A vote with no confidence: Ethiopia’s untimely election

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Hello and welcome to the intelligence on Economist Radio. I'm your host, Jason Palmer. Every weekday we provide a fresh perspective on the events shaping your world. With Italy's new government in February came a new department, the Ministry for Ecological Transition. It's got a huge 70 billion euro chunk of pandemic recovery funds to build a greener future for the country. We examine its plans and its challenges. And Australia is seeing a rare conservation success. Humpback whales, once brought to the brink by whaling operations, are resurging. The government thinks it's time to take them off the list of threatened creatures. But conservationists think otherwise. But first, Ethiopia is holding a national election today, its first since Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed took office in 2018. In his final campaign rally last week, Abiy promised the vote would be peaceful. He said that although the world expected violence, it Ethiopia would show them otherwise. But expectations of violence aren't unreasonable. For seven months, the northern Tigray region has been at war as armed groups loyal to the region's former ruling party face off against federal troops and their allies from neighboring Eritrea. Homes have been destroyed, harvests ruined, and food aid prevented from entering. Tigray's population faces imminent starvation. It had long been hoped that today's election would calm divisions in the country's politics. But to many observers. It's instead become a further sign that Abiy's promise of free and fair democracy in Ethiopia has been broken.

It's hard to overstate the gravity of what's happening in Tigray now. I think it's probably not an exaggeration to say it's the most pressing humanitarian crisis ongoing in the world right now.

Tom Gardner is our Addis Ababa correspondent.

In seven months since the war began last November, we've seen war crimes, atrocities. It seems that rape has been used as a weapon of war in Tigray and now famine. A report this month warned that 5.5 million people in the region are facing high acute food insecurity. 353,000 are at the highest catastrophic level of risk. That is UN speak for famine.

And we've been talking about the war and its effects essentially since it began. Why is it that things have gone from so bad to so much worse?

Well, it's partly accumulative. Seven months now of limited food aid, a blockade at the beginning of the war, and now we have the approach of the rainy season, so farmers need to plow their fields and plant their crops within the next month. I mean, it's probably too late. In the last few weeks or months, there's actually been an intensification of the fighting and in particular an intensification of some of the obstacles facing humanitarian support there. The real problem now is soldiers from the Eritrean side, but also Ethiopian troops as well, have been blocking, intimidating, harassing and detaining humanitarian workers and in some cases, looting their aid convoys. And according to the un, that has been getting worse. The number of recorded incidents has been going up in the last few months.

And with all that going on, incredibly, Ethiopians are being asked to go to the polls. Why now?

Well, I mean, officially, elections are long overdue. They were originally stated for last year. Those were pushed back due to the pandemic and then again delayed from June 5th of this year to June 21st due to logistical concerns. It's been extraordinarily difficult to organize an election in a country of 110 million people with very poor infrastructure and a very limited experience of real, free and fair elections to date. But, I mean, equally important, I think, to realize is Abiy came to power three years ago, essentially through an internal party coup. So he's never been elected. And there's always been these question marks hanging over his legitimacy. And the government and officials definitely see those question marks as driving the violence and the conflicts in the country. So Abiy, to Consolidate power. He needs to have a popular mandate that he can point to, and he's dead set on doing that and getting that mandate. However, there are certainly signs that it won't be a truly competitive or credible ballot.

How do you mean?

Well, to start with, around 15% of constituencies are not going to be holding elections at all. But most importantly, aby's home region Oromia, which comprises almost a third of all constituencies and actually 40% of registered voters. That's essentially a one horse race. So we have in effect, the ruling party running unopposed in the most important region.

So it sounds as if there might be more going on here than just simply trying to organize an election in a war zone.

Yes, of course there are serious logistical issues around organizing election in a country there's currently conflict ridden as Ethiopia. But it's also certainly the case that particularly the closer you get to the ground, you find all sorts of funny business going on. Whether that's complaints from the opposition around the process of voter registration over the previous two months, whether it's the fact that opposition candidates in many parts of the country cannot campaign safely or freely, that local officials won't let them campaign, won't let them hold meetings. I've spoken to many people who've seen this sort of thing firsthand. One of them was Yusuf Ibrahim, the vice chairman of the National Movement of Amhara. That's the main opposition in Amhara, which is the largest region and an increasingly critical constituency for aby. And he told me that intimidation and violence was rife in Amhara.

The government militia and the security forces have already put stumbling blocks on the road to reaching our people. And they are firing gunshots and also arresting those running for election. And we have lost two candidates, unfortunately, and many are in prison.

And what is the international community saying about all of this?

Belatedly, some foreign governments are sounding the ALARM. So on June 12, America's State Department said it was gravely concerned about the election. It's also called on the government to commit to talks with the opposition afterwards. Last month, the EU cancelled its election observation mission. It said that bureaucratic obstacles had made its work impossible. The Ethiopian government blamed the EU for dragging its feet and said an election didn't need foreign observers to be deemed credible.

And so is the international response getting any more urgent now that famine is the watchword?

The international community is certainly getting louder. There's been a growing and more coordinated diplomatic push from various Western countries calling for a humanitarian ceasefire in Tigray. But the UN Security Council, which met last week only met to have informal discussions on the crisis in Tigray. It's yet to have a formal public meeting, no resolutions, only one press statement.

And so again, we're kind of forced to recalibrate our thoughts on Abiy Ahmed, the poster boy for African democracy, Nobel laureate. Now words like dictatorship being thrown around.

Yes. I mean, many in Ethiopia may not have been so surprised at this progression. I mean, Abiy came up through the military cybersecurity. He's the consummate party insider. And this is a party which has changed its name since he came to power. But it's the same people. It's a fundamentally not a democratic party. Nonetheless, I don't think many people expected things to degenerate quite this dramatically. I mean, this really is, especially in Tigray, the worst case scenario. Absolutely. The most cataclysmic of all the predictions and the line that connects it all, I think is Abi's unflinching determination to get his own way. His sense of mission means that both in Tigray, when it comes to resisting any outside pressure to change course or resisting calls from the opposition to engage in dialogue, his personality has certainly been a driving force in making this crisis worse than it might otherwise have been.

Thanks very much for joining us, Tom.

Thank you, Jason.

For more analysis like this from our international network of correspondence, take out a subscription to the Economist. Get a great introductory deal@Equality.com IntelligenceOffer the link is in the show Notes. Late last year, leaders of the European Union agreed an ambitious new climate goal to cut greenhouse gas emissions to 55% of the levels in 1990. By the end of this decade, as one of the EU's biggest economies, Italy is expected to play a significant role in making these cuts. Its newish prime minister, Mario Draghi, is allocating billions of euros to the task. But the country's unstable politics, coupled with its love of the internal combustion engine means that it's in for an uphill battle.

Italy will be getting the biggest single chunk of any member state from the EU's recovery fund.

John Hooper is the economist's Italy and Vatican correspondent.

And of that the biggest single chunk is going to the projects to help the environment that are going to be handled primarily by its new Ministry for Ecological Transition.

And what is the ministry proposing to do with all that cash?

Well, Mr. Draghi's ministers had very little time in which to revise the previous government's recovery scheme. And when I spoke to the minister, Roberto Cingolani, he said that his strategy had been to Go for what he called the low hanging fruits of decarbonization. By far the biggest element in his program is the extension of a so called super bonus that was introduced by the previous government that allows 110% of the cost of works to boost domestic energy efficiency to be set against tax. And letting that program run on, that's going to cost 14 billion euros, which is nearly a fifth of all that Italy is intending to spend on green projects. On the supply side, Mr. Cingolani says that his approach is to electrify everything that can be electrified. But there is a problem in Italy. It's not a stereotype to say that Italians are, are car mad. And one of the challenges is going to be to convert Italy's motorists to either using other forms of transport or going green by driving hybrids and electric vehicles.

So how does that picking of the low hanging fruit sit with the country's environmental lobby?

Not at all. Well, the environmental organizations put out a statement decrying a number of different aspects, for example, saying all this money is going towards making housing more energy efficient, but industry accounts for more of Italy's emissions. Why are we doing nothing for the factories? Another gripe that they had was that the government just wasn't allocating enough money to, to the creation of a network of electrical charging stations for vehicles. In fact, it's only about a tenth of the sum that's being spent on mass transit systems. So really quite a small amount by the large amounts that are involved in the EU's recovery plan.

So for the parts of the plan that do come off, what sort of difference will it make, put in the context of wider decarbonisation plans?

I think that one factor that we can't know at the moment is the reaction of the EU commission and they're in a position to go back to the Italian government and demand changes be made. But as things stand, the verdict of those who are monitoring the process, two German NGOs have undertaken this task and have created a website and their view is that Italy is bottom of the class. They say that far from the figures put out by the government, only 16% of the overall amount will actually help to slow climate change. And that's the lowest share of any big recipient.

It sounds like damning by feigned praise, really. I mean, what do the Italian people make of all this back and forth?

There is quite a lot of green consciousness in Italy. Though the Greens are weak politically, there will be, I think, quite a lot of sympathy for the idea of arresting global warming in a country that could suffer greatly from it. But on June 4, a group of more than 200 individuals and associations went a step further than that and announced legal proceedings against the government, claiming that it was failing in its duty to future generations. And those groups and individuals included some quite moderate ones, such as the Italian Meteorological Society, for example. There's also, I think, going to be pressure on the government now from within the governing coalition, where the Five Star movement, very ecologically minded, has sorted out its internal problems and is likely to have a stronger voice in future.

So if I could ask you to get out your green tinted crystal ball with those pressures from the eu, from the people, from within the government, do you think Italy will get there? Will it reach its targets?

I think that the Italian government is going to come under quite a lot of pressure from within the country, but also from the European Commission to change parts of this plan before it gets activated. And the commission is in a position to get its demands met because it can say under the rules of the recovery plan, if you don't do what we tell you to do, you just won't get the money.

John, thanks very much for joining us.

My pleasure.

Between May and November, some 40,000 humpback whales commute along Australia's eastern coast. It's a highway from their feeding grounds in Antarctica to the Great Barrier Reef, where their calves are born. It hasn't always been smooth swimming for the whales, though. They were hunted for oil and bone until the 1960s and are still on the list of threatened species. Just how complete their comeback has been, though, depends on whom you ask.

The humpbacks here in Australia have been breeding incredibly successfully. They've been breeding, as one expert who I spoke to put it, like rabbits.

Eleanor Whitehead is the Economist's Australia and New Zealand correspondent.

There have been films of them moving along this year up the coast of eastern Australia in these kind of giant superpods of dozens of humpbacks, which is a scale that scientists are saying they've never seen before. And they're breeding so well that the Federal Environment Department thinks it's time to take them off Australia's list of threatened species.

And they're on that list because of whaling.

In the past, they were hunted really right up to the brink of extinction by Europeans. From pretty much the moment that the Brits arrived in Australia. It was one of the colony's first primary industries right the way through until the 1960s, when the hunting of humpbacks was banned by the International Whaling Commission. And by that point there were about, give or take 200 or so along the east coast of Australia and another 800 or so off the western coast. But they've done really well since then. They've been breeding at a rate of about 10% or more a year over the past decade or so. One of the scientists I spoke to said it was almost biologically implausible. Some scientists think that they may now be more numerous than they were before the days of commercial whaling.

Which is to say that they're not endangered anymore.

Well, that is the line that the federal government is taking, yes. So it does think it's time to take them off this list that it has of threatened species. They're listed at the moment as vulnerable, which gives them kind of extra funding, attention. Taking them off would mean that that gets to go to other animals. It's not exactly like a one in, one out situation, but there's only so much of those resources and the kind of official line is other creatures need that help more and that the humpbacks will still be protected under an environmental law which looks after migratory species. But there are a lot of scientists here who are worried about that.

Why is that?

Their thinking is that the whales face a whole kind of range of problems which are way more complicated than the simple one to solve of whaling back in the day. So that's everything from being hit by boats, ocean pollution, noise pollution, being caught in fishing nets. There was a humpback caught in fishing gear just off the beach where I live just the other week, and they had to stage this massive rescue operation for it. So none of those problems have affected their numbers yet. But then there's the ever present threat of climate change and that affects the krill that the whales eat. So there is a kind of concern among environmentalists that there could be threats to their numbers coming and there might be a crash coming in the future, particularly if they grow in numbers beyond the ecosystem's capacity to support them. And scientists will say to you, well, this has happened with the gray whale in North America. It was taken off the US's list of threatened species and kind of proceeded to die off en masse, which has been attributed to food shortages, which apparently may have been caused by climate change. So they want measures taken to make sure that the whales are looked after, even if they are taken off that threatened species list.

But still, it's kind of a good situation to be in.

It is. It's a good problem to have. I mean, certainly when you compare the humpback's situation to that of other creatures in Australia, generally, animals in Australia are not faring that well. It's got the highest mammal extinction rate of any country in the world according to environmental charities. It's flooring giant tracts of land on a daily basis. There's one estimate that says it's felling a stadium sized area of forests, forest and bushland every two minutes. So that's hurting creatures like the koala which is edging towards extinction. In New South Wales, there were By 1 estimate 3 billion animals killed or displaced by the bushfires that happened here in 2019 and 2020 over that summer. There are plenty of creatures that kind of come off that threatened species list because, you know, unfortunately they've gone extinct. So it's nice that there is one that might be doing that because it's thriving.

Thanks very much for joining us.

Eleanor thanks, Jason.

That's all for this episode of the Intelligence. If you like us, leave us a rating and a review and we'll see you back here tomorrow.

SAM.