The Ethiopian prime minister’s opponents fear that he’s an African Erdogan. His rhetoric and policies suggest he’s more of a liberal democrat.
Earlier this year, when Abiy Ahmed was seeking the leadership of Ethiopia’s ruling party, the Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF), he encountered stiff resistance.
At the time, much of his home region of Oromia, Ethiopia’s largest and most populous regional state, was experiencing a wave of a protests and strikes that brought the economy to a near standstill. In February, then-Prime Minister Hailemariam Desalegn resigned, and a state of emergency was declared by the federal government. Abiy, as the recently appointed chairman of the Oromo wing of the EPRDF, a multiethnic coalition, put his name forward. He was young and popular with the demonstrators, and he echoed many of their demands, including for the release of political prisoners. But a section of the EPRDF establishment—centered in its ethnic Tigrayan wing, the Tigrayan People’s Liberation Front (TPLF)—dismissed him and his Oromo colleague Lemma Megersa as reckless populists and fought tooth and nail to obstruct his candidacy. They failed.
Since then, Ethiopian politics has been turned on its head. In late March, Abiy chairman of the EPRDF, in spite of internal opposition, and became the country’s new prime minister. He is enormously popular today and has won acclaim internationally for his rapid liberalization of the country’s politics; for his promises to organize, in 2020, Ethiopia’s first free and fair election; and for his
“One of the most common – and at times most compelling [critiques] – is that Abiy is a populist in the mold of Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdogan, India’s Narendra Modi, and U.S. President Donald Trump. It’s a critique worth contemplating; it also happens to be wrong,” the author, Tom Gardner says on the magazines ‘Argument’ section.
The article argues that unlike populists, Abiy offers “reconciliation, not division” and that his philosophy of “medemer” which means “unity” or “togetherness” ended schism in the Ethiopian Orthodox Church and he welcomed opposition groups, once declared terrorists by his predecessors, to peacefully take part in the country’s politics.
“Calling him a populist is intellectually sloppy; it fails to stand up to scrutiny and simply echoes the words of his internal party foes,” the magazine said.
Abiy does not fit to the definition of populism, the article argues, because he does not attack this or that group in the name of the people and does not offer “quick fixes” to the complex problems in the country.
“If Abiy must have a label imported from the West, he is a liberal democrat – or the closest approximation of one in contemporary Ethiopian politics – not a populist.”
