The TPLF eats itself

The TPLF eats itself

The party that fought a two-year war and lost begins, in August 2024, the internal struggle whose resolution will produce, by March 2025, the factional displacement of the federally-endorsed interim leadership and the substantive collapse of the Pretoria Agreement’s central institutional vehicle. The political logic of the split is comprehensible. Its strategic consequences open the operational pathway to the renewed regional crisis of 2026.

Filed late April 2025

The Tigray People’s Liberation Front had governed Tigray Region for thirty years before the November 2020 war began. It had been driven from federal political power in March 2018. It had been militarily defeated in the November 2022 Pretoria Agreement. It had been delisted from its terrorist designation by the federal government in March 2023, conditionally re-registered as a political party by the National Election Board of Ethiopia in August 2024 under “special circumstances” tied to the Pretoria framework, and was, by mid-2024, operating in a structural position that had not been precedented in its history: a defeated former ruling party attempting to manage the political transition of a region whose population had absorbed approximately 600,000 wartime deaths (by the upper-bound estimates) and whose political-economic conditions were comprehensively degraded.

The internal political pressures that produced the August 2024 – March 2025 factional crisis had been accumulating since the Pretoria signing. Three principal structural pressures deserve identification.

The first was the political dispute over the Pretoria Agreement’s substantive terms. The Agreement, as Dispatch 13 has analysed, had committed the TPLF to disarmament, dissolution of the pre-war regional administration, recognition of federal sovereignty over Tigray, and participation in a federally-administered political transition. The terms had been favorable to the federal government and substantially constraining for the TPLF. Within the TPLF leadership, the negotiations had been led by Getachew Reda — a younger, US-trained figure with substantial English-language communications capacity and a record of pragmatic engagement with federal interlocutors. Within the broader TPLF political base, the negotiations had been viewed with significant scepticism. The “hardline” faction within the TPLF, identified with chairman Debretsion Gebremichael, had been substantially supportive of the negotiations at the time of signing but had, in subsequent months, increasingly characterised the agreement as having traded TPLF political and territorial interests for the personal advancement of the negotiators. [Africa Center for Strategic Studies, “Rising Tensions in Tigray Risk Regional Conflict,” 21 August 2025, https://africacenter.org/spotlight/rising-tensions-tigray/]

The second was the appointment of Getachew Reda to lead the Tigray Interim Administration. The federal government, in May 2023, had refused to accept Debretsion as the head of the Pretoria-mandated Interim Administration; the TPLF had nominated Getachew as the alternative. Getachew’s appointment placed the TPLF in a structural condition that had no precedent in its institutional history: the senior TPLF figure who served as the federally-recognised regional administrator was not the TPLF chairman. The structural ambiguity that this produced — whether the Interim Administration operated under TPLF authority or as an independent federally-recognised body — had been the principal organisational tension between Debretsion’s faction and Getachew’s faction through 2023 and 2024. Getachew’s public characterisation, articulated in multiple interviews and press conferences, was that the Interim Administration operated as a neutral regional government in compliance with the Pretoria framework. Debretsion’s public characterisation, articulated through the TPLF Central Committee communications, was that the Interim Administration was an instrument of the TPLF’s transition strategy and operated under the TPLF’s political direction.

The third was the deterioration of relations between Getachew’s faction and the broader Tigrayan political base. Getachew, as Interim Administration head, had been the public face of the federally-aligned approach to the post-Pretoria period. The federally-aligned approach had not, as Dispatch 14 has documented, produced the substantive improvements in Tigrayan civilian conditions that had been hoped for. The Eritrean Defence Force had not withdrawn from northern Tigray; the contested territories of Western Tigray had not been returned; the displaced Tigrayan civilians had not been able to return to their homes; the federally-promised transitional-justice process had not been operative. The TPLF’s broader political base, by 2024, had come to view the federally-aligned strategy as having failed to deliver on its principal substantive commitments. Getachew, as the public face of the strategy, became the focus of the resulting political dissatisfaction.

The factional dispute moved to open political conflict in August 2024 with the TPLF’s controversial 14th Congress.

The 14th Congress had been due, under TPLF organisational rules, since 2023; the post-war organisational reconstruction had delayed it. By mid-2024, the federal NEBE had set, as a condition of the TPLF’s re-registration as a political party, the requirement that the Congress be held within six months. The Debretsion faction had pressed for an earlier Congress through the spring of 2024; the Getachew faction had pressed for delays on the grounds that political conditions in Tigray were not adequate for a unified party assembly. By July, the Debretsion faction’s pressure had become operationally decisive. On 13 August 2024, the 14th Congress opened in Mekelle. Approximately 14 members of the Central Committee, including Getachew Reda, boycotted the Congress. The Getachew-aligned faction characterised the Congress as illegal under TPLF rules; the federal NEBE characterised the Congress as not meeting the regulatory requirements for the TPLF’s re-registration; the Debretsion faction proceeded with the Congress nonetheless. [Wikipedia, “TPLF factional dispute,” accessed June 2026, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TPLF_internal_leadership_dispute]

The 14th Congress’s substantive decisions through 13–18 August 2024 were the operational opening of what would become the eight-month factional collapse. The Congress reelected Debretsion as TPLF chairman. The Congress suspended and subsequently expelled Getachew Reda and several other senior TPLF officials from party positions. The Congress passed resolutions characterising the Interim Administration as requiring restructuring to be brought under TPLF political direction. The Congress positioned the Debretsion faction as the institutional centre of the TPLF and characterised the Getachew faction as having operated outside the party’s institutional framework.

The federal government’s response was hostile. Prime Minister Abiy publicly warned that the TPLF “could find itself in a war” if it proceeded with the Congress. The federal Government Communication Service minister Legesse Tulu characterised the Congress as “practically nullifying the Pretoria agreement and threatening the peace.” The NEBE refused to recognise the Congress’s outcomes as legitimate party decisions. The federal-government communications characterised the Debretsion-led Congress as a return of the “hardline” TPLF that had conducted the war and as a threat to the post-war stability the Pretoria framework was supposed to produce.

Through September, October, and November 2024, the factional dispute escalated through a series of public exchanges and operational moves that progressively undermined the Interim Administration’s authority. On 7 October 2024, the Debretsion faction’s Central Committee announced the removal of Getachew Reda and several other officials from their positions; the Interim Administration characterised the removal as a “public coup” attempt; the federal government characterised the removal as outside the Debretsion faction’s authority. On 17 November 2024, an apparent assassination attempt against Solomon Measho — a senior Interim Administration official aligned with Getachew — was widely attributed to Debretsion-aligned operatives, although the federal investigation never produced public conclusions. Through November 2024 and into December 2024, the Debretsion faction began appointing parallel local administrators across Tigray Region in operational competition with the Getachew-led Interim Administration.

The NEBE’s progressive pressure on the TPLF to convene a federally-recognised general assembly intensified through late 2024 and into 2025. On 26 December 2024, NEBE issued a public statement urging the TPLF to convene the general assembly required for its re-registration before a 10 February 2025 deadline. The Debretsion faction’s response was to characterise the December 2024 statement as continued federal-government pressure on the TPLF and to escalate its operational moves to control the Interim Administration. On 23 January 2025, approximately 200 senior commanders of the Tigray Defence Forces issued a public statement endorsing the resolutions of the August 2024 14th Congress and calling for the Interim Administration to be reorganised to include Debretsion-aligned TPLF members. The TDF commanders’ endorsement was the operational pivot point: the armed force whose political control had been contested between the Interim Administration and the TPLF Central Committee had publicly aligned with the Debretsion faction. [ACLED, “Ethiopia situation update (19 March 2025),” 19 March 2025, https://acleddata.com/update/ethiopia-situation-update-19-march-2025]

In February 2025, the NEBE suspended the TPLF’s political activities for three months for failure to convene a federally-recognised general assembly, with the warning that the suspension would be converted to formal deregistration if the TPLF did not comply with the regulatory requirements within the suspension period. The suspension’s operational effect was to further weaken Getachew’s federal-aligned position: with the TPLF formally suspended, the political-legal basis for Getachew’s interim authority as a TPLF figure recognised by the federal government became substantively ambiguous.

The factional dispute moved to operational violence in mid-February 2025. Debretsion-aligned security forces began progressively taking control of local administrations in the Southeast and Central zones of Tigray. On 14 February, approximately 30 Debretsion-aligned security forces took the official seal of the Addis Alem kebele administration; the kebele residents who gathered outside in protest were attacked by the same forces, with at least 17 civilians injured. By late February, Debretsion-aligned forces were operating local-administration takeovers across multiple zones. The Interim Administration’s authority was, by early March 2025, substantially limited to the South Tigray zone and to the central districts of Mekelle.

On 10 March 2025, Getachew, in his capacity as Interim Administration head, sent a letter to the Tigray Peace and Security Bureau dismissing three senior TDF generals — Tadesse Werede, Migbey Haile, and Fessha Kidanu — on the grounds that the generals had been inciting violence and aligning with the Debretsion faction. The dismissal’s substantive legality under the Pretoria framework was contested; the Tigray Peace and Security Bureau immediately rejected the dismissal as exceeding the Interim Administration’s authority; the Debretsion faction characterised the dismissal as an attempt to weaken the TDF leadership. On 11 March, Debretsion-aligned TDF formations took control of the regional radio station and the Mayor’s Office in Mekelle. By 12 March, Debretsion-aligned forces had taken control of Mekelle’s airport and several towns along the Eritrean border, including parts of the Seharti district and Adigrat. [The Guardian, “Tigray faction takes over offices in Mekelle,” March 2025; AEI, “Tigray Threatens to Spark the Next Eritrean-Ethiopian War,” 24 March 2025, https://www.aei.org/articles/africa-file-special-edition-tigray-threatens-to-spark-the-next-eritrean-ethiopian-war-and-plunge-the-horn-of-africa-into-crisis/]

The events of 11–12 March 2025 have been characterised in subsequent international analysis as a “soft coup” or “de facto coup” against the Pretoria-mandated Interim Administration. Getachew fled to Addis Ababa, where he was subsequently appointed by Abiy as Advisor for Horn of Africa Affairs with the rank of minister. The federal government, faced with the de facto Debretsion takeover, appointed Tadesse Werede — the former TDF Chief of Staff and Debretsion-aligned figure — as the new head of the Tigray Interim Administration. The appointment was, in operational terms, the federal-government’s recognition that the Debretsion faction had succeeded in capturing the institutional vehicle through which the Pretoria framework had been operating.

The political implications of the March 2025 development can be summarised across three dimensions.

The Pretoria Agreement’s central institutional vehicle had substantively collapsed. The Interim Administration that the Agreement had created had been the principal mechanism for the post-war political transition in Tigray. Its capture by the Debretsion faction — and the federal-government’s accommodation of that capture through the Tadesse appointment — meant that the Pretoria framework was operating through institutional structures that had been substantively transformed from those the original Agreement had contemplated. The federal-government’s continued public commitment to the Pretoria framework, after March 2025, masked the operational reality that the framework’s central institutional architecture had been displaced.

The TPLF had become a substantively different organisation from the one that had signed the Pretoria Agreement. The Debretsion-led TPLF that emerged from the August 2024 Congress and the March 2025 takeover was, on the analysis of the Africa Center for Strategic Studies and similar institutions, a “hardline” version of the TPLF that included veterans of the pre-war institutional structure (Debretsion himself, Fetlework “Monjorino” Gebregziabher, Alem Gebrewahid, former intelligence chief Getachew Assefa) and that had been substantially aligned with the political position that the Pretoria Agreement had been an inadequate settlement requiring renegotiation. The TPLF’s public communications through 2025 progressively reflected this position: the federal-government’s failure to implement the contested-territories provisions, the federal-government’s failure to ensure non-ENDF withdrawal, the federal-government’s failure to deliver transitional-justice accountability were all characterised as breaches of the Agreement that justified the TPLF’s reclamation of its pre-war political and institutional position.

The Eritrean factor emerged as a structural element of post-March 2025 Tigrayan politics. The Debretsion faction’s success in the March 2025 takeover had been supported, by various subsequent reports including The Guardian and Africa Intelligence’s June 2025 reporting, by Eritrean intelligence services in operational coordination with TPLF formations. The political relationship between the TPLF and the Eritrean government, which had been the principal hostile relationship in Horn of Africa politics for thirty years, had progressively transformed through the post-Pretoria period under the pressure of shared opposition to the federal Ethiopian government in Addis Ababa. The “enemy of my enemy is my friend” logic that had operated for most of the post-2022 period had, by March 2025, become operationally consequential. The Tigray-Eritrea-Asmara axis that emerged from the March 2025 development would, by mid-2026, become one of the central forward-looking political risks of the Horn of Africa security architecture.

What the August 2024 – March 2025 factional dispute substantively demonstrated was that the Pretoria Agreement’s framework for managing the post-war political transition in Tigray had been inadequate to the underlying political conditions. The Agreement had assumed that the TPLF would, through Getachew’s leadership of the Interim Administration, manage the political transition in cooperation with the federal government. The Agreement had not assumed that the underlying TPLF political base — and the broader Tigrayan political base — would reject the federally-aligned approach in favour of a return to the pre-war institutional configuration. The eight-month factional dispute was the operational expression of the political base’s rejection. The federal-government’s accommodation of the resulting takeover, through the Tadesse appointment, was the federal-government’s recognition that resisting the development would have produced operational costs the federal-government was not prepared to bear.

The retrospective question, from the mid-2025 vantage point, is whether the political base’s rejection of the federally-aligned approach was inevitable or whether it could have been averted by different federal-government conduct in the post-Pretoria period.

The honest answer is that the rejection was substantially overdetermined by the post-Pretoria federal-government conduct. The federal-government’s failures to ensure EDF withdrawal, to resolve the contested-territories question, to deliver transitional-justice accountability, and to protect Tigrayan civilians from the continuing atrocities in EDF-occupied and Amhara-administered zones had progressively undermined the Getachew faction’s political legitimacy within the Tigrayan political base. Getachew’s faction had no substantive achievements to point to as evidence that the federally-aligned approach had been delivering for the Tigrayan population. The Debretsion faction’s political proposition — that the federally-aligned approach was failing and that the TPLF’s pre-war institutional position was the more sustainable basis for Tigrayan political-strategic positioning — had substantial empirical support in the federal-government’s documented failures.

The federal-government, in this assessment, had structurally contributed to the development that the federal-government’s strategic position required it to oppose. The federal-government had wanted a Getachew-aligned Interim Administration to manage the post-war Tigrayan transition in cooperation with federal authority. The federal-government had not, through 2023 and 2024, taken the operational steps that would have given the Getachew administration the substantive achievements required to maintain political legitimacy within the Tigrayan base. The federal-government’s strategy had depended on a Getachew administration succeeding without federal-government substantive support. The strategy had failed in operational terms.

The Tadesse appointment of late March 2025 was the federal-government’s recognition that the failed strategy had to be replaced. The federal-government’s relationship with the Debretsion-led TPLF, through April, May, and June 2025, was substantially more confrontational than its relationship with the Getachew-led Interim Administration had been. The Debretsion-led TPLF’s relationship with the Eritrean government, through the same months, was substantially more cooperative than the Getachew-led Interim Administration’s relationship had been. The structural alignment that the post-March 2025 period produced — federal Ethiopia versus Tigray-Eritrea-Asmara — was the operational outcome of the eight-month factional dispute and of the underlying political conditions the dispute had been expressing.

The TPLF, by April 2025, had eaten itself in the institutional sense the Dispatch’s title characterises. The Getachew faction had been displaced. The Debretsion faction had captured the regional administrative apparatus. The federal-government had accommodated the displacement while characterising the development as continued operation of the Pretoria framework. The empirical political configuration that the March 2025 development produced was substantially different from the configuration the Pretoria Agreement had contemplated. The strategic consequences of that configurational change have, through 2025 and into 2026, been the operational opening of the renewed regional crisis that the May 2025 TPLF deregistration would further consolidate.

By April 2025, the post-Pretoria political settlement that had ended the open phase of the Tigray war in November 2022 was, in operational substance, no longer operative. The institutional framework remained nominally in place. The substantive political relationships had been transformed. The next phase of the regional crisis was, by April 2025, operationally underway.

What the federal-government failed to accommodate substantively, the political process accommodated by force of factional politics. The TPLF that emerged from the eight-month dispute was a different organisation from the one that had signed the Pretoria Agreement. The federal-government would have to manage a different counterparty going forward. The management would prove, through 2025 and into 2026, substantially more difficult than the management of the Getachew-led counterparty had been.

The TPLF ate itself. What emerged from the consumption was not what the federal-government had wanted to deal with. The political consequences of this fact would, by May 2025, be visible in the federal NEBE’s deregistration decision and in the broader operational unraveling of the Pretoria framework’s institutional foundations.

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Sources for Article 23

1. Wikipedia, “TPLF factional dispute” (TPLF internal leadership dispute), accessed June 2026 — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TPLF_internal_leadership_dispute
2. Wikipedia, “Tigray People’s Liberation Front,” accessed June 2026 — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tigray_People's_Liberation_Front
3. ACLED, “Ethiopia situation update (19 March 2025),” 19 March 2025 — https://acleddata.com/update/ethiopia-situation-update-19-march-2025
4. Africa Center for Strategic Studies, “Rising Tensions in Tigray Risk Regional Conflict,” 21 August 2025 — https://africacenter.org/spotlight/rising-tensions-tigray/
5. American Enterprise Institute / Critical Threats Project, “Tigray Threatens to Spark the Next Eritrean-Ethiopian War,” 24 March 2025 — https://www.aei.org/articles/africa-file-special-edition-tigray-threatens-to-spark-the-next-eritrean-ethiopian-war-and-plunge-the-horn-of-africa-into-crisis/
6. The Guardian coverage of Mekelle takeover, March 2025
7. The Africa Report, “Tigray cannot be the battleground for Ethiopia and Eritrea,” 2025
8. Peoples Dispatch, “New leadership in Tigray amid deepening divisions and fragile peace,” 22 April 2025 — https://peoplesdispatch.org/2025/04/22/new-leadership-in-tigray-amid-deepening-divisions-and-fragile-peace/
9. Africa Is a Country / GPPi, “The enemy of my enemy is my friend,” 4 August 2025 — https://africasacountry.com/2025/08/the-enemy-of-my-enemy-is-my-friend
10. The New Humanitarian, “I don’t want to fight again in another Tigray war,” 4 August 2025 — https://www.thenewhumanitarian.org/opinion/first-person/2025/08/04/i-dont-want-fight-again-another-tigray-war
11. Critical Threats Project, “TPLF Undoes Tigray Peace Agreement,” 23 April 2026 — https://www.criticalthreats.org/analysis/ethiopia-tigray-tplf-tia-mozambique-rwanda-ismp-sudan-rsf-saf-africa-file-april-23-2026
12. Addis Standard coverage of TPLF factional dispute, 2024–2025
13. The Sentry investigation on Eritrean activities in Tigray, June 2025

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End of expanded article for Dispatch 23. One article, approximately 3,000 words.