BRIEFING THE ETHIOPIAN 2010 FEDERAL AND REGIONAL ELECTIONS: RE-ESTABLISHING THE ONE-PARTY STATE KJETIL TRONVOLL * ETHIOPIA CONDUCTED ITS FOURTH FEDERAL and regional election on 23 May 2010. Considering the widespread pre-election interest and excite- ment the 2005 election attracted, and the vigorous role played by the oppo- sition both during the campaign and in the post-election turmoil, the 2010 process was a huge let-down. The general impression among Ethiopians was that the outcome was a foregone conclusion, so the electorate was rather passively, or perhaps reluctantly, following the campaign and election discourse. The only excitement was related to how overwhelmingly the incumbent Ethiopian Peoples Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF) would win; the general guesstimate was that the huge opposition gains in the 2005 elections, giving them one-third of the seats in the House of Representatives, would be pushed back in order for EPRDF to secure a solid victory of between 75–85 percent of the seats. It thus raised some eye- brows both domestically and internationally when the National Election Board of Ethiopia (NEBE) declared that EPRDF had secured 99.6 percent of the seats in Parliament – all but two, one going to the opposition and one to an EPRDF-friendly independent candidate. What happened in the 2010 electoral process, or before, that can explain the radical setback for the opposition and the total victory of EPRDF? Does the election outcome represent the genuine will of the Ethiopian electorate? Is it true, as Prime Minister Meles Zenawi asserts, that EPRDF actually is that popular? This briefing offers three broad cat- egories, each with three sets of interconnected and reinforcing factors, explaining the shift of political climate in Ethiopia since the 2005 elec- tions, making sense of the ‘better-than-Soviet-style’ 2010 election result. First, however, a brief background to Ethiopia’s electoral transition is pre- sented and an analysis of the political context prior to the run-up to the *Kjetil Tronvoll (kjetil.tronvoll@nchr.uio.no) is Professor of Human Rights, University of Oslo, Norway. African Affairs,1–16 doi: 10.1093/afraf/adq076 © The Author 2010. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of Royal African Society. All rights reserved 1 African Affairs Advance Access published November 26, 2010 at OUP on November 29, 2010 afraf.oxfordjournals.org Downloaded from