Is Ethiopia repeating its oldest mistake?

Is Ethiopia repeating its oldest mistake?

Submitted by Yunus Turhan on Thu, 10/01/2026 - 16:33 When past leaders have tried to govern from a single centre, the country's peripheries have united in opposition Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed attends a meeting in Moscow, Russia, on 25 September 2025 (Evgenia Novozhenina/AFP) On Ethiopia’s history has come back to haunt it.

Late last month, seven armed groups - among them the Fano militia in Amhara, the Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF) and the Oromo Liberation Army - announced the formation of the Ethiopian Peoples’ Forces Alliance for Survival, and vowed to remove Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed.

Within days, Tigrayan forces had seized the airports in Mekelle, Axum and Shire, and opened fronts in Afar and Amhara. By 25 September, phone and internet lines in Tigray were cut.

This time it was the TPLF, not Addis Ababa, that ordered the blackout. Most commentary reads the new conflict as the collapse of the Pretoria agreement, a 2022 peace deal to end two years of war.

But the story is much older than the Pretoria process and Abiy himself. For nearly two centuries, Ethiopian politics has swung between a centre that wants to command, and regions that insist on ruling themselves.

Each time the pendulum has pushed hard towards the centre, the peripheries have found a way to unite against it.

After the Zemane Mesafint (“ Era of the Princes ”) in the 18th and 19th centuries, when regional lords ran their own affairs, Tewodros II tried to rebuild the empire by the sword.

The provinces revolted one after another, and in 1868, he died at Magdala, his army reduced to remnants.

Similarly, former emperor Haile Selassie’s 1962 dissolution of the Eritrean federation turned a small insurgency into a 30-year war.

The Derg regime pushed centralisation to its limits, and fell in 1991 to a coalition of ethno-regional groups, the Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF).

The 1995 constitution swung back by creating ethnic federalism and, in Article 39, even a right to secession. Yet the EPRDF ran that system through party discipline from Addis Ababa, so self-rule stayed largely on paper.

In short, Ethiopia’s state structure has swung between centralisation and decentralisation over 170 years.

Tensions unresolved Abiy assumed power in 2018 by preaching Medemer, an approach of reconciliation and national unity in the face of ethnic divisions.

But it quickly began to unravel in 2019, when he dissolved the EPRDF to form his Prosperity Party.

Tensions long kept under wraps soon boiled over, and to contain them, Abiy returned to the tools of his predecessors: mass arrests of suspected opponents, and new restrictions on the media.

War with the TPLF followed in 2020, fought alongside forces from Eritrea and Amhara. After the Pretoria agreement in 2022, Abiy disbanded the regional special forces, which pushed the Fano militia into open revolt.

The status of Welkait and Raya, claimed by both Amhara and Tigray, was left unresolved after Pretoria, so both sides felt cheated.

The coalition now marching against Abiy is largely made up of the forces with which he won the last war What made such an unlikely alliance possible?

The answer lies less with the rebels than with the centre’s own choices. Each centralising step cost Abiy a partner.

Eritrea, kept away from the Pretoria table, watched its old enemy survive, and then heard Addis Ababa speak of a Red Sea port in terms Asmara read as a claim on Assab. The special forces decision did the same to Amhara.

In short, the coalition now marching against Abiy is largely made up of the forces with which he won the last war. Can the new alliance muster the capacity to challenge Abiy’s rule?

This is not likely, at least for the time being. The alliance has named no joint military commander, and unlike 1991, it has no dominant force able to march on the capital.

Abiy has a drone fleet the Derg never had, along with a fresh mandate from the public, as his party won 438 of the 501 contested seats in parliament (nearly 90 percent) this past June.

But some groups have rejected the results, and voting did not take place in Tigray, which comprises 38 constituencies. The road ahead Three paths seem possible from here for Abiy.

In the first, he peels Amhara away with concessions over Welkait, while the TPLF’s seizure of airports enables him to present it as the aggressor.

The price is that any Welkait deal with Fano locks Tigray into permanent war, so dividing the alliance on one front deepens the other.

In the second, the war settles into a stalemate: the centre holds the cities and the skies, armed movements hold the countryside, and Ethiopia drifts towards a de facto confederation run by men with guns - a Zemene Mesafint by other means.

The third is the most dangerous. Abiy has a record of seeking a unifying cause abroad when pressed at home; once it was the Renaissance Dam (where Egypt is a factor), and today it is access to the sea.

This time, a move towards Assab would turn a civil war into a war with Eritrea, and pull in every regional power watching. The regional map explains why that third path cannot be dismissed.

The fault lines of Sudan ’s war now run through Ethiopia.

On one side sits the UAE, Abiy’s main supporter since 2018, whose drones are widely credited with turning the last war, and which analysts accuse of routing arms through Ethiopia to Sudan’s Rapid Support Forces.

Gold, arms and mercenaries: On UAE's shadowy networks in Sudan Read More » Israel ’s recognition of Somaliland in December 2025, widely seen as brokered by Abu Dhabi, and President Isaac Herzog’s visit to Addis Ababa in February tied Ethiopia’s hunger for the sea to Emirati-Israeli designs for the Red Sea.

On the other side, Egypt, which regards the Renaissance Dam as a threat to its survival, has built an axis with Eritrea and Somalia, and backs Sudan’s army, with Saudi Arabia reportedly drawing closer to Asmara.

A simultaneous rift with Egypt and Eritrea would carry a heavy price for Abiy Ahmed's government, since Addis Ababa would then face hostile fault lines to both its north and its east.

Cairo has pledged troops to the African Union mission in Somalia, and Eritrea has already placed itself at the heart of the dispute by severing diplomatic relations with Ethiopia altogether.

Hemmed in on both flanks, Ethiopia would depend almost entirely on Djibouti, which already handles close to 90 percent of its trade.

For Ahmed, a war on several fronts would revive what Otto von Bismarck called his "cauchemar des coalitions", the "nightmare of coalitions" in which France and Russia might join forces and drag Germany into a two-front war.

Fighting at home while quarrelling abroad would be the worst of all scenarios for Addis Ababa, once the military costs, the strain on debt relief and the human toll are counted together.

For Cairo, an Ethiopia tied down at home is leverage on the Nile. For Abu Dhabi, a collapsing Ethiopia would mean losing its most valuable partner on the mainland.

Both camps thus have reasons to feed the war, yet neither has much interest in a clear winner. That is how civil wars become proxy wars.

This is where Turkey matters.

It brokered the Ankara Declaration between Ethiopia and Somalia in December 2024, while holding its largest overseas base in Mogadishu, and has mended ties with both Cairo and Abu Dhabi in recent years.

This gives Ankara a rare ability to speak to both camps. As his room at home narrows, Abiy may well knock on Ankara’s door again.

Ethiopia’s prognosis therefore hinges on Abiy’s next move: whether he adopts collaborative, win-win strategies towards his opponents, or clings to a zero-sum game.

In making that choice, he would do well to look back, for Ethiopian history is clear on one point: the state has held when power was bargained with the regions, and it has cracked whenever power was imposed on them.

The reason is simple. Once power has been devolved to the peripheries, it can rarely be recentralised without resistance - and this is precisely the lesson Abiy must now come to terms with.

The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Eye.

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