It’s election time in Africa’s second most populous country, but with unrest simmering and whole regions excluded from the vote, Monday’s poll is anything but straightforward.

Ethiopians will head to the polls on Monday for parliamentary and regional elections, and Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed’s Prosperity Party is expected to come out on top, according to cbinews.tv.

But the vote is happening against a backdrop of serious unrest across much of the country. Abiy, 49, has tightened his grip on Ethiopian politics since being appointed in 2018 after mass protests ended the long rule of the EPRDF coalition.

His Prosperity Party swept the last election in 2021, taking 410 out of 484 seats in parliament. Since then, though, Abiy has faced years of violent unrest in several of Ethiopia’s ethnically organised regions.

That includes his home region of Oromiya, the country’s largest, and Amhara, the second biggest, where a militia known as Fano has seized swathes of countryside since 2023.

Then there’s Tigray. A brutal civil war raged there from 2020 to 2022 after Abiy’s relationship with Tigrayan leaders broke down. Researchers say hundreds of thousands died.

A 2022 peace deal ended the fighting, but tensions flared again this month when Tigray’s main political party moved to reassert control over the region’s administration. Officials and analysts warn it could spark fresh unrest.

Because of “unfavourable conditions”, voting will not happen in Tigray at all. At least eight of Amhara’s 138 constituencies are also off the ballot due to insecurity.

The Prosperity Party is up against a fragmented opposition weakened by infighting. Opposition parties accuse the federal government of arresting their leaders and using legal hurdles to block their campaigns. The government rejects those claims and says it is acting within the law.

Reuters hasn’t been able to report from inside Ethiopia since mid-February, after the Ethiopian Media Authority declined to renew accreditation for its three Addis Ababa based journalists.

More than 50 million of Ethiopia’s 120 million people are registered to vote. Results are expected by 11 June.

Prosperity Party candidates have been campaigning on the economy. The government points to improved food security in a country that has suffered several famines in the past.

It’s projecting growth of over 10% in 2026, one of Africa’s fastest rates. Economists credit Abiy’s moves to liberalise the tightly controlled economy with boosting investment and exports.

When Abiy first took power, he won global praise. He freed journalists, activists and political prisoners, lifted bans on parties, and even picked up the Nobel Peace Prize in 2019 for ending hostilities with Eritrea.

But critics and human rights groups say many of those gains have been rolled back. They accuse his government of detaining journalists and shutting down civil society groups in recent years.

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