ABSTRACT
This chapter presents the role played by the four political parties that used to make up the Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Democratic Front in safeguarding the coalition’s hold on political power in Ethiopia. In so doing, it pays special attention to most important critical junctures in the evolution of strategic interests of the front’s elite, points to the most challenging tests such a historically long-lived political coalition faced throughout its existence, and explains how it survived the majority of the existential threats it faced. By tracing the patterns of elite interaction within the coalition and by presenting how the conduciveness of the ethnic federal arrangement enabled authoritarian survival, the chapter argues that, all along, the four-party front was a resilient political coalition well designed for overcoming challenges that could emerge to its grip on political power. Nonetheless, in the discussion of the last critical juncture, the chapter also explains how popular protests in addition to internal revolts within the coalition – mostly led by the front’s Amhara and Oromo elites, which sided with the sentiments heard from the protests – led to the termination of the influence and dominance of the Tigray People’s Liberation Front, and the eventual dissolution of the coalition and its replacement by the Prosperity Party following the political change in 2018. Thus, the chapter makes the points that, in the study of authoritarian survival or resilience, among others, institutional factors and the strategic interests of the elite both require close attention in equal measure.
