Elections in Ethiopia: Beyond winning (and losing) Part II

Ed’s Note: In the first part of this series of reflections on elections in Ethiopia, Tsegaye R. Ararsa of the University of Melbourne Law School described the current politico-legal context in which Ethiopia’s election 2015 takes place. The goal was to explore the ‘mood’ so that we can say there is a generally ‘democratic ambience’ within the context of which we expect a free and fair election. In this second part, Tsegaye describes the historical context in order for us to get the feel and flavor of the general sense of disenchantment with the state form and its constitutional incapability to turn up a democratic electoral process.

Problematic state form: A body politic with inaugural violence, held together by violence

*Tsegaye R Ararssa

If the immediate civic-political space is dwindling because of the saturation of this space by the obtrusive legal structure that (re)occupied it, the bigger ‘stage’ in which all this happens – the Ethiopian state system – is nowhere close to engendering a ‘political ecology’ that can deliver a festive electoral moment, a constitutional moment for the transformation and redemption of the state by overcoming the deficits thereof.

Elections in Ethiopia: Beyond winning (and losing)

Tsegaye R Ararssa*

Part I
1 . Introduction
Election fever is gaining momentum in Ethiopia. It is ‘Election 2015’, the 5th general election since Ethiopia’s formal adoption of the more (or less) liberal constitution of 1995 that ended the hesitant ‘transition’ from the Derg’s military rule to a western-style representative democracy[1]. The projected aim of the transition was to liberalize and pluralize the politics, to reform and resuscitate the economy, to restructure the state (through democratization and decentralization), and to transform the hitherto tenuous state-society relations. Through the constitution, the regime provided itself the legal edifice on which to ensure that transitional project is attained and a liberal democracy (expressed through representative and participatory institutions) is formally instituted. In a gesture of transforming the state, the constitution recognized national diversity, legalized collective rights such as the right to self-determination[2], and institutionalized federal non-centralization. Having ostensibly demilitarized politics [3], electoral contestation became the formal mode of contending for political power. The election fever that is steadily gripping the nation now is the symptom of that contention.