Ethiopia's Ruling Party 'Heavily Favored' in Election EU says

Ethiopia's Ruling Party 'Heavily Favored'
in Election, European Union Says

8 November, 2010 | By William Davison (Bloomberg)
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Ethiopia’s electoral playing field was “heavily” balanced in favor of
the ruling party in a May vote in which Prime Minister Meles
Zenawi and allied parties won all but two of the 547 seats in
parliament, the European Union said.

Local administrations that are almost entirely controlled by the
Ethiopian Peoples’ Revolutionary Democratic Front should in future
have a reduced role in elections to make the process fairer, the EU
said in its final report on the vote published on its website today.
The EPRDF controls more than 99 percent of local administrations
in the country.

Ethiopia’s government rejected the criticism of a process it has
described as free and fair.

“The report casts doubt not on the

standards of the election, but on the

integrity of the observers,” government

spokesman Shimeles Kemal said in a

mobile-phone interview today.

The report was presented in Brussels, the Belgian capital, after
observers failed to get permission to deliver the report in Addis
Ababa, said Thijs Berman, a Dutch member of the European
Parliament who led a team to the Horn of Africa country in May.

Shimeles said he had “no idea” why the report wasn’t presented in
Ethiopia.

The EPRDF used a combination of harassment and arrests and
withholding food aid and jobs to thwart the opposition Medrek
alliance ahead of the election, Human Rights Watch, a New York-
based advocacy group, said in a March 24 report entitled “One
Hundred Ways of Putting Pressure.”

‘Curtail Suspicions’

The EU mission recommended that if the National Electoral Board
relied less on local administrations it could “could prevent and curtail
suspicions of governmental control of the electoral process.” The
ruling party alliance won all but four of the 1,904 seats for the
regional state councils in this year’s elections.

Changes to the legal framework and the fragmentation,
imprisonment and exile of opposition figures following disputed
elections in 2005 have made it difficult for opponents of the ruling
party to operate in Ethiopia, the EU said.

The mission said the EPRDF used state resources to fund its
campaign and reporting by state media ahead of the vote was
biased in favor the ruling party. Freedom of assembly was
sometimes not respected for opposition parties, and the volume of
complaints of intimidation against the ruling party, local
administrations and police was a “matter of concern,” it said.

Meles is a former Marxist guerrilla leader who has led sub- Saharan
Africa’s second-most populous nation and top coffee producer
since 1991. Under his rule, Ethiopia has pursued an economic
model that mixes a large state role with foreign investment in roads,
agriculture and power. Last year, almost a sixth of the population
relied on food aid.

To contact the reporter on this story William Davison in Addis
Ababa via Johannesburg at 1999 or pmrichardson@bloomberg.
net.

To contact the editor responsible for this story: Antony
Sguazzin at asguazzin@bloomberg.net.
.
Courtesy