Govt offers olive branch
2005-05-17 09:23
Addis Ababa - Ethiopia's ruling party said late on Monday it had won hotly contested weekend general elections but offered an olive branch to the opposition which made significant gains in the 547-seat parliament.
While conceding it had lost all of Addis Ababa's 23 parliamentary seats as well as the capital's city council, the Ethiopian People's Revolutionary Front (EPRDF) said it would soon form a new government with a parliamentary majority.
"We have won the necessary seats to form a federal government; we accept the verdict of the people," Prime Minister Meles Zenawi's party said, adding it would work in good faith with the opposition.
A 'landslide victory'
The party had also taken four of eight regional assemblies: South Ethiopia Peoples, Oromia, Amhara and Tigray.
It gave no indication of how many parliamentary seats the EPRDF had won in Sunday's election but it had previously held 481 posts and the state-run Ethiopian News Agency reported it had been a "landslide victory".
Ethiopia's two main opposition groups, which had only a handful of MPs, said they had won as many as 61 parliamentary seats, including at least 20 in Addis Ababa.
The election was the country's third since the 1991 fall of a Soviet-backed dictatorship, second since the advent of multi-party politics and first under international scrutiny.
Boycotts banned
Official preliminary returns are not due until on Saturday and final results not until June, but the EPRDF conceded it had been shut out in all contests in the capital where Meles has banned all demonstrations for the next month as the preliminary vote counts from the more than 30 000 individual polling stations trickled with the opposition claiming big wins and dropping earlier threats to boycott the results.
The two opposition groups, the Coalition for Unity and Democracy (CUD) and the United Ethiopian Democratic Forces (UEDF), had set a target of winning 185 parliamentary seats together, enough to block legislation.
It was not clear whether they had had come close to reaching that goal but by winning the 23 Addis Ababa seats, the CUD passed the threshold of 20 needed to proposed bills.
One Western Addis Ababa-based diplomat called the CUD's success in the capital "an unheard of mini-revolution for the opposition".
But, observers said the EPRDF had been in no danger of losing its bid for a third term due to strong support in rural areas where 85% of the population lives.
Carter brushes aside Meles' ban
Former US president Jimmy Carter brushed aside Meles' ban on demonstrations.
Carter, who led a team of 50 observers, said he was satisfied with the explanation for the ban given to him by the prime minister.
The United States said the elections were fraught with multiple problems such as ballot shortage and slow lines, but there was no evidence of systemic fraud.