Ethiopia’s ruling coalition hangs on to power after elections

ADDIS ADABA, May 28 (AFP) — Ethiopia’s ruling coalition and its allied parties hung on to an absolute majority in the 547-seat parliament, but the opposition made major gains in the May 15 elections, according to provisional results released Saturday by the national electoral commission.

According to returns from 453 constituencies, the ruling Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF) led by Prime Minister Meles Zenawi won 271 seats, down from 481 in the last parliament, and allied parties took another 14 in the legislative polls.

This gives the ruling coalition and allied parties 285 seats, well above the absolute majority of 274 in the federal parliament.

The EPRDF may yet win an absolute majority on its own but this will not be known until Sunday, said Getahun Amongne, a spokesman for the the National Electoral Board of Ethiopia (NEBE).

If confirmed, the electoral victory would be the third for Meles who came to power in 1991 after overturning communist dictator Colonel Mengistu Haile Mariam.

The country’s two main opposition groups, which held only 12 seats in parliament before the election, were credited with 166 seats, and the remaining seat went to an independent.

These groups, the Coalition for Unity and Democracy (CUD) and the United Ethiopian Democratic Front (UEDF), have complained of irregularities during the elections with the CUD threatening not to take up its seats unless there is an investigation by the NEBE.

The UEDF refused Saturday to accept the latest election results saying it would need to wait until its complaints of electoral irregularities were investigated.

“Since some of the seats that went to the EPRDF are contested by us, we need to have a ruling on our objections before accepting these results,” said UEDF vice-president Beyene Petros.

On Friday the NEBE said it had ordered a re-run of polls in six constituencies of two southern states after having looked into a raft of complaints alleging irregularities.

It also said the complete preliminary tally from Ethiopia’s more than 30,000 polling stations might not be released on June 8 as promised due to a large number of electoral complaints being lodged by rival parties.

It did not give a possible new date.

“These results aren’t a surprise,” said EPRDF spokesman Berekat Simon, who is information minister in the outgoing government.

“As soon as we declared we had won, we knew that we had more than 274 seats,” he told AFP.

But a university student said he thinks many people don’t trust the results.

“Ror the first time the whole country went out to vote. There are indications that many people voted for the opposition and in the mind of many people, even if they have no evidence, the EPRDF has lost,” said the student, who asked not to be named.

“I think a lot of people might not believe the results.”

An EU mission praised the peaceful conduct of the election itself when more than 90 percent of Ethiopia’s 26 million registered voters swarmed more than 30,000 polling stations across the country.

However it criticised the delay by NEBE in releasing results, premature victory claims by both the ruling party and opposition as well as post-election pro-government bias in the state media coverage.

“These practices, taken as a whole, are seriously undermining the transparency and fairness of the elections,” the EU observers said.

“They also risk increasing the scope for manipulation and consequently putting in doubt public confidence in the process,” they said.