By Jason McLure | Bloomberg
Ethiopians went to the polls today to vote in the Horn of Africa nation’s first national elections since 2005 after a campaign marred by allegations of intimidation by Prime Minister Meles Zenawi’s ruling party.
The polls opened at 6 a.m. local time, with 31.9 million registered voters slated to elect 547 members of parliament and representatives to regional councils. A former Marxist guerrilla leader who has ruled Africa’s second-most populous nation since 1991, Meles, 55, is expected to win re-election easily, according to human rights groups and analysts.
Meles’ Ethiopian Peoples’ Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF) has used a combination of harassment and arrests and withholding food aid and jobs to thwart the opposition Medrek alliance, New York-based Human Rights Watch said in a March 24 report entitled “One Hundred Ways of Putting Pressure.”
The “EPRDF is just set to rig this election,” Medrek Chairman Beyene Petros told reporters on May 20 in Addis Ababa, the capital. Medrek says that three of its activists have been murdered during the campaign and that hundreds more have been beaten and jailed on trumped-up charges.
Under Meles, Ethiopia, Africa’s top coffee producer, has pursued an economic model that mixes a large state role with foreign investment in roads, dams and power. The government controls the Ethiopian Telecommunications Corp., a state-run monopoly, and owns all the land, while companies owned by the state or the ruling party dominate banking and trucking. Almost a sixth of its 85 million people depend on food aid.
Fight in Somalia
Meles has been a key ally in the fight against Islamic militants in neighboring Somalia.
Development aid to Ethiopia from the U.S., U.K., the World Bank and other donors rose to $3.3 billion in 2008 from $1.9 billion in 2005, according to the Organization for Economic Co- operation and Development.
The government dismisses opposition charges of harassment as false and intended to discredit the vote. It says economic growth in Ethiopia of more than 7 percent annually over the past five years is the main reason it will win re-election.
Ruling party campaign posters featured candidate photos next to drawings of gleaming skyscrapers and superhighways.
The European Union has sent a 160-member monitoring mission to observe the vote led by Thijs Berman, a Dutch member of the European parliament.
Medrek, a coalition that includes jailed opposition leader Birtukan Mideksa’s Unity for Democracy and Justice party and a number of ethnic-based parties, is divided on how it would govern the country if elected, David Shinn, a former U.S. ambassador to Ethiopia from 1996-1999, said in a May 11 phone interview.
Opposition
“They are a disparate group,” he said. “It’s the kind of grouping that can try to hang together to defeat the EPRDF, and if they don’t do that they’ll go their separate ways.”
In 2005, EU monitors were blocked from observing ballot counting by Ethiopian officials after early results showed the opposition winning all 23 parliamentary seats in Addis Ababa, Ana Maria Gomes, the head of the 2005 EU observation mission, said in a May 11 phone interview.
Official results released after the elections showed the ruling party and its allies winning more than 360 seats in the 547-member parliament.
At least 193 people were killed in Addis Ababa by security forces loyal to Meles in unrest following the poll. Birtukan and more than 120 opposition leaders, democracy activists and journalists were jailed and later charged with treason or related crimes.
They were released under a pardon by Meles in 2007. Birtukan was re-arrested in December 2008 and jailed under a life sentence after saying her pardon had been part of a political deal.
(Editors: Karl Maier, Paul Richardson)