The TPLF is no longer a party

A bureaucratic decision ends the political party

Two and a half years after Pretoria, the National Election Board of Ethiopia formally deregisters the TPLF. The decision is presented as administrative compliance with electoral law. It is, in substantive function, the federal-government’s response to the Debretsion faction’s March 2025 takeover and the formal closure of the political pathway through which the Pretoria Agreement was supposed to operate. The TPLF appeals to the African Union. The appeal has no operational effect. The structural condition that follows is one in which the principal armed political party of one of Ethiopia’s largest regional populations operates without legal recognition.

Filed mid-May 2025

The National Election Board of Ethiopia (NEBE) is, in its formal legal character, an independent constitutional body charged with administering Ethiopian elections and regulating political parties. The Board’s institutional independence from the federal executive has been formally established by the Ethiopian constitution and the relevant proclamations on political-party registration; the Board’s operational independence has been, throughout the post-2018 period, a matter of substantial contest. The Board’s chairperson through the 2024–2026 period, Melatework Hailu, has been generally regarded by international observers as a professional administrator with limited operational discretion vis-à-vis federal-government priorities. The Board’s substantive decisions on contested political-party matters — including the May 2023 refusal to reinstate the TPLF under Proclamation 1162/2011, the August 2024 “special circumstances” reinstatement under Proclamation 1332/2016, the February 2025 three-month suspension, and the May 13, 2025 formal deregistration — have, throughout this sequence, aligned consistently with the federal-government’s preferred positions in the underlying political disputes. [Borkena, “NEBE Officially Cancels TPLF from Political Party Registry,” 14 May 2025, https://borkena.com/2025/05/14/ethiopias-electoral-board-cancels-tplf-from-political-party-registry/]

The legal-administrative timeline that produced the May 13, 2025 deregistration is worth setting down in operational detail.

The TPLF had been delisted as a political party in May 2021 under Proclamation 1162/2011, which provides for delisting of parties found by parliamentary resolution to have engaged in violent activity. The delisting had followed the federal House of Peoples’ Representatives’ May 6, 2021 resolution designating the TPLF as a terrorist organisation, contemporaneous with the federal-government’s prosecution of the Tigray war. The delisting had been the formal legal characterisation that operated through the November 2022 Pretoria Agreement period, during which the TPLF had no operational legal status as a political party in Ethiopia.

The Pretoria Agreement of November 2, 2022, in its substantive terms, did not explicitly require the federal government to reinstate the TPLF’s political-party status. Article 10 of the Agreement specified that “the Federal Government of Ethiopia is to designate political parties that are to be considered for participation in the political process,” language that, on the TPLF’s subsequent interpretation, implicitly required reinstatement of the TPLF’s pre-war legal status; and that, on the federal-government’s interpretation, retained federal-government discretion over the substantive question of which parties would be reinstated and on what terms. The Agreement also referenced the formation of an “inclusive Interim Administration” in Tigray — language that, the TPLF subsequently argued, implicitly required the TPLF’s continued political existence.

In March 2023, the federal House of Peoples’ Representatives passed a resolution removing the TPLF from the federal terrorist designations list. The removal was, in operational terms, the federal-government’s compliance with the broader Pretoria framework’s normalisation provisions. The removal did not, however, automatically restore the TPLF’s political-party status. The TPLF subsequently requested NEBE to reinstate its political-party registration. In May 2023, NEBE refused the request on the substantive grounds that, under Proclamation 1162/2011, there was no legal mechanism for the reinstatement of a party that had been delisted under the terrorist-organisation provisions. The TPLF’s response, articulated through public communications and through subsequent diplomatic engagements, was that the Pretoria Agreement provided an alternative legal basis for reinstatement that the NEBE was failing to recognise. The position was not accepted by NEBE.

Through 2023 and into 2024, the TPLF operated in legal-administrative limbo: removed from the terrorist designations list but not registered as a political party, unable to participate in formal Ethiopian political processes but operating as the substantive political authority within Tigray through its alignment with the Interim Administration. The structural condition was unsustainable for any extended period; the federal political environment required the TPLF either to have legal political-party status or to be definitively excluded from the political process. The decision on which side of the binary the TPLF would occupy was, through 2024, the subject of progressive federal-government deliberation.

In August 2024, NEBE granted the TPLF “special circumstances” registration under Proclamation 1332/2016 — a more recent law than the 1162/2011 proclamation that provided a procedurally different pathway for party registration. The “special circumstances” framing was novel; it had no clear precedent in NEBE’s prior decisions. The substantive conditions attached to the registration were the standard requirements that any registered political party hold a general assembly within six months of registration with 21 days’ advance notice to NEBE; appoint federally-recognised leadership; conduct its political activities within the constitutional and legal frameworks; and maintain its administrative compliance with NEBE’s regulatory requirements. The TPLF’s response to the August 2024 registration was, from the start, contested. The Debretsion-led faction (which had, by August 2024, already conducted the 14th Congress that the federal-government had warned against) characterised the registration as a federal-government acknowledgment of the TPLF’s pre-existing political-party status rather than as a new registration. The TPLF’s subsequent communications repeatedly referenced this position: that the TPLF “never recognized the special registration” because the registration would, on the TPLF’s interpretation, have constituted an implicit waiver of the political-party status the Pretoria Agreement had established. [Addis Standard, “Ethiopia’s Election Board revokes TPLF’s legal status,” 14 May 2025, https://addisstandard.com/ethiopias-election-board-revokes-tplfs-legal-status/]

The substantive question of whether the TPLF was operating under the August 2024 NEBE registration was, through late 2024 and into early 2025, contested between the TPLF and NEBE in a series of public exchanges that exposed the underlying disagreement on the legal-political question. The TPLF’s position: the Pretoria Agreement had reinstated the TPLF’s pre-war legal status, and the August 2024 NEBE registration was not a new registration but an administrative acknowledgment of the existing status; NEBE was acting in violation of the Pretoria framework by treating the TPLF as a newly-registered party. NEBE’s position: the August 2024 registration was a new registration under Proclamation 1332/2016, the TPLF had accepted the registration’s terms by accepting the certificate, and the TPLF was now required to comply with the standard regulatory requirements for registered political parties. The substantive legal question — whether the Pretoria Agreement, as an international agreement implemented in Ethiopian domestic law by parliamentary ratification, took precedence over the NEBE’s procedural authority under Proclamation 1332/2016 — was not definitively adjudicated by any Ethiopian judicial body during the contested period.

The TPLF’s failure to convene a federally-recognised general assembly within the six-month period from the August 2024 registration produced, in February 2025, the NEBE’s three-month suspension of the TPLF’s political activities. The suspension was, formally, a procedural compliance measure: the TPLF had failed to meet a regulatory deadline and the suspension was the standard regulatory consequence. The substantive context of the suspension was the broader factional dispute documented in Dispatch 23: the Debretsion faction’s 14th Congress had been held without federal recognition; the Getachew faction’s parallel claim to TPLF legitimacy had not produced a separate registration; the federal NEBE’s regulatory authority over a contested-leadership party was operationally ambiguous. The suspension’s effect was to make the underlying ambiguity definitive: the TPLF was, for the duration of the suspension, unable to operate as a recognised political party, and the absence of a federally-recognised general assembly meant that the operational pathway to lifting the suspension was unclear.

The factional events of March 2025 — the Debretsion takeover, the dismissal of Getachew, the federal accommodation through the Tadesse Werede appointment — transformed the political context within which the suspension’s expiration would be assessed. By April 2025, the federal-government’s substantive options were limited. The TPLF that had been registered in August 2024 had been substantially restructured by the March takeover; the leadership the federal-government had been working with had been displaced; the new leadership operated outside the framework the August registration had contemplated. The federal-government could, in principle, have negotiated a modified registration framework with the post-March TPLF leadership. The federal-government could, alternatively, have allowed the suspension to expire and deregistration to proceed. The federal-government chose the second option.

On April 24, 2025 — approximately three weeks before the suspension’s expiration — the TPLF publicly reiterated its position that the federal-government was violating the Pretoria Agreement by failing to recognise the TPLF’s pre-war legal status. The TPLF’s statement characterised the impending deregistration as having “dangerous consequences” for the Pretoria peace deal. The TPLF announced that it had escalated the issue to the African Union Panel and that the AU Panel had, in informal communications, suggested that the TPLF’s legal status could be restored without re-registration. The federal-government’s response was that the TPLF’s argument was “not acceptable” and that the regulatory requirements applied to all parties without exception.

On May 13, 2025, NEBE formally announced the deregistration of the TPLF as a political party. The decision was framed in narrow procedural terms: the TPLF had failed to fulfill the requirements of the August 2024 registration during the February–May 2025 suspension period; the suspension’s expiration without compliance produced, under NEBE’s regulatory authority, the formal deregistration. The decision cited Proclamation 1332/2016 (under which the August 2024 registration had been conducted) and Directive No. 25/2016 (the operational regulation implementing the proclamation) as the procedural authorities. The decision also invoked Article 99 of Proclamation 1162/2011 — the same proclamation under which the original 2021 delisting had occurred — for the “consequences of party dissolution,” which include the prohibition of further political activity, prohibition of asset disposition under the party’s name, and the formal exclusion of the party’s leadership from continued political engagement under the party’s institutional identity. The decision was, in operational substance, the comprehensive legal closure of the TPLF’s political-party status.

The TPLF’s response was immediate and substantively comprehensive. On May 15, 2025, TPLF Chairman Debretsion Gebremichael issued a public letter to Mahmoud Ali Youssouf, the Chairperson of the African Union Commission, characterising the NEBE decision as a violation of the Pretoria Agreement and as a serious threat to the post-war peace process. The letter cited Articles 3(c) and 3(d) and Article 10 of the Pretoria Agreement, and Articles 6(c) and 7(1)(a)-(d) of the AU Peace and Security Council Protocol, as the legal frameworks under which the TPLF’s continued political-party status was, in the TPLF’s argument, required by both the bilateral peace settlement and the broader AU peace architecture. The letter called on the AU to apply pressure on the Ethiopian government to suspend the NEBE decision pending AU Panel review, to convene a formal AU Panel deliberation on the matter, and to provide diplomatic support for the substantive position that the Pretoria Agreement implicitly reinstated the TPLF’s pre-war legal status. [Borkena, “TPLF Condemns NEBE’s Delisting Decision as Violation of Pretoria Peace Agreement,” 15 May 2025, https://borkena.com/2025/05/15/ethiopia-tplf-condemns-nebes-delisting-decision-as-violation-of-pretoria-peace-agreement/]

The TPLF’s appeal to the African Union has, by mid-2026, produced no operational effect on the deregistration. The AU Panel has, in formal terms, taken the matter under deliberation; the Panel has not, in operational terms, produced any decision that the federal Ethiopian government has been required to address. The structural reality of AU peace-and-security mechanisms is that they operate through political consensus and diplomatic pressure rather than through binding adjudication; the federal Ethiopian government’s substantive position — as the seat of the African Union, as one of the largest contributors to AU operational budgets, and as a state with substantial diplomatic weight across the African political system — has made operational AU pressure on the federal-government an unrealistic prospect. The AU’s silence on the matter, through 2025 and into 2026, has been the operational expression of this structural reality.

The substantive political consequences of the May 13, 2025 deregistration have been visible across multiple dimensions.

The TPLF has been formally excluded from electoral participation. The deregistration’s operational effect, under Article 99 of Proclamation 1162/2011, is that the TPLF and its leadership cannot register candidates for any Ethiopian election, cannot conduct formal political-party activities, and cannot operate the institutional infrastructure of a registered political party. For the June 2026 federal election, the TPLF was, in operational terms, not eligible to participate. The TPLF’s response, articulated through Debretsion’s public communications, was to characterise the federal-government’s position as the substantive end of the Pretoria framework and to indicate that the TPLF would consider its political-strategic options without regard to the federal NEBE’s regulatory authority.

The Tigrayan political space has been, in operational terms, transferred to alternative formations. Getachew Reda’s new political party, Tigray Democratic Solidarity (Simret), was formally founded in May 2025 — substantively contemporaneous with the TPLF deregistration. The Simret founding congress was held in October 2025. NEBE formally recognised Simret as a regional political party eligible to run for office in Tigray in early December 2025. The federally-aligned political vehicle that Simret represents has, by mid-2026, become the federal-government’s preferred Tigrayan interlocutor; the political space within Tigray that Simret’s recognition opens — even as the underlying Tigrayan political base remains substantially aligned with the deregistered TPLF — has become one of the structural conditions of post-May 2025 Tigrayan politics.

The Pretoria framework’s institutional architecture has been substantively closed. The Interim Administration captured by the Debretsion faction operates under a federally-appointed head (Tadesse) but without the political-party institutional support the original framework had contemplated. The TPLF’s deregistration removes the political-party that was, on the Pretoria framework’s intent, supposed to be the formal counterparty for the federal-government’s post-war political engagement with Tigray. The Pretoria Agreement’s substantive operation depended on the TPLF’s existence as a legal political-party that could negotiate, contest, and engage with the federal-government within the federal Ethiopian political system. With the TPLF deregistered, no such legal counterparty exists. The federal-government’s relationship with Tigray is, after May 2025, conducted through the Interim Administration (under federal-aligned leadership) and through Simret (as the federally-recognised Tigrayan political party). The TPLF’s substantive political existence continues outside the formal Ethiopian political system, as an armed-political organisation whose status is structurally similar to the OLA’s status: politically influential, militarily capable, but without the legal recognition that would allow operational participation in federal political processes.

The Tigray-Eritrea axis has consolidated. The TPLF’s exclusion from the federal political system has, in operational terms, made the TPLF substantially less constrained in its regional political alignments. The progressive rapprochement with Eritrea, which had been developing through 2024 and had been operationally consequential in the March 2025 takeover, has been further consolidated through the post-May 2025 period. The Eritrean government has been the principal external supporter of the post-deregistration TPLF; the relationship has been characterised by direct meetings between Debretsion and senior Eritrean officials (including, by Africa Intelligence reporting, a January 2025 Asmara summit attended by Isaias Afwerki), by Eritrean intelligence cooperation with TPLF security formations, and by aligned political communications on regional security questions. The “enemy of my enemy is my friend” dynamic that had been operating since 2023 has, by late 2025 and into 2026, become a substantively operational political-military alignment.

The federal-government has demonstrated, again, its preference for administrative-legal instruments over substantive political accommodation. The pattern that the May 2025 deregistration represents — federal-government use of regulatory and administrative authority to manage political disputes that would, on a more accommodating approach, have been addressed through substantive political negotiation — has been the federal-government’s consistent post-Pretoria operational pattern. The November 2024 suspension of civil-society organisations, the April 2025 suspension of NGOs documenting the corridor development project, the January 2025 freezing of TPLF assets, and the May 2025 TPLF deregistration are operationally continuous: all are administrative instruments used to constrain opposition political space. The federal-government’s consistent preference for these instruments over substantive political accommodation has produced, by mid-2026, a constrained Ethiopian political environment in which the formal political space has been progressively narrowed and the underlying political grievances of major regional constituencies have been progressively unaddressed.

The retrospective question — whether the federal-government could have negotiated a modified TPLF registration framework that would have allowed the post-March TPLF leadership to continue formal political participation while maintaining the federal-government’s broader strategic interests — admits a clear analytical answer. The federal-government could, in principle, have pursued such a negotiation. The negotiation would have required substantive engagement with the Debretsion-led TPLF on terms the federal-government has not been willing to extend. The federal-government’s preferred outcome — a federally-aligned Tigrayan political party operating within the federal political system in cooperation with federal authority — was not achievable given the post-March TPLF’s substantive political position. The federal-government’s alternative outcome — the formal exclusion of the post-March TPLF from the political system through administrative deregistration — was achievable, and the federal-government pursued it.

The strategic costs of the federal-government’s choice have, by mid-2026, accumulated. The Tigray-Eritrea axis has consolidated. The post-deregistration TPLF has progressively reasserted its pre-war institutional positions within Tigray. The Tigray Defence Forces have, under TPLF political direction, expanded their operational positions in disputed territories. The structural conditions for renewed Tigray-federal conflict — conditions that the Pretoria framework had been designed to address through political settlement — have, since May 2025, progressively reaccumulated. The May 2026 TPLF restoration of its pre-war Council institutional configuration (which Dispatch 27 will address) was, by April 2026, an operationally probable outcome of the trajectory the deregistration had been part of producing.

The substantive question of whether the federal-government’s regulatory-administrative strategy on the TPLF has been operationally successful depends on the timeframe of assessment. In the short term, the strategy has produced the federal-government’s preferred outcomes: the TPLF excluded from federal politics, the Pretoria framework operating through federally-aligned alternatives (Simret, the Tadesse Interim Administration), the Tigrayan political space substantially constrained. In the longer term, the strategy has produced political-strategic costs: the Tigray-Eritrea axis consolidation, the structural unsustainability of the Pretoria framework, the operational pathway to renewed regional crisis.

The federal-government’s calculation has been that the short-term gains exceed the long-term costs. The calculation may, on the historical record of Ethiopian regional politics, prove substantially incorrect. The next phase of the regional crisis, when it arrives, will have been opened in significant part by the choices that the May 13, 2025 deregistration represented.

A bureaucratic decision ended the political party. The political party’s substantive operations continued outside the federal political system. The substantive conditions for renewed regional conflict accumulated. The federal-government’s preference for administrative-legal instruments produced the formal exclusion of the TPLF from federal politics and produced, simultaneously, the operational opening of the regional crisis that the post-Pretoria framework had been intended to prevent.

The arithmetic of the May 2025 deregistration: a short-term federal-government tactical success producing accumulating long-term federal-government strategic costs. The strategic costs would, through the subsequent twelve months, become operationally consequential.

What had been intended in November 2022 to be the framework for sustained post-war political settlement had become, by May 2025, the framework whose substantive collapse the federal-government’s own administrative choices had progressively accelerated. The next phase of the Ethiopian regional crisis, when it arrives, will have been the consequence of the political logic that the post-Pretoria federal-government strategy had been operating under. The logic’s eventual consequences are, in mid-2026, becoming visible.

A political party was deregistered. A peace framework was substantively closed. A regional crisis was operationally opened. The administrative instrument that produced these consequences was, in formal terms, a bureaucratic compliance decision. The substantive consequences were, in operational terms, the closure of the political pathway through which the post-war settlement was supposed to operate.

The closure was administrative. Its consequences will not be.

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Sources for Article 24

1. Borkena, “NEBE Officially Cancels TPLF from Political Party Registry,” 14 May 2025 — https://borkena.com/2025/05/14/ethiopias-electoral-board-cancels-tplf-from-political-party-registry/
2. Fana Media Corporation, “NEBE Removes TPLF from Political Party Registry,” 14 May 2025 — https://www.fanamc.com/english/nebe-removes-tplf-from-political-party-registry/
3. Addis Standard, “Ethiopia’s Election Board revokes TPLF’s legal status,” 14 May 2025 — https://addisstandard.com/ethiopias-election-board-revokes-tplfs-legal-status/
4. Dedebit Broadcasting Corporation, “Ethiopia’s Electoral Board Revokes TPLF’s Legal Status Amid Unresolved Compliance Dispute,” 15 May 2025 — https://dedebit.org/?p=25790
5. Borkena, “TPLF Condemns NEBE’s Delisting Decision as Violation of Pretoria Peace Agreement,” 15 May 2025 — https://borkena.com/2025/05/15/ethiopia-tplf-condemns-nebes-delisting-decision-as-violation-of-pretoria-peace-agreement/
6. The Reporter (Ethiopia), “Election Board, TPLF Feud Culminates In Proscription. What Next?”, 17 May 2025 — https://www.thereporterethiopia.com/45213/
7. Ethiopian Tribune, “NEBE Revokes TPLF’s Political Party Status After Months-Long Dispute,” 14 May 2025 — https://ethiopiantribune.com/2025/05/nebe-revokes-tplfs-political-party-status-after-months-long-dispute/
8. Eastleigh Voice, “Ethiopia’s electoral board deregisters Tigray People’s Liberation Front, casting uncertainty over peace process,” 14 May 2025 — https://eastleighvoice.co.ke/tigray+people's+liberation+front+(tplf)/150281/ethiopia-s-electoral-board-deregisters-tigray-people-s-liberation-front-casting-uncertainty-over-peace-p
9. Borkena, “Ethiopia: Getachew, PM Abiy Advisor and TPLF Figure, to Form New Political Party,” 29 April 2025 — https://borkena.com/2025/04/29/ethiopia-getachew-reda-pm-advisor-and-tplf-figure-moves-to-form-new-political-party-amidst-registration-dispute/
10. Lawfare, “Ethiopia’s Troubled Peace,” 1 March 2026 — https://www.lawfaremedia.org/article/ethiopia-s-troubled-peace
11. Pretoria Agreement (Cessation of Hostilities Agreement between the Government of the Federal Democratic Republic of Ethiopia and the Tigray People’s Liberation Front), 2 November 2022
12. AU Peace and Security Council Protocol, 2002
13. Proclamation 1162/2011 (Ethiopian Electoral, Political Parties Registration and Election’s Code of Conduct Proclamation)
14. Proclamation 1332/2016 (Ethiopian Electoral Reform Proclamation)
15. NEBE Directive No. 25/2016

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End of expanded article for Dispatch 24. One article, approximately 2,900 words.