Abiy Ahmed dreams of remaking Ethiopia in his image- The Economist

• The prime minister’s re-election is certain. Ethiopia’s future is less so

Originally published in The Economist on May 25, 2026, and reprinted here.

A sheaf of wheat can have many meanings. For Ethiopia’s Prosperity Party, which chose one as its campaign logo ahead of polls scheduled for June 1st, it is a symbol of national unity: stalks entwined like the country’s many ethnic groups. More than that, it is an emblem of Ethiopia’s progress towards “food sovereignty”, explained the mayor of Addis Ababa, the capital, at a recent rally. No longer should Ethiopians beg foreigners for aid, she said: “We produce wheat ourselves and have become self-sufficient.” If once Ethiopia was a byword for famine, now it was rapidly becoming a “model nation”, she claimed.

Such grandiose words have become the stock-in-trade of Ethiopian officials under Abiy Ahmed, the prime minister. To Mr Abiy’s allies, he is a visionary leader who has laid the foundations for a united, prosperous Ethiopia strong enough to reclaim what they believe to be its rightful place as the undisputed hegemon on the African side of the Red Sea. To his critics, he is an autocrat who stokes division at home and threatens to foment chaos abroad. What is clear is that few leaders in Africa today have such exalted visions for national development. “Nothing”, Mr Abiy recently declared, “can stop us.”

When protests forced his predecessor to resign in 2018, few expected Mr Abiy, then in his early 40s and little known, to last long. Yet he has spent those years in single-minded pursuit of his goals. He has seen off deadly protests and ethnic rebellions and, in the northern region of Tigray, prosecuted a brutal civil war that nearly forced him from power and left perhaps half a million dead. In flawed elections in 2021 the ruling party—a personalised vehicle for Mr Abiy’s brand of prosperity-gospel-infused politics—won nearly all contested seats. When he goes up for re-election next week he will face even less real competition.

Much of Mr Abiy’s vision for Ethiopia depends on economic success. He has taken important steps to liberalise Ethiopia’s economy by floating the currency and opening industries such as banking and telecoms to foreign investment. He has given Addis Ababa a facelift, razing much of its historic centre to make way for luxury apartments, hotels, parks and cycle lanes, and broken ground on numerous grand projects, including a new airport that is set to be the continent’s biggest. In 2025 he struck a deal with Aliko Dangote, a Nigerian tycoon who is Africa’s richest man, to build a giant fertiliser plant worth more than $4bn.

By some estimates, the ambition is paying off. The IMF expects Ethiopia’s economy to grow by 9.2% in 2026, less than the government figure of 10.2%, but still more than double the sub-Saharan African average (and probably an optimistic estimate given the quality of government statistics). Exports are projected to reach $17.5bn, an increase of nearly 50% since 2024. In February annual inflation fell to 9.7%, down from 15% in 2025. Government revenues have risen sharply, as have—to a less dramatic degree—foreign-exchange reserves. Following a visit to the country in May Kristalina Georgieva, the IMF’s boss, hailed Ethiopia’s “impressive progress” on its “ambitious” economic agenda.

Eventually, Mr Abiy hopes Ethiopia will achieve what he calls national “sovereignty”, by which he means an economy less exposed to outside pressures. He wants to replace 96 essential imports with local substitutes to make Ethiopia more self-sufficient and end what he calls Ethiopia’s “culture of begging” for foreign aid.

Yet that future still looks some way off. Foreign direct investment (FDI) remains anaemic, despite attempts to woo investors. Manufacturing, which made strides under Mr Abiy’s predecessors, is in the doldrums; its share of GDP has fallen by a third since he took office. It does not help that Mr Abiy frequently touts statistics that leave experts scratching their heads. “I don’t even look at them anymore—they’re just so made up,” says a weary Western aid official. The government recently told donors it no longer needs their help in responding to humanitarian crises, but official figures belie that claim. The World Bank reckons the share of the population living on $3 a day or less hit 43% last year, up from 33% a decade ago. The UN’s World Food Programme says some 7m people are in urgent need of food aid. Hundreds of thousands of young Ethiopians, seeing little prospect for the future, leave each year.

The war in Iran will probably stymie Mr Abiy’s growth plans further. Ethiopia imports 97% of its fuel from the Middle East; the closure of the Strait of Hormuz since March has recently caused two-day queues for diesel in Addis Ababa. Aid workers worry that shortages of fertiliser, much of which also comes from the Gulf, will exacerbate hunger in much of the countryside.

Yet the biggest threat to Mr Abiy’s economic vision is his political one. The prime minister says he is uniting Ethiopians. In practice, that has meant centralising power. Large parts of the state apparatus and state-run economy are under his thumb. This includes, for instance, the sovereign wealth fund established in 2021, and, more recently, a security “task force” charged with overseeing the upcoming election. Subsidies from the federal government to Ethiopia’s states were a collective 60% of the national budget in 2018. By 2026 they had shrunk to just 20%.

Mr Abiy has also been accused of favouring the Oromo, his own ethnic group and the country’s largest. The heads of the army, air force and federal police are all Oromo. So is the mayor of Addis Ababa. Economic power seems to be shifting their way. One prominent Oromo opposition figure concedes that the government has been focused on uplifting Oromos more than other groups.

That risks undermining the very control Mr Abiy seeks to achieve. Increasingly, Ethiopians of all stripes—not just the Tigrayans who waged war against the federal government between 2020 and 2022—resent Mr Abiy for amassing too much power. In Amhara, the second biggest region, an insurgency launched against the federal government in 2023 is escalating. Before Mr Abiy took power Ethiopia was an autocratic but largely stable country. Today large swathes of it are beyond the government’s control and off limits to investors, both local and foreign; one reason for the disappointing FDI figures.

Beyond Ethiopia’s borders, Mr Abiy’s mission is riven by similar contradictions. In the Horn of Africa he casts himself as an architect of regional stability and integration. But at the same time he dreams of restoring Ethiopia’s direct access to the sea, which it lost when Eritrea, its much smaller neighbour to the north, seceded to form its own country in 1993. Though in public his officials insist they respect their neighbour’s territorial integrity and sovereignty, in private they question the legal basis for its independence. Eritreans fear Mr Abiy’s ultimate goal is to revive the old Ethiopian Empire, by annexing their country and making Ethiopia a naval power on the Red Sea.

None of this will stop Mr Abiy from being re-elected. In 64 of 509 election districts outside Tigray only candidates for the Prosperity Party are standing. The Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF), which dominated national politics for nearly three decades before Mr Abiy’s ascent, has been outlawed. No voting at all will take place in Tigray, home to around 6% of the population. “What Abiy did is he killed politics,” says a seasoned Ethiopian analyst.

But politics could yet roar back to life. Mr Abiy’s ambition to reconfigure the Horn of Africa means a conflict with Eritrea is all too plausible. Ethiopia’s recent meddling in the civil war in neighbouring Sudan makes it more likely, because its support for the rebel Rapid Support Forces may push Sudan’s army to join forces with Eritrea and Mr Abiy’s domestic opponents. A peace Mr Abiy signed with the TPLF in 2022 is hanging by a thread. And a prolonged spell of Iran-war-induced high energy prices risks eating up Ethiopia’s still-meagre foreign reserves at a time when it cannot afford another balance-of-payments crisis. “Until the election we are safe,” observes a prominent Ethiopian journalist. “After that, who knows?”