Ethiopia is set to hold parliamentary elections on June 1, with opposition parties warning of an uneven playing field that they say makes a sweeping victory for Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed's ruling Prosperity Party (PP) all but inevitable. The vote will take place across most of Africa's second most populous nation of some 130 million people, though no polling will occur in the northern Tigray region, where tensions with the federal government remain elevated following a devastating civil war fought between 2020 and 2022 that left an estimated one million people displaced.

Opposition figures paint a bleak picture of the conditions in which campaigning has taken place. Parties report physical harassment of candidates, arbitrary arrests, and near-total state domination of the media — a situation consistent with Ethiopia's ranking of 148th out of 180 countries in Reporters Without Borders' press freedom index. In the Amhara region, a nationalist armed group known as the Fano has threatened to disrupt the vote, with candidates for regional parties describing death threats against their supporters. Multiple parties say it has been impossible to hold public rallies, whether due to active insecurity or restrictions imposed by authorities. "This election will be the worst of all," said Mistresilasie Tamerat, secretary general of the Ethiopian People's Revolutionary Party. Merera Gudina, who leads an eleven-party opposition coalition, was equally blunt, describing the process as "a ritual intended to show the international community that the government is elected every five years."

The structural advantages held by the PP are considerable. The party runs completely uncontested in 64 of Ethiopia's 547 constituencies, and at the last election in 2021 it captured 96 percent of parliamentary seats. Even the largest opposition grouping, Ezema, is fielding candidates in fewer than 300 seats and currently holds just four MPs — a figure complicated further by the fact that one of its members holds a ministerial post in the current government. Ethiopia has never held a fully free and fair election since the fall of the Stalinist Derg dictatorship in 1991; every vote since has produced landslide results accompanied by allegations of fraud.

International scrutiny of the process is nonetheless significant. The African Union has deployed an Election Observation Mission of 73 short-term observers drawn from 37 African countries, led by former Kenyan President Uhuru Kenyatta. The mission, in which 61 percent of observers are women, will fan out across regions to monitor voting, counting, and tabulation procedures, and is expected to release a preliminary statement on June 3. Some analysts note that even in fairer conditions the PP's organisational reach and name recognition would likely produce a dominant result — though that assessment does little to address opposition concerns about a process they say was skewed long before polling day.