Ethiopia holds elections to the House of Representatives on 1 June 2026, the 547-seat lower chamber that elects the prime minister. It is the sixth electoral round since 1995, and it arrives in a country crossed by armed conflict in several regions. Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed, the 2019 Nobel Peace Prize laureate, is seeking to renew the majority of his Prosperity Party, which in the previous 2021 election won 410 of the 436 contested seats.
Conventional coverage will focus on the result, which few analysts consider uncertain. Diálogo Ciudadano watches the layer that is contested before the polls open: the campaign’s digital conditions.
What the opposition and researchers say
Opposition parties describe a hostile environment online. “We are facing challenges in reaching our constituencies and are subjected to intense social media hate campaigns and disinformation by supporters of the ruling party,” an opposition leader told the Africanews agency in late May 2026. The complaint is not new: in the 2021 election, Facebook removed accounts it had identified as part of “coordinated inauthentic behaviour” intended to covertly shape voters’ beliefs.
The digital picture rests on a wider media architecture. According to a Journal of Democracy analysis published in May 2026, the Prosperity Party —successor since 2019 to the former EPRDF coalition— retains near-total control of the media, and the Electoral Board approved several opposition parties that, the same analysis says, are aligned with the ruling party, in what it describes as a strategy to project to the international community the existence of credible competition.
The legal framework adds to this. According to the outlet Borkena, a 2025 law bars organizations receiving any foreign support from engaging in voter education, election monitoring, or political advocacy, shrinking the civic infrastructure for independent scrutiny; amendments to the media law, per the same source, have increased journalists’ criminal exposure for reporting deemed inaccurate.
The government’s version
The official narrative is different. After the 2021 election, Abiy Ahmed called the vote “historically inclusive” and said his party had been “chosen by the will of the people to administer the country.” The Africa Center for Strategic Studies recalls that, on taking office in 2018, Abiy released thousands of political prisoners and opened the political and civic space of a country that had known only forms of authoritarian government, and that he presents himself to his supporters as a reformer and modernizer. The same center notes he is also criticized for consolidating power and for his intolerance of dissent: the two readings that coexist about his figure.
The factor weighing on the vote: shutdowns
The precedent that most shapes the digital dimension of this election is that of internet shutdowns. The Institute of Development Studies documented how, in the 2021 campaign, the space on social media —especially Facebook— became a contested political terrain marked by hate speech, disinformation, fake government accounts, and internet shutdowns. The National Election Board (NEBE) revoked in May 2025 the legal status of the Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF), which has declared the election “null and void,” while parts of Tigray were left out of the process. The question observers are asking is not only who wins, but whether the network will stay open during the voting and the count.
Why it matters
For an outlet tracking the digital integrity of elections around the world in 2026, Ethiopia offers an edge case: a process whose outcome appears settled, but in which digital tools —coordinated disinformation, media control, and the latent threat of shutdowns— define the real margin of competition. The contrast with other elections in the calendar is what makes it possible to measure, country by country, how much is decided before a single ballot is cast.