’s former president Uhuru Kenyatta, pronounced the exercise conducted within a framework that “broadly supports democratic governance”; the IGAD mission, under Uganda’s former vice-president Speciosa Wandira-Kazibwe, confirmed the ballot boxes had been sealed correctly. Both are true. Both describe the procedure of an election while declining to notice the country it was held in. An observer can certify that the boxes were sealed without remarking that an entire region was given no boxes to seal.

Meanwhile, in Brussels

While the commissioners read out their winners, a quieter indictment was being recorded eight time zones away. In the European Parliament, under the auspices of the intergroup on freedom of religion or belief, the European Centre for Law and Justice convened a hearing it titled, without euphemism, “The Silent Suffering of the Amhara People in Ethiopia” — an update of a report the centre first published two years ago. Its keynote was delivered by Prince Asfa-Wossen Asserate: grand-nephew of Haile Selassie, historian, and a man whose father was among the sixty officials executed on the Black Saturday of November 1974, and who has spent the half-century since in Germany.

He came to ask the institutions of the West for specific things, and named them one by one: an independent United Nations inquiry into the persecution of Orthodox Christians in Oromia; a United States designation of Ethiopia as a country of particular concern under the Religious Freedom Act; targeted European sanctions against the officials he holds responsible; an end to the African Union’s studied silence; and the documentation, by the international criminal bodies, of a case naming the prime minister himself.

The prince’s gravest figures should be handled with the care he himself urged: his tally of nearly forty thousand casualties from federal air and drone strikes on Amhara over five months was drawn, he conceded from the podium, from a single American monitor with few specialists on the country. The harder, corroborated core of his case sits closer to the ground. In the last days of May and the first of June — as the nation queued to vote — assailants moved through the Arsi zone of Oromia, killing at least thirty-five Orthodox Christians, burning the Teleta Saint Gabriel church, a structure that had stood for a hundred and one years, and looting another. The federal government blames the Oromo Liberation Army; the OLA blames forces aligned with the government; the dead remain dead, and largely unacknowledged by the state that failed to protect them.

It was the prince, not this newspaper, who reached for the comparison that hangs over every such hearing: the world expressed its remorse after Rwanda, after Sinjar, after Srebrenica, and remorse without prevention, he observed, is not justice. He noted, too, that the country’s most celebrated singer, Teddy Afro, had released a record — Ethiora, briefly the second-ranked album on a global chart — pleading for reconciliation, and had seen his premises raided and his managers jailed for the trouble. A government secure in its mandate does not fear a love song. A government that has just been handed 106,280 votes and a region full of empty polling stations evidently does.

The reckoning

Macbeth got his crown. What the play remembers is not the coronation but everything the coronation could not settle: the blood that would have blood, the wood that walked, the dawning recognition that a throne taken by arithmetic is held only as long as the arithmetic frightens people. Abiy Ahmed will be sworn in. The Board has certified it, the observers have blessed the procedure, and the figures are entered beneath Articles 7 and 162. Whether a mandate assembled out of a hundred thousand votes here, an excluded region there, and one believed complaint in a hundred and twenty-nine can govern a country already fighting itself on three fronts is the question the certificate cannot answer. It signifies, for now, a great deal of sound and fury. What it signifies beyond that, the next five years will be left to decide.

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