6.04 Emanuele Fantini; Iginio Gagliardone
Beyond the vote liturgy: making sense of Ethiopia’s 2015 elections : a roundtable
Invited speakers: Jon Abbink, Jean-Nicolas Bach, Rene Lefort, Sarah Vaughan
As widely expected, the 2015 national elections in Ethiopia have been largely uncontested, with the ruling coalition of EPRDF and its allies gaining 100% of the seats in the National Parliament and in the Regional Councils.Such a bold results might bring social scientist interested in contemporary Ethiopian politics to question the relevance and the interests of elections itself, reduced to a mere liturgy to reaffirm EPRDF uncontested rule throughout the country.
In order to make sense and find interesting meanings in such a non event, we believe fruitful to interrogate it from its margins, exploring what the analysis of the 2015 elections could tell us in terms of
- continuities and transformation in the exercise of political power and in state-society relations at local level;
- the internal reconfiguration of power within the EPRDF, the dialectic between different ethnic parties, as well as between federal and regional elites;
- the processes of reconfiguration inside the opposition parties and the space for public organisation of political dissent and political alternatives;
- narratives, attitudes and quality of the speech in the online Ethiopian sphere;
- the negotiation process between Government and international donors, between the political conditionality and the technicalities of “good governance” and “electoral assistance”.