A strange consensus has settled over African political commentary: that elections, however flawed, represent progress. That any movement toward the ballot box is better than none. That voter registration campaigns and election commissions publishing results represent democratic momentum, regardless of what those results actually reflect. This is worth examining carefully. Across the continent this season, in countries with very different histories and political structures, the same basic transaction is occurring, governments are staging the performance of democratic consent while carefully managing who actually holds power.

Ethiopia's June 2025 election represents the purest version of this dynamic. Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed, the Nobel laureate who launched a civil war in Tigray, sought re-election in a process that no serious observer believed would produce any outcome other than his continuation in office [S3]. This is not democracy as a mechanism for political competition. It is democracy as a mechanism for political legitimation. The elections occurred, results were announced, and the world noted that Ethiopia held elections, regardless of what those elections actually measured or decided.

Within Ethiopia, voting was interrupted in Oromia and Amhara, the two regions most affected by the civil war Abiy launched [S3]. In neighbouring Burkina Faso, the military junta recently suspended the country's largest student union and arrested its leader [S4]. The move follows a pattern: junta governments across the Sahel are increasingly targeting the civic infrastructure that built Africa's independence movements, unions, professional associations, opposition parties, under cover of anti-imperialist language borrowed from the very liberation movements they are dismantling.

The Democratic Theatre Season