General elections were held in
Ethiopia
Ethiopia, , om, Itiyoophiyaa, so, Itoobiya, ti, ኢትዮጵያ, Ítiyop'iya, aa, Itiyoppiya officially the Federal Democratic Republic of Ethiopia, is a landlocked country in the Horn of Africa. It shares borders with Eritrea to the ...
on 24 May 2015 to elect officials to the
House of Peoples' Representatives
The House of Peoples' Representatives is the lower house of the Ethiopia, Ethiopian Federal Parliamentary Assembly. Located in the capital Addis Ababa, the House has 547 members. All are elected in theory for five-year term in single-seat constit ...
. Regional Assembly elections were also held on this date.
The result was a victory for the ruling
(EPRDF), which won 500 of the 547 seats. Allies of the EPRDF won the remaining seats. Only 5.1% of the valid votes (less than 1.7 million) went to opposition parties.
Electoral system
The 547 members of the House of Peoples' Representatives (the lower chamber of parliament) were elected in single-member constituencies using the
first-past-the-post
In a first-past-the-post electoral system (FPTP or FPP), formally called single-member plurality voting (SMP) when used in single-member districts or informally choose-one voting in contrast to ranked voting, or score voting, voters cast their ...
system. The results of the election were announced one month after the election took place. About 93.2 percent of Ethiopia’s 36.8 million registered voters participated in the parliamentary elections, and nearly 1.4 million (3.3%) of the total votes cast for the election were deemed "invalid." This number exceeded even the number of votes which went to any individual opposition party, highlighting the dire circumstances for opposition in the election. Invalid ballots could be discarded as such for a variety of reasons according to Ethiopia's electoral laws. As outlined by Ethiopian paper The Reporter after the election: "a ballot paper is deemed invalid where the identity of the elector is disclosed, the ballot paper is not marked or difficult to determine the intention of the voter,
otedfor more candidates than the allowed. But as was witnessed during vote counting in some polling stations, discarding ballots as invalid was not always a clear cut conclusion."
The elections were delayed in the
Gimbo Gawata constituency due to clashes between the EPRDF and an independent candidate, Ashebr Woldegiorgis, who filed formal complaints against the EPRDF after coming in second at 17.7% of the region's votes.
Polling took place on 14 June.
Campaign
A total of 1,828 candidates contested the 547 seats, of which nine were independents and the remainder represented 44 parties. Of the 1,828 candidates, 1,527 were men and 801 women.
To help voters make informed decisions for the May Federal and National Elections, the Joint Council of Political Parties selected nine subjects as the agendas for televised debates between the political parties in the planned televised debating sessions. The subjects identified for debate in the televised election programs cover a variety of subjects: the Multi-Party System and Building Democracy; Federalism; Agricultural and Rural Policy; Urban Development and Industrial Policy; Good Governance and the Rule of Law; National Security; Foreign Policy; Infrastructure; Education and Health. Despite these structures being in place, there were obstacles particularly from the ruling government that did not allow for an easy campaign period. For example, "on April 1, 2015, Yilkal Getnet (Eng.), president of the Blue Party (known in Amharic as Semayawi Party) had planned to travel to the United States for campaigning with the Ethiopian Diaspora there, according to Yonatan Tesfaye, public relations head of the party. However, his plan was aborted, because his passport was snatched by the authorities."
The censorship in Ethiopia makes it difficult for members of opposition parties to effectively campaign to the general Ethiopian populous, thus limiting knowledge of political candidates.
[World Report 2015: Ethiopia.]
''Human Rights Watch''. Accessed 4 April 2017. Leaders of opposition parties have been arrested, including during the month after this election.
Number of candidates within each party
Conduct
The elections were not free and fair; the government-controlled nationwide election board declared the
, the
authoritarian
Authoritarianism is a political system characterized by the rejection of political plurality, the use of strong central power to preserve the political ''status quo'', and reductions in the rule of law, separation of powers, and democratic votin ...
ruling party in Ethiopia for more than two decades, and its allies to have won every single seat. In 2016, the Electoral Integrity Project, a panel of scholars and experts on election integrity, noted that the election occurred amid "harassment of opposition parties, censorship of the media and repression of human rights"; it was ranked as the worst election on the Perceptions of Electoral Integrity (PEI) expert dataset.
[Pippa Norris, Ferran Martinez i Coma, Alessandro Nai & Max Grömping, ]
The Electoral Integrity Project: The Year in Elections, 2015
' (2016). Human rights groups condemned the election as a sham;
Human Rights Watch
Human Rights Watch (HRW) is an international non-governmental organization, headquartered in New York City, that conducts research and advocacy on human rights. The group pressures governments, policy makers, companies, and individual human r ...
stated that the election was nondemocratic because, although there "may not have been widespread violence or blatant ballot box stuffing on Election Day," the government's "systematic repression of basic rights" made it "extremely unlikely that Ethiopians would feel safe" expressing opposition views.
Jason Mosley, an associate fellow of the Africa program at
Chatham House
Chatham House, also known as the Royal Institute of International Affairs, is an independent policy institute headquartered in London. Its stated mission is to provide commentary on world events and offer solutions to global challenges. It is ...
in London, writing ahead of the elections, described the election as an attempt by the ruling EPRDF to foster "controlled" or "non-competitive" political participation by the Ethiopian people; he added that the competitiveness of the opposition parties was undermined by both "internal divisions and bureaucratic obstacles."
Merga Bekana, the electoral board chairman at the time, declared the election to have been "free, fair, peaceful, credible and democratic" while the Ethiopian opposition, including
Medrek
Medrek ( am, መድረክ), officially the Ethiopia Federal Democratic Unity Forum ( am, የኢትዮጵያ ፌዴራላዊ ዴሞክራሲያዊ አንድነት መድረክ), is an Ethiopian political coalition founded in 2008 by former def ...
coalition and the
Semayawi (Blue) party, rejected the official declaration of results, citing the harassment and abuses that occurred. The Blue Party called the election an "undemocratic disgrace"—citing the government's refusal to register scores of its party members as candidates, as well as arrests of its candidates—and a signal that Ethiopia was a one-party state.
[Ethiopia opposition says elections an 'undemocratic disgrace']
Agence France-Presse (29 May 2015). Prime Minister
Hailemariam Desalegn
Hailemariam Desalegn Boshe ( amh, ኃይለማሪያም ደሳለኝ ቦሼ; born 19 July 1965) is an Ethiopian politician who served as prime minister of Ethiopia from 2012 to 2018. He also previously served as deputy prime minister and Minister ...
dismissed reports of abuses.
The
United States Department of State
The United States Department of State (DOS), or State Department, is an executive department of the U.S. federal government responsible for the country's foreign policy and relations. Equivalent to the ministry of foreign affairs of other n ...
said that the United States remained "deeply concerned by continued restrictions on civil society, media, opposition parties, and independent voices and views" in Ethiopia,
[ and in July 2015, U.S. National Security Adviser Susan E. Rice stated that the election results were not credible.][ However, in July 2015, President ]Barack Obama
Barack Hussein Obama II ( ; born August 4, 1961) is an American politician who served as the 44th president of the United States from 2009 to 2017. A member of the Democratic Party, Obama was the first African-American president of the U ...
visited Ethiopia and, at a joint press conference with Prime Minister Desalegn, referred to the government as "democratically elected"; while human rights groups had called for Obama to more forcefully press for democratic reforms, Obama instead made a more mild call for the Ethiopian government to become more open to opposition.[ Obama's approach was criticized by the Ethiopian opposition.][
There were no international election observers from Western countries; the ]European Union
The European Union (EU) is a supranational political and economic union of member states that are located primarily in Europe. The union has a total area of and an estimated total population of about 447million. The EU has often been des ...
(EU) declined to participate in the proceedings on the grounds that Ethiopia had ignored the recommendations it provided after the previous round of elections that were also won by a questionable landslide. The EU said that Ethiopia had not yet developed democratically and expressed concern over "arrests of journalists and opposition politicians, closure of a number of media outlets and obstacles faced by the opposition in conducting its campaign."[ The ]African Union
The African Union (AU) is a continental union consisting of 55 member states located on the continent of Africa. The AU was announced in the Sirte Declaration in Sirte, Libya, on 9 September 1999, calling for the establishment of the Africa ...
(AU), which monitored the election, declared the election "calm, peaceful, and credible" (but not "free and fair"); the African Union Election Observation Mission did, however, note several irregularities.[
]
Results
House of Peoples' Representatives
The election found women gaining a more favorable percentage of seats, with men holding about 61% of the seats, and women holding about 39%.
Regional assemblies
References
{{Ethiopian elections
Ethiopia
Ethiopia, , om, Itiyoophiyaa, so, Itoobiya, ti, ኢትዮጵያ, Ítiyop'iya, aa, Itiyoppiya officially the Federal Democratic Republic of Ethiopia, is a landlocked country in the Horn of Africa. It shares borders with Eritrea to the ...
Election
An election is a formal group decision-making process by which a population chooses an individual or multiple individuals to hold public office.
Elections have been the usual mechanism by which modern representative democracy has opera ...
General elections in Ethiopia
May 2015 events in Africa
Election and referendum articles with incomplete results