Ethiopia’s Troubled Peace

Editor’s Note: Ethiopia has suffered internal strife many times in its recent history, and these instances often involved conflict between the central government and regional rebels. Hilary Matfess of the University of Denver explains why the Ethiopian government's power grab in the Tigray region may lead to a return of conflict to this long-troubled area.

Daniel Byman

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With a dry bureaucratic decision, Ethiopia’s National Election Board (NEBE) has put the country back on a collision course with the restive Tigray region. In early December 2025, NEBE recognized Tigray Democratic Solidarity (Simret) as a regional political party eligible to run for office in Tigray in the country’s 2026 elections. The board has not extended the same recognition to the Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF), which governed Tigray as a political party from 1991 through the present day. In 2020, the TPLF returned to the battlefield, fighting a coalition of forces led by the Ethiopian National Defense Forces in a bloody two-year war that claimed an estimated 600,000 lives. The signing of the Pretoria Agreement in November 2022 silenced the guns but left the region’s political future uncertain.

The board’s decision thus amounts to a quiet coronation of Simret and leaves the TPLF without options for peaceful political contestation in the upcoming elections, currently scheduled for June 1. The NEBE’s decision contributes to mounting insecurity in Tigray and will almost certainly add fuel to the simmering conflict between the Tigray Defense Forces (aligned with the TPLF) and the Tigray Peace Forces (allegedly aligned with Simret). It is merely the latest in a series of developments threatening the incomplete peace in northern Ethiopia.

The Emergence of Simret

Many of the power-brokers in Simret are no strangers to Ethiopian politics, having once been a part of the TPLF elite. The party’s leader, Getachew Reda, once served on the executive committee of the TPLF. It is perhaps more accurate to think of Simret as a splinter party of the TPLF than an entirely new political force.

Between March 2023 and March 2025, Getachew served as the interim president of Tigray—until he was removed in a “soft coup” by Debretsion Gebremichael and allied TPLF leaders. Since his removal, Getachew and others have aligned themselves with Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed Ali and the federal forces he controls.

The fragmentation of the TPLF has occurred over several years and broke into the open in August 2024, when the party held its 14th Congress. Seventeen members of the party’s Central Committee (including Getachew) and district leaders refused to participate in the event. Getachew published a letter explaining his position that “[t]he event holds no value other than endangering both the party and the people of Tigray,” and characterized it as a way of weeding out party dissidents. Getachew organized a “parallel conference,” which he called “Salvation of the People and the Party.” Unsurprisingly, the move prompted “swift retaliation from the TPLF’s executive committee, which expelled Getachew and several key allies, including Beyene Mekru and Professor Kindeya Gebrehiwot, from both party and interim administrative structures, citing charges ranging from insubordination to financial impropriety.”

Simret was officially founded in May 2025, and a founding congress took place in October. According to one Toronto-based outlet, Simret “has been unable to meaningfully operate in the Tigray region of Ethiopia due to security concerns the Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF) allegedly posed.”

But now, the NEBE has moved to sideline the TPLF from electoral politics. In May, the NEBE announced its decision to “formally deregister” the TPLF as a political party. This comes after an August 2024 decision not to reinstate the TPLF as a political party. The NEBE claims that the TPLF’s participation in violence and failure to hold a general assembly renders it ineligible. The TPLF objected to this decision. In a letter to the African Union, the TPLF asserted that deregistration “denies the TPLF a right it had reclaimed through the Pretoria Agreement, and poses a serious threat to the foundation of the peace process.”

If the TPLF is actually barred from participating in elections, it would represent a sea change in Tigrayan politics. The TPLF has governed the territory for decades—first as a rebel force battling the central government between 1974 and 1991, then as a political party, and again as a rebel group between 2020 and 2022. It now controls the interim government. The party enjoys widespread support, either out of genuine appreciation for the group’s policies or because that support has been compelled through the party’s history of coercion and authoritarianism. In contrast, Simret does not have the same long history in Tigray, nor the bureaucratic structures that developed over the course of those decades.

Prospects for Conflict

All of this means that the uneasy peace brought about by the Pretoria Agreement is more tenuous than ever. Both the TPLF and Simret seem to have the backing of armed groups that have already engaged in skirmishes and armed confrontations. In August 2025, for example, representatives of the Tigray Interim Administration accused Simret of having “embarked on acts of terrorism” and “advancing a foreign-funded agenda.” Other officials accuse the federal government of funneling support to the Tigray Peace Forces (TPF) in an effort to undermine the TPLF. A well-placed political player recently explained to me that the federal government provides TPF fighters with food—but resisted describing the TPF as an armed group. “The TPF is not a fighting force, it’s a force that is trying to show the powers that be in Mekelle [the capital of Tigray] that they will not be fighting in their cause, OK?” he said. “So, to that extent, it’s about taking away whatever military resources they would have at their disposal, so that they will think twice before they make the stupid mistake of miscalculating again.”

The purported relationship between Simret, the TPF, and the federal government is a perplexing arrangement. Getachew and other TPLF leaders denounced Prime Minister Abiy during the war and accused him of perpetrating a genocide. But, as Robin Tutenges reported in the Guardian, the 2022 Pretoria Agreement “reshuffled the deck: former allies are now enemies” and former enemies have found common cause. In this case, Getachew and Abiy have found room to cooperate based on their shared opposition to the TPLF.

It is not the only confounding partnership, however. There are credible accounts suggesting that the TPLF has brokered ties with the Eritrean government—which was responsible for mass violence against Tigrayan civilians during the war. TPLF representative Aregay Gebrekristos asserted that “[t]he TPLF and Eritrea must unite to dissolve the dirty country [Ethiopia]. Anyone who is against this idea, whether from TPLF or PFDJ, should know that he is putting himself in a danger of death.”

As Simret and the TPLF jockey for relevance in postwar Tigray, the NEBE’s decision is just one more factor pushing them closer to armed confrontation. Removing the prospect of peaceful political contestation in the June 2026 elections puts TPLF leaders’ backs against the wall. The intraparty wrangling that led to the creation of Simret underscores the unwillingness of TPLF leaders to give up power. If the TPLF is not able to participate as a political party in the coming elections, it may push the party to remilitarize and remobilize to retain its place in Tigrayan politics.

It is also unclear to what lengths the federal government will go to hold elections in Tigray in June. It seems plausible that the TPLF will reject the NEBE’s decision and refuse to cooperate with the planned federal elections. This would escalate the already fraught relationship with the federal government—and could result in the federal government cutting off funding to Tigray, appointing representatives, or even deploying the military again. Any of these scenarios could result in renewed fighting and unravel the tepid gains made since the Pretoria Agreement.