ABSTRACT
Djibouti, Sudan and Ethiopia regimes offer different authoritarian trajectories: while Djibouti continues a timid apprenticeship of political liberalization over the course of the elections, the last electoral appointments have been suspended in Ethiopia and Sudan on the eve of general elections (scheduled for 2020 in both countries). In Sudan, the popular revolution of December 2018 overthrew President Omar al-Bashir and the Inqaz regime in April 2019. In Ethiopia, Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed’s decision to postpone the general elections in 2020 – officially justified by the COVID-19 pandemic – and the decision of Tigrayan authorities to conduct their own independent election in September 2020 accelerated the conflict between the region and the federal government which turned into civil war in November 2020. These three trajectories, as different as they may be, lead to the same conclusion: holding regular elections in an authoritarian context is neither a guarantee of a legitimate government, nor a motor for democratization, nor a guarantee of regime survival (no matter how skillfully it was in manipulating elections). In this chapter, we offer a brief mirroring of these three electoral trajectories whose common characteristic is the coexistence of both authoritarian and democratic institutions, among which elections.
