The Prosperity Party is born. The TPLF is not invited.

The merger and the refusal

Thirty years of coalition politics end in a single Executive Committee vote. The TPLF, founder of the coalition, refuses to attend.

Filed early December 2019

The Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Democratic Front had governed Ethiopia for twenty-eight years on a structural premise the new Prime Minister had decided was no longer politically tenable. The premise was that the country was a federation of ethnically defined regions, that each region required ethnically defined political representation in the federal coalition, and that the coalition itself was therefore a partnership of four ethnically organised parties — the Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF), the Amhara Democratic Party (ADP, formerly ANDM), the Oromo Democratic Party (ODP, formerly OPDO), and the Southern Ethiopian People’s Democratic Movement (SEPDM) — each holding equal weight in the Executive Committee and the Council regardless of its constituent population. The TPLF, representing the roughly 6% of Ethiopia’s population that is Tigrayan, held the same forty-five seats on the 180-member EPRDF Council as the OPDO, which represented the 34% who are Oromo. The arrangement had been engineered by Meles Zenawi in the early 1990s as the operating logic of the post-Derg state: equal representation of unequal populations as the price of national cohesion under ethnic federalism. [Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Democratic Front, Wikipedia, accessed June 2026, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethiopian_People’s_Revolutionary_Democratic_Front]

Abiy Ahmed had become EPRDF chairman in March 2018 on the basis of that arrangement. His selection by 108 of 180 Council votes had depended on the OPDO’s 45 seats, the ANDM’s 45 seats (most of which had been delivered by Demeke Mekonnen), and the willingness of a portion of the SEPDM and even some TPLF members to defect to the reformist candidate. The arrangement that elected him would now be the arrangement he would dissolve.

The political logic of the dissolution had three layers. The shallowest was operational: the EPRDF coalition could not function with a TPLF that no longer accepted federal leadership. The TPLF had been publicly opposing the Abiy government since at least the December 2017 Executive Committee meeting at which it had rebuked Lemma Megersa’s reformist current. Its senior cadres had spent 2018 and 2019 publicly characterising the Abiy administration as illegitimate, the Asmara peace deal as a betrayal of Tigrayan interests, and the broader Prosperity-oriented agenda as a centralising project hostile to ethnic federalism. Internal coalition discipline had broken down; coordination between Addis and Mekelle was occurring through diplomatic-style intermediaries rather than through coalition mechanisms.

The middle layer was ideological. The medemer doctrine that Abiy had been articulating since his April 2018 inauguration — synergy, addition, the integration of Ethiopian diversity into a unified national project — was incompatible with the ethnic-federal premise on which the EPRDF had been built. Abiy could not, in good faith, continue to lead a coalition whose constitutional architecture treated ethnic identity as the organising principle of political representation while simultaneously promoting a doctrine that treated ethnic identity as a stepping-stone to be transcended. A single multi-ethnic party, organised around shared citizenship rather than constituent ethnic membership, was the institutional form medemer required.

The deepest layer was electoral. The 2020 federal election (which would, in the event, be postponed to 2021) was scheduled to be the most competitive in Ethiopian history. The 2018 reform period had unbanned the OLF, Ginbot 7, ONLF, and a dozen smaller parties; the political opposition was, for the first time in 27 years, in a position to contest seats on something resembling fair terms. The EPRDF coalition, as a coalition, was a structurally weak electoral vehicle in such an environment: its constituent parties competed against each other in their respective regions, internal coordination was difficult, and the brand was tied to the repressive past it was trying to escape. A unified Prosperity Party would compete more efficiently as a single national entity, would dilute the regional opposition’s geographic strongholds, and would provide Abiy with the institutional vehicle for the dominant-party majority that the Prosperity-oriented project required.

The merger had been discussed openly inside the EPRDF Executive Committee through 2019. The OPDO’s Lemma Megersa, whose Defence Ministry portfolio kept him formally inside the cabinet but outside the regional politics he had been using as his base, had publicly opposed the proposal in interviews on Voice of America Afaan Oromo and elsewhere, arguing that the move would dilute the federal architecture without producing the national integration the reform agenda claimed to want. The ANDM under Demeke Mekonnen had supported the merger from early in the year. The SEPDM had supported it. The TPLF had opposed it, but had until November 2019 attempted to do so through internal coalition mechanisms rather than through public denunciation.

On 16 November 2019, the EPRDF Executive Committee met in Addis to vote on the dissolution. The vote was 27 in favour and 0 against among the Committee members present. The TPLF Executive Committee members, who had been required to consult with the broader TPLF leadership in Mekelle before voting on so consequential a question, had declined to attend. The Executive Committee, in their absence, declared the EPRDF dissolved, the constituent parties of the three other coalition members (OPDO, ADP, SEPDM) dissolved into the new Prosperity Party, and five long-subordinate affiliate parties from Afar, Benishangul-Gumuz, Somali, Gambela, and Hareri regions absorbed into the new structure. Abiy tweeted that evening: “The unanimous decision passed today to merge the Party is a crucial step in harnessing our energy to work toward a shared vision. Prosperity Party is committed to strengthening & applying a true Federal system which recognizes the diversity and contributions of all Ethiopians.” The TPLF was not party to the decision and would not be party to the resulting organisation. [Prosperity Party, Wikipedia, accessed June 2026, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prosperity_Party]

The TPLF’s formal response came on 21 November, in a letter from the TPLF chairman Debretsion Gebremichael to the EPRDF Council Secretariat. Citing “legal and procedural shortfalls,” the letter stated that the TPLF’s representatives on the EPRDF Council had “no legal mandate to dissolve the party in the name of merger” and that any such mandate could only be conferred by the result of “broader steps of consultation through different party hierarchy, which will culminate the final decision in TPLF’s own Council.” On the basis of this procedural objection, the TPLF declined to attend the EPRDF Council meeting scheduled to ratify the Executive Committee’s decision. Of the 180 EPRDF Council members, 45 were from TPLF; none participated. The Council, with the remaining 135 members present, ratified the dissolution and the formation of the Prosperity Party. [Addis Standard, “TPLF cites legal, procedural shortfalls to decline merger,” 21 November 2019, https://addisstandard.com/news-tplf-cites-legal-procedural-shortfalls-to-decline-merger/]

The National Electoral Board of Ethiopia formally recognised the Prosperity Party as a registered political organisation on 25 December 2019. Abiy was chairman; Demeke Mekonnen, deputy. The new party would contest the postponed 2020 (later 2021) federal election as a unified national entity.

The TPLF, in subsequent statements through December 2019 and January 2020, escalated its rhetorical position. On 28 December, Debretsion delivered a speech to the TPLF central committee in Mekelle in which he declared the EPRDF “dead” and characterised the Prosperity Party as “illegitimate.” He accused Abiy of “openly violating” the policies promulgated by the EPRDF and of placing “the federal system and the constitution in serious danger.” He noted that the Tigrayan branch of the OPDO/ADP/SEPDM merger — the wing that would become known as the Tigray Prosperity Party — would be operating in Tigray as a federally-backed political opponent of the TPLF, and that this constituted an inappropriate federal intervention in regional politics. He announced that the TPLF would “make strategic relations with other federalist parties” — a reference to the Federalist Bloc the TPLF would attempt to assemble with the Oromo Federalist Congress, the Sidama National Liberation Front, the Benishangul-Gumuz People’s Democratic Movement, and other federalist regional parties through early 2020. The Federalist Bloc would never cohere into an effective electoral coalition; the TPLF’s exclusion from federal politics, after 1 December 2019, would be the structural condition of its political existence rather than a problem to be solved through opposition coalition-building. [Awate, “Ethiopia: Debretsion’s Final Nail in the EPRDF Coffin,” 30 December 2019, https://awate.com/ethiopia-debretsions-final-nail-eprdf-coffin/]

Three structural points about the merger and the refusal deserve emphasis.

First, the merger was a political decision dressed as institutional reform. The EPRDF’s organisational defects were real, and a reorganisation of the coalition was a legitimate political project. But the form of the reorganisation chosen — a single national party that absorbed the three reformist constituents but excluded the founding constituent — was not technically necessary. Alternative forms were available: a federation of preserved ethnic parties under a unified leadership council; a multi-party coalition with shared programmatic commitments; a unified party with explicitly preserved regional autonomous sections. The form chosen was the form that maximised Abiy’s centralising authority and minimised the TPLF’s institutional weight inside the new entity. The TPLF was not, in any strict sense, expelled from Ethiopian politics on 16 November 2019. It was structurally placed in a position where its continued operation as a coalition partner became impossible.

Second, the constitutional ambiguity of the merger remained unresolved. The Ethiopian constitution does not provide explicit procedures for the dissolution of a ruling coalition or for the merger of its constituent parties; the EPRDF coalition’s internal governance documents required Council majority for major structural decisions, but the question of whether 27 of 27 Executive Committee members present (out of an Executive Committee with TPLF members nominally enrolled) constituted a valid procedural vote was — and remains — contested. The TPLF’s procedural objection was not frivolous. The federal government’s subsequent treatment of the TPLF as a regional political actor without coalition standing, and the TPLF’s subsequent treatment of the federal government as an actor exceeding its constitutional authority, traced through the next eleven months of escalating tension to the November 2020 war. The legal status of what had happened on 16 November 2019 was, in the end, settled by force rather than by adjudication.

Third, the merger’s success in absorbing the smaller regional parties was its substantive accomplishment. The five affiliate parties (Afar, Benishangul-Gumuz, Somali, Gambela, Hareri) had operated, throughout the EPRDF period, as subordinate organisations without full Council representation. Their absorption into the Prosperity Party gave them, in principle, equal standing with the former Big Four constituents — a long-standing demand that the EPRDF had refused to meet. The merger had, on this dimension, completed work the EPRDF had been unable to complete. The cost of this completion was the loss of the founding constituent. The trade-off was not, in November 2019, broadly debated in the international press.

What had happened on 1 December 2019 was, in retrospect, the most consequential political event of Abiy’s premiership outside the November 2020 war itself. The coalition that had elevated him to the premiership eighteen months earlier had been dissolved. The institutional vehicle through which his reform agenda would proceed had been founded. The TPLF, having lost the federal centre in March 2018 and the Eritrea peace deal in July 2018, had now lost its formal standing in the federal coalition. By the standards of any other political system in which a 30-year coalition had just collapsed, the event would have produced sustained international attention; in the international press of December 2019, it was treated as administrative housekeeping that the new Nobel laureate had attended to between Stockholm and the new year.

The work of the next eleven months — the postponement of the 2020 election, the parallel Tigray election of September 2020, the federal sanctions on Tigray of October 2020, the Northern Command attacks of 3–4 November 2020 — was the working-out of the merger that the Prime Minister had completed on 16 November 2019. The Prosperity Party was the constitutional vehicle. The war was the consequence.

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Sources for Article 6A

1. Wikipedia, “Prosperity Party,” accessed June 2026 — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prosperity_Party
2. Wikipedia, “Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Democratic Front,” accessed June 2026 — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethiopian_People's_Revolutionary_Democratic_Front
3. Wikipedia, “Tigray People’s Liberation Front,” accessed June 2026 — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tigray_People's_Liberation_Front
4. Addis Standard, “News: TPLF cites legal, procedural shortfalls to decline merger,” 21 November 2019 — https://addisstandard.com/news-tplf-cites-legal-procedural-shortfalls-to-decline-merger/
5. Addis Insight, “Prosperity Party is ‘Illegitimate’ - TPLF,” 6 January 2020 — https://addisinsight.net/2020/01/06/prosperity-party-is-illegitimate-tplf/
6. Awate, “Ethiopia: Debretsion’s Final Nail in the EPRDF Coffin,” 30 December 2019 — https://awate.com/ethiopia-debretsions-final-nail-eprdf-coffin/
7. Terrence Lyons, “The Origins of the EPRDF and the Prospects for the Prosperity Party,” ResearchGate, 2021 — https://www.researchgate.net/publication/354309151_The_Origins_of_the_EPRDF_and_the_Prospects_for_the_Prosperity_Party
8. Eyob Balcha Gebremariam, “The Merger of EPRDF into Prosperity Party and Its Impact on the Constitution,” Academia.edu, 2020 — https://www.academia.edu/43855232/The_Merger_of_Ethiopia_Peoples_Revolutionary_Democratic_Front_EPRDF_in_to_Ethiopia_Prosperity_Party_EPP_and_Its_Impact_on_the_Constitution
9. International Crisis Group, “Keeping Ethiopia’s Transition on the Rails,” 16 December 2019
10. Ethiopian Tribune, “TPLF’s Fall from Grace — The Economics of Power Redistribution in Post-EPRDF Ethiopia,” 16 May 2025 — https://ethiopiantribune.com/2025/05/special-report-tplfs-fall-from-grace-the-economics-of-power-redistribution-in-post-eprdf-ethiopia/

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What the Prosperity Party actually was, and how Lemma was excluded from it

The merger created a national party along ethnic lines. The coalition’s last constraining figure was pushed out within months.

Filed July 2020 — covering the seven months from the Prosperity Party’s formation through Lemma Megersa’s removal from cabinet

The Prosperity Party was presented, in its official communications and in the international press through December 2019 and early 2020, as the institutional embodiment of medemer: a single multi-ethnic party that would transcend the ethnic-federal politics of the EPRDF and produce a unified national political identity. In its organisational reality, the Prosperity Party was something more modest and more familiar.

The party was organised, from the beginning, along ethnic lines. The Tobias Hagmann analysis published in 2021 documented the structure: there was an Amhara Prosperity Party (APP), an Oromo Prosperity Party (OPP), a Somali Prosperity Party (SPP), a Sidama Prosperity Party (also SPP — confusion in initials persisted), and a Tigrayan Prosperity Party (TPP), among others. Each regional Prosperity Party had its own chairmanship, its own central committee, and its own regional patronage networks. The federal Prosperity Party was a coordinating body whose Chairman (Abiy) and Deputy Chairman (Demeke Mekonnen) presided over a collection of regional ethnic structures that looked, to anyone familiar with the EPRDF, like the EPRDF without the TPLF. The party’s pan-Ethiopian rhetoric rested on top of an ethnic patronage machine; its organisational diagram, regardless of its branding, was substantially the diagram of its predecessor with one constituent removed and one centralising chairman installed. [Prosperity Party, Wikipedia, accessed June 2026, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prosperity_Party]

The internal politics of the Prosperity Party through 2020 demonstrated what its institutional form actually was. The Oromo wing under Shimelis Abdisa — the Oromia regional president who had replaced Lemma Megersa in April 2019 — competed with the Amhara wing under Temesgen Tiruneh (who had replaced Ambachew Mekonnen after the June 2019 killings) for influence over federal cabinet appointments, regional security force deployments, and the distribution of federal investment. The Tigrayan Prosperity Party under Nebiyou Shulmichael, Abraham Belay, and Mulu Nega — comprising Tigrayans willing to operate in opposition to the TPLF — was a small federally-backed organisation with limited support inside Tigray. By March 2021, after the Tigray war had begun, the Oromo and Amhara Prosperity Parties were publicly accusing each other of being the principal cause of inter-communal violence in disputed border zones, with each issuing statements blaming the other for atrocities. The pan-Ethiopian unity that the merger had been designed to produce was, by its first anniversary, demonstrably absent from the party’s own internal communications.

What held the party together, in Tobias Hagmann’s later assessment, was “opposition to the TPLF.” The Prosperity Party’s ethnic constituents shared, in October 2019 and through 2020, a common interest in the political defeat of the federalist current that the TPLF had institutionalised since 1991. They did not share, in any deep sense, a positive vision of post-ethnic-federalist Ethiopia. Once the TPLF was defeated militarily in 2022, and then politically deregistered in May 2025, the absence of that positive vision would surface as the party’s central political weakness. By 2024–2025, the Oromo and Amhara wings of the Prosperity Party were operating in significant tension; by 2026, with the Fano insurgency in Amhara and the OLA insurgency in Oromia both being conducted against a federal government dominated by what Amhara Prosperity Party voices characterised as the Oromo wing, the Prosperity Party’s structural condition was that of a coalition held together by the diminishing political utility of its founding common enemy.

The most consequential casualty of the merger, in its first year, was Lemma Megersa.

Lemma had been the figure the 2014–2018 protests had produced. He had been the OPDO chairman who had stepped aside for Abiy in March 2018. He had been Abiy’s Defence Minister from October 2018. He had been the institutional ballast inside the cabinet — the senior Oromo figure with independent political authority who could push back on Abiy’s centralising instincts from a position of constituent legitimacy. The Lemma-Abiy reform coalition that had elevated the Prime Minister to office had depended on Lemma’s continued political weight inside the OPDO and his willingness to operate as a constraining voice inside the cabinet.

Lemma had opposed the Prosperity Party merger from early in 2019. In a Voice of America Afaan Oromo interview in summer 2019, he characterised the proposed merger as “premature” and as inconsistent with the federalist commitments the reform agenda had been built on. His objection was less ideological than tactical: he argued that dissolving the OPDO into a national Prosperity Party would deprive the Oromo political constituency of its institutional vehicle, would alienate the Qeerroo who had been the protests’ street force, and would empower exactly the kind of centralising federal authority the protests had been against. Lemma’s position aligned with what Oromo activists like the journalist Mohammed Ademo were arguing in opinion pieces through 2019: that the merger represented a betrayal of the federalist promise on which the protest movement had been mobilised. [Foreign Policy, “Abiy Ahmed Betrayed Oromia Before He Went to War in Tigray,” 25 January 2022, https://foreignpolicy.com/2022/01/25/abiy-ahmed-ethiopia-qeerroo-oromia-betrayed/]

Abiy’s response to Lemma’s opposition was characteristic. He did not attempt to negotiate. He did not attempt to incorporate Lemma’s objections into a modified version of the merger that might have preserved more of the ethnic-federal structure inside the new party. He moved against Lemma instead.

The first move was in April 2019, three months before the Bahir Dar killings. Abiy unilaterally — without going through the formal Oromia Region Council procedures — removed Lemma from the position of Oromia regional president and replaced him with Shimelis Abdisa, an Abiy-aligned figure with no independent political base. The replacement was conducted, by the account of the journalist and former Oromia Region official Etana Habte, “through brazen disregard for protocol, without even considering or adhering to the regional state council’s procedure and approval.” Lemma was reassigned to the Defence Ministry, a position that removed him from regional Oromia politics and from the OPDO leadership he had used as his base.

The second move was in spring and summer 2020. With the EPRDF dissolution complete and the Prosperity Party formed, Abiy began a “house cleaning” operation inside what had been the OPDO and was now the Oromo Prosperity Party. Mid-level officials identified as Lemma loyalists were removed from positions in the Oromia regional administration and from federal cabinet portfolios. The Qeerroo organisers who had been part of Team Lemma in 2017–2018 found themselves either co-opted into the new Prosperity Party structures on Shimelis’s terms or pushed out of formal politics. By summer 2020, with the Hachalu Hundessa riots producing the most serious unrest of Abiy’s premiership, the Oromo political space that Lemma had organised was either inside the Shimelis-led Oromo Prosperity Party or in opposition (Jawar Mohammed and the Oromo Federalist Congress, Bekele Gerba, Abdi Regassa). The Lemma current, as an organised political force, had ceased to exist.

The third move was in August 2020. Abiy removed Lemma as Defence Minister and replaced him with Kenea Yadeta, an Abiy ally without Lemma’s political weight. Lemma was given the lower-profile Ministry of Democratization. By December 2020, in the early months of the Tigray war, Lemma was placed under house arrest. The official charge was that he had been in unauthorised contact with TPLF leadership during the lead-up to the war; the operational reality was that Lemma had been the last figure inside the federal political class with the independent authority to publicly disagree with Abiy on the conduct of the war, and his removal foreclosed that disagreement.

What had happened to Lemma between November 2019 and December 2020 was not, on its own, a political crisis. It was a routine personnel sequence inside a centralising government that had decided to operate without internal constraint. The political crisis was what was missing. By the time the Tigray war began in November 2020, there was no figure inside the federal cabinet who could, on the basis of independent political authority, push back on the conduct of the operation. There was no senior Tigrayan voice in the federal security command (Se’are Mekonnen had been killed in June 2019). There was no senior Amhara reformist voice in the federal cabinet (Ambachew Mekonnen had been killed in the same operation). There was no senior Oromo reformist voice (Lemma had been moved out). What remained was Abiy himself, a small circle of personal loyalists (Redwan Hussien, Demeke Mekonnen, Shimelis Abdisa, Temesgen Tiruneh), and an institutional structure — the Prosperity Party — that had been designed precisely to channel political authority upward to the Chairman.

The Prosperity Party that was registered on 25 December 2019 was, in its first six months of operation, the institutional form of a personalist political project. Its ethnic-federal architecture inherited from the EPRDF; its centralising authority constructed by Abiy; its key internal opposition removed by the same process. The political space inside the party for figures like Lemma — figures with independent constituent authority who could constrain the Chairman without being his rivals — had been closed.

The election the Prosperity Party would contest in 2021 would be conducted in this institutional environment. The opposition that the Prosperity Party would face in 2021 would, in significant part, be the political space evacuated by the Lemma-Ambachew-Gedu coalition that the merger had dispersed. The Jawar Mohammed-led Oromo Federalist Congress, the Berhanu Nega-led Ezema (citizens-for-justice), the OLF political wing, the smaller federalist regional parties — all of them would operate in 2020–2021 inside a political environment shaped by the Prosperity Party’s institutional dominance and the absence of the reformist coalition that had elevated Abiy in 2018.

The Prosperity Party’s 1 December 2019 founding was, in the end, the moment at which the reform project’s institutional architecture caught up with its political reality. The reform coalition that had produced Abiy was no longer the coalition that governed Ethiopia. The Prime Minister was now leading a different party, organised on different principles, oriented toward different political goals. The Nobel laureate of October 2019 was, by December 2019, the Chairman of an entity none of the reformists who had elevated him to office in 2018 had voted for.

The transition was complete. The election that would ratify it was scheduled for August 2020. By March 2020, that election would be postponed, and the constitutional crisis that the postponement would produce would, eight months later, be the operational pretext for the war.

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Sources for Article 6B

1. Wikipedia, “Prosperity Party,” accessed June 2026 — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prosperity_Party
2. Wikipedia, “Lemma Megersa,” accessed June 2026 — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lemma_Megersa
3. Foreign Policy, “Abiy Ahmed Betrayed Oromia Before He Went to War in Tigray,” 25 January 2022 — https://foreignpolicy.com/2022/01/25/abiy-ahmed-ethiopia-qeerroo-oromia-betrayed/
4. Wikipedia, “Premiership of Abiy Ahmed,” accessed June 2026 — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Premiership_of_Abiy_Ahmed
5. Borkena, “Abiy Ahmed’s Hegemonistic Prosperity Party,” 24 June 2026 — https://borkena.com/2026/06/24/abiy-ahmeds-hegemonistic-prosperity-party-a-liability-for-ethiopia/
6. Terrence Lyons, “The Origins of the EPRDF and the Prospects for the Prosperity Party,” 2021
7. Ethiopia Today, “TPLF dragging feet on merger with ruling Prosperity Party,” undated — https://ethiopiatoday.net/tplf-dragging-feet-on-merger-with-ruling-prosperity-party/
8. International Crisis Group, “Keeping Ethiopia’s Transition on the Rails,” 16 December 2019
9. The Africa Report, “Ethiopia’s leadership race: the Oromo leader at the front,” February 2018 — https://www.theafricareport.com/709/ethiopias-leadership-race-the-oromo-leader-at-the-front/

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End of expanded articles for Dispatch 6. Two articles, approximately 5,000 words.