The politics of Eritrea and the government of Eritrea take place in the framework of a single-party presidential republican totalitarian dictatorship. The President officially serves as both head of state and head of government. The People's Front for Democracy and Justice is the only political party legally permitted to exist in Eritrea. The popularly elected National Assembly of 150 seats, formed in 1993 shortly after independence from Ethiopia, elected the current president, Isaias Afwerki. There have been no general elections since its official independence in 1993. A new constitution was drafted in 1993 and ratified in 1997, but has not been implemented. Since the National Assembly last met in January 2002, president Afwerki has exercised the powers of both the executive and legislative branches of government.
Isaias Afwerki is an Eritrean politician and partisan who has been the first and only president of Eritrea since 1993. In addition to being president, Isaias has been the chairman of Eritrea's sole legal political party, the People's Front for Democracy and Justice (PFDJ).
Abdullahi Yusuf Ahmed was a Somali politician and former colonel in the Somali National Army. He was one of the founders of the rebel Somali Salvation Democratic Front (SSDF), as well as the Puntland state of Somalia, the latter of which he served as the first president. In 2004, Yusuf also helped establish the Transitional Federal Government (TFG), which he led as President of Somalia from 2004 until 2008.
The Eritrean Liberation Front, colloquially known as Jebha, was the main independence movement in Eritrea which sought Eritrea's independence from Ethiopia during the 1960s and the early 1970s.
The Eastern Front was a coalition of rebel groups operating in eastern Sudan along the border with Eritrea, particularly the states of Red Sea and Kassala. The Eastern Front's Chairman is Musa Mohamed Ahmed. While the Sudan People's Liberation Army (SPLA) was the primary member of the Eastern Front, the SPLA was obliged to leave by the January 2005 Comprehensive Peace Agreement that ended the Second Sudanese Civil War. Their place was taken in February 2004 after the merger of the larger Beja Congress with the smaller Rashaida Free Lions, two tribal based groups of the Beja and Rashaida people, respectively. The Justice and Equality Movement (JEM), a rebel group from Darfur in the west, then joined.
There are no current independent mass media in Eritrea. All media outlets in Eritrea are from the Ministry of Information, a government source.
Hamid Idris Awate was an Eritrean revolutionary and prominent guerrilla commander, and a symbol of the Eritrean War of Independence and independence struggle.
A coup d'état was carried out by the Sudanese Armed Forces on 30 June 1989 against the democratically elected government of Prime Minister Sadiq al-Mahdi and President Ahmed al-Mirghani. The coup was led by military officer Omar al-Bashir who took power in its aftermath; he ruled the country for the next 30 years until he was overthrown in 2019.
The Second Afar insurgency was an insurgency in the Afar Region of Ethiopia and the Southern Red Sea Region of Eritrea, waged by various Afar rebel groups. Both Ethiopia and Eritrea supported different rebel groups in the region in a proxy war, and occasionally engaged in border skirmishes with each other, as well as with opposing rebel groups.
The Red Sea Afar Democratic Organisation is a political organisation and armed insurgent group based in Ethiopia. The organisation is made up of mainly ethnic Afar people, and was founded in early 1995-1996 following a revolt by the Red Sea Afar people led by Ahmed Humed, after the UN-supervised Eritrean independence referendum was held in 1993. The primary goal of RSADO is to achieve autonomy for the region known as Dankalia, inhabited mainly by the Red Sea Afar.
The Eritrean–Ethiopian border conflict was a violent standoff and a proxy conflict between Eritrea and Ethiopia lasting from 1998 to 2018. It consisted of a series of incidents along the then-disputed border; including the Eritrean–Ethiopian War of 1998–2000 and the subsequent Second Afar insurgency. It included multiple clashes with numerous casualties, including the Battle of Tsorona in 2016. Ethiopia stated in 2018 that it would cede Badme to Eritrea. This led to the Eritrea–Ethiopia summit on 9 July 2018, where an agreement was signed which demarcated the border and agreed a resumption of diplomatic relations.
The Saho People's Democratic Movement (SPDM) is an organized group in Eritrea, fighting for the self-determination of the Saho people. They are allied with the Red Sea Afar Democratic Organisation (RSADO), whom they have done joint operations with. The organization was founded in 1984, during the Eritrean War of Independence, and played a significant role in the struggle against Ethiopian rule.
Abiy Ahmed Ali is an Ethiopian politician who is the current Prime Minister of Ethiopia since 2018 and the leader of the Prosperity Party since 2019. He was awarded the 2019 Nobel Peace Prize "for his efforts to achieve peace and international cooperation, and in particular for his decisive initiative to resolve the border conflict with neighbouring Eritrea". Abiy served as the third chairman of the Ethiopian People's Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF) that governed Ethiopia for 28 years and the first person of Oromo descent to hold that position. Abiy is a member of the Ethiopian parliament, and was a member of the Oromo Democratic Party (ODP), one of the then four coalition parties of the EPRDF, until its rule ceased in 2019 and he formed his own party, the Prosperity Party.
The South Sudan Opposition Alliance is a coalition of political parties and armed groups in South Sudan that opposed the government of President Salva Kiir. It was formed in February 2018 in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, by nine groups. In September the alliance acceded to a revised peace deal with the government that also included the main rebel faction, the Sudan People's Liberation Movement-in-Opposition, but some of the member groups disagreed with the decision and split from the alliance. The pro-deal SSOA has experienced continued tension between its members, as well as with the government.
Ahmed Mohamed Jasir was an Eritrean politician, is one of the most significant leaders in Eritrean history of struggle for independence from 1958 to 1990.
This timeline of the Tigray War is part of a chronology of the military engagements of the Tigray War, a civil war that began in the Tigray Region of Ethiopia in early November 2020.
Abiy Ahmed is currently the third serving Prime Minister of Ethiopia. In 2018, he became the first ever Oromo descent to assume the role of prime minister in the history of Ethiopia. He won the Nobel Peace Prize in his second year as a prime minister of Ethiopia in 2019 becoming the eighth African laureates to win the award for peace.
The 1995 Ethiopian Federal Constitution formalizes an ethnic federalism law aimed at undermining long-standing ethnic imperial rule, reducing ethnic tensions, promoting regional autonomy, and upholding unqualified rights to self-determination and secession in a state with more than 80 different ethnic groups. But the constitution is divisive, both among Ethiopian nationalists who believe it undermines centralized authority and fuels interethnic conflict, and among ethnic federalists who fear that the development of its vague components could lead to authoritarian centralization or even the maintenance of minority ethnic hegemony. Parliamentary elections since 1995 have taken place every five years since enactment. All but one of these have resulted in government by members of the Ethiopian People's Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF) political coalition, under three prime ministers. The EPRDF was under the effective control of the Tigray People's Liberation Front (TPLF), which represents a small ethnic minority. In 2019 the EPRDF, under Abiy, was dissolved and he inaugurated the pan-ethnic Prosperity Party which won the 2021 Ethiopian Election, returning him as prime minister. But both political entities were different kinds of responses to the ongoing tension between constitutional ethnic federalism and the Ethiopian state's authority. Over the same period, and all administrations, a range of major conflicts with ethnic roots have occurred or continued, and the press and availability of information have been controlled. There has also been dramatic economic growth and liberalization, which has itself been attributed to, and used to justify, authoritarian state policy.
Ahmed Mohammed Nasser was an Eritrean politician who was the chairman of the Eritrean Liberation Front and a key figure during the Eritrean War of Independence.
