Africa Confidential, Vol 60 No 22, 7 November 2019
ETHIOPIA
Selected as a Nobel Peace Laureate, the Prime Minister faces mayhem in his home region
Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed is pushing to merge all the ruling Ethiopian Peoples' Revolutionary Democratic Front's regional member organisations, as well as affiliated ruling parties from other federal states, into a single unit, dissolving their particular national, or ethnic, identities. The structure under formation, whose working name is believed to be the Ethiopian Prosperity Party, would then discard the EPRDF's Leninist cladding and instead follow Abiy's Medemer ('synergy') theory, a personal philosophy he has enshrined in a book which he offers as a road-map to Ethiopia's political future. Critics have called Medemer an ideological mish-mash coated in self-help evangelism.
Supporters assert that the merger, which Abiy wants completed before the polls set for May, would ensure true multinational federalism by integrating representatives of the five peripheral regions into national political decision-making. But that is not how hold-outs like the Tigray People's Liberation Front, once-dominant within the EPRDF, see it. The TPLF, lead architects of the 25-year-old federal system managed by the EPRDF, says now is not the right time to try and consolidate a coalition. The EPRDF is currently an alliance only in name, they say. They are afraid that removing constituent members' regional identities would be the first step towards ending devolved, ethnic self-rule, which is enshrined in the constitution. That, says Abiy's office, is mere fear-mongering.
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https://www.africa-confidential.com/article/id/12787/Prize_fight