Ethiopia is turning into a one party state under the ruling EPRDF. UDJ said the ruling party has even outperformed the Chinese communist party to realize a virtual one party state in Ethiopia during the past five years.

The leading opposition group, Unity for Democracy and Justice (UDJ), said Ethiopia’s ruling party is emulating the Chinese style one party state model.
At a press conference held on Friday, UDJ’s top leaders presented the results of a study they said they have conducted to probe what resulted in the ruling party’s overwhelming win in the May 23 poll.
UDJ collected a majority of the former CUD leaders who managed to upset the ruling party with big wins in the capital Addis Ababa in 2005 poll.
The group established by the leadership of now jailed Birtukan Midekssa stands out from the opposition camp as well-organized, with relatively strong financial muscles and over 40,000 members.
Despite being strong compared to other opposition camps and amongst the six members of the biggest coalition Medrek, the UDJ is not even a match to the ruling EPRDF Addis Ababa women league alone. The latter has some 44,000 members.
UDJ only won one of the 547 seats in the federal power house in the last general elections. This week it said that measures taken by the EPRDF in the last five years are to be blamed.
The ruling EPRDF and its alliance own all but three seats from the 547 parliament seats. Their domination in the May poll resulted in an overwhelming 99.6 percent win.
UDJ said a rigorous study the party’s national council discussed earlier this month revealed that while weakening others, the ruling party has bolstered its capacity following the so called Chinese model.
“In China, of every twelve eligible voters, one is a member of the communist party.  The ruling EPRDF outperformed the Chinese communist party in the past five years alone by upgrading its membership by over 500 percent to reach over five million. Now of every ten eligible voters in Ethiopia, one is an EPRDF member,” the UDJ study claimed.
The UDJ said recruiting such wide membership is being conducted in a subtle manner: “The ruling party pulled members by swaying voters by various incentives and putting their livelihood at risk.”
UDJ said the opposition camp also needs to better manage itself. Failing to do so is partly to be blamed to the devastating loss it faced in the May poll. UDJ announced that it is now willing to go as far as becoming one party with other members of Medrek to form a “strong opposition front”.
UDJ called on the ruling party to reverse its strategy and measures to realize “absolute control”.
“My understanding of a one party state is a constitutional arrangement which does not provide for contested elections, and which does not provide for parties with differing ideologies to compete for the allegiance of the electorate,” Prime Minister Meles Zenawi recently said, rejecting similar assessments that Ethiopia is turning into a one party state.
“In an environment where there is a multiplicity of parties competing for the same votes but where one party more or less habitually gets the majority you can have what is sometimes called a dominant party system; That is what we had in Sweden for decades. And what we had in Japan for decades again,” the PM has elaborated.
Meles expects the double digit economic growth his government realized for the past seven years to buy him and the ruling party another five years even beyond 2015 - the year in which he promised once again to step down.