Ethiopians Queue for Hours as Voters Seek Peace at the Ballot Box

Jun 1 , 2026.

The charcoal braziers were lit before the sun cleared the volcanic ridges surrounding Addis Abeba, sending a thin blue smoke over the traditional coffee ceremony at Polling Sub-Station 120. By 4:00am, with the capital’s temperature still lingering in the single digits, a voter, Wegayehu was already waiting in the darkness of Lemi Kura District.

A housekeeper at an unfinished concrete residence nearby, he was the seventh person in line. Yet it was not until 7:15am, when the morning sun was already high, that he dipped his thumb in indelible ink and cast his ballot.

"Only six people were ahead of me," Wegayehu murmured, gesturing with a mixture of exhaustion and civic duty toward the lines now snaking down the unpaved road.

This was the ground-level reality of the seventh national and regional elections. It is a slow, manual and intensely local exercise carrying the weight of national expectation. While the high-level political affairs may be debated in the glass-fronted ministries of Africa's second-most populous country, the survival of its fragile state rested on a tedious analog process of registers, ballot papers, sealed boxes, party observers, patient voters, and election officials managing tempers one queue at a time.

Across the country, more than 54 million registered voters were testing whether a complex, multi-party apparatus could deliver stability to a country deeply scarred by militarised conflicts and double-digit inflation. The scale of the exercise remains formidable, as more than 10,900 candidates, 27pc fielded by the incumbent Prosperity Party  (PP), contesting 547 seats in the federal Parliament in a country with a median age of about 19 years. A whole set of voters in Tigray Regional State are excluded from this process, as elections are not being held there.

For the ruling party, led by Abiy Ahmed (PhD), today’s election is as the “ultimate institutional validation” of its governance. Voting in his home village of Besheha, in the Jimma Zone of the Oromia region, Abiy struck a tone of historic destiny, describing the exercise as visible evidence of a "great democratic system taking shape."

In the capital, Addis Abeba, Mayor Adanech Abiebie echoed his optimism, declaring that the “sovereignty of the state” has officially returned to ordinary citizens.

"The source of power in Ethiopia is the people’s vote," Adanech told the media after casting her vote, urging voters to remain patient through logistical hitches, rain, or sun.

However beneath the official rhetoric lay a deeply fragmented political reality. The Prosperity Party, formed from the EPRDF coalition, was attempting a bold experiment of building a centralized and pan-Ethiopian civic identity. To its supporters, it represents a yearning for national unity. To its critics, the centralized model risks alienating regional forces in a country federalized by multicultural fault lines.

The opposition, led by figures such as Eyob Mesafint of the Ethiopian Citizens for Social Justice party (EZEMA), faced an uphill battle against deeply entrenched incumbent machinery. Speaking to reporters after casting his ballot at a polling station in Addis Abeba, Eyob acknowledged "minor irregularities" about the candidate lottery system but maintained a cautiously cooperative posturing.

"Establishing a government is much better than any other outcome," he said, brushing off questions about the security vacuums that have kept parts of the Amhara and Tigray regional states from participating.

If the national political debate was philosophical, the polling stations were transactional. At the Yeka District Health Center (Station 02), election executives officially sealed the ballot boxes at 5:45am. About 1,409 are registered there, with exactly 1,700 papers allocated for Parliament and another 1,700 for the city Council.

But precision on paper did not prevent friction on the ground. At a polling station near Bole airport, lines stalled as Amarech Feleke, clinical nurse, observing for the Prosperity Party, noted that the manual cross-checking of voter registers eating up critical minutes. The queue moved only after voters mutually agreed to let local military personnel skip ahead to cast their ballots.

Elsewhere, the priority system, designed to shield the elderly, disabled, and mothers with infants from the wait, sparked flare-ups. At the main Lemi Kura station, murmurs turned into open disapproval when observers noted that healthy and younger religious leaders were being ushered to the front of the queue. Tensions briefly peaked when a frustrated voter tried to bypass the line entirely, pushing an executive before being restrained by election staff.

For veteran voters, the lines were a small price for what they saw as structural progress. Ayelech Deseta, a 69-year-old retiree waiting at the Yeka District compound among a heavy morning demographic of elderly women, has voted in every election since the mid-1990s.

"In the past, polling stations were not located in places that were convenient," Ayelech said, recalling decades of shifting regimes.

She credited targeted campaign drives for giving her a clearer understanding of the ballot's utility this year.

"Even if the country is facing difficult circumstances, I believe holding the election is appropriate," she said.

Yet for many outside the political class, the vote was less an endorsement of democratic regime than a plea for economic stability. Large swaths of Addis Abeba remained unusually quiet throughout the morning, with commercial life paused as citizens watched the boxes fill.

Standing directly opposite the Lemi Kura polling station at his Michael Bakery, 64-year-old Merid Beshir, a retired head of the Wollega Agriculture Development Trade Bureau, summarized the stakes facing whoever forms the next government.

"I just want peace," Merid said, his brief assessment cutting through the high-flown rhetoric of the morning speeches.

He argued that the state's ongoing domestic conflicts have battered the local economy, driving up import prices and everyday staples.

"If the war stops, the cost of living will also improve," he said.

The deeper test was whether the administrative process would be deemed credible enough by a weary public to buy the peace that citizens like Merid were counting on.

PUBLISHED ON Jun 01,2026 [ VOL 27 , NO 1362]