Falling from Grace: The Collapse of Ethiopia's Ruling Coalition

ABSTRACT:The Ethiopian Peoples' Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF), the government party in Ethiopia from 1991 to 2019, was Africa's biggest party in terms of membership base and considered to be the most powerful incumbent on the continent. The factors behind its rapid fall from grace and eventual collapse in 2019 will be put under scrutiny in this article. Comparative political research has pointed to both endogamous and exogamous factors contributing to party instability. Party-specific concerns such as differences in local constituencies, variations in ethnopolitical identities, differences of ideological outlook, and policy preferences are all factors that may lead to a withering of party consensus. Furthermore, the governance structure of the country may also impinge on party stability, because federal models may be more divisive in nature than unitary states. The argument pursued in this article will be to investigate how the origin of the EPRDF's component parties and their ethnopolitical base under the federal system were made relevant in the internal power struggle to claim control of the coalition and hence the government of the land. The article concludes by identifying four key factors contributing to the internal power struggle that led to the demise of the EPRDF: disagreements over ideology; disputes over party bylaws, procedures, and practices; contestation over the federal state model; and finally, the surge of ethnonationalism with intrinsic territorial ambitions.