[3] 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.

[19] Abiy is also believed to lead and organize Koree Nageenyaa, a secret service that purportedly commits unlawful detentions and extrajudicial killings in the Oromia Region with the aim of suppressing uprisings.

In 2022, Alex de Waal described Abiy's PhD thesis as constituting an anecdote on an event in which an individual friendship between people of opposite sides augmented social capital and inspired the resolution of a local violent conflict in Jimma Zone.

[46] Abiy published a related short research article on de-escalation strategies in the Horn of Africa in a special journal issue dedicated to countering violent extremism.

[49] Later on, Abiy was posted back to his home town of Beshasha, where he – as an officer of the Defense Forces – had to address a critical situation of inter-religious clashes between Muslims and Christians with a number of deaths.

He attained the rank of Lieutenant colonel[45][33] before deciding in 2010 to leave the military and his post as deputy director of INSA (Information Network Security Agency) to become a politician.

A lot of political observers made Lemma Megersa (the ODP chairman) and Abiy Ahmed the front-runners to become the Leader of the ruling coalition and eventually Prime Minister of Ethiopia.

[70] That same day, charges were dropped against Andargachew's colleague Berhanu Nega and the Oromo dissident and public intellectual Jawar Mohammed, as well as their respectively affiliated US-based ESAT and OMN satellite television networks.

[72] Abiy had previously met former Oromo Liberation Front leaders including founder Lencho Letta, who had committed to peaceful participation in the political process, upon their arrival at Bole International Airport.

On 1 June 2018, Abiy announced the government would seek to end the state of emergency two months in advance of the expiration its six-month tenure, citing an improved domestic situation.

[75] The pace of reforms has revealed fissures within the ruling coalition, with hardliners in the military and the hitherto dominant TPLF said to be "seething" at the end of the state of emergency and the release of political prisoners.

[100][101][102] In June 2018, the ruling coalition announced its intention to pursue the large-scale privatisation of state-owned enterprises and the liberalization of several key economic sectors long considered off-limits, marking a landmark shift in the country's state-oriented development model.

[105] State-owned enterprises in sectors deemed less critical, including railway operators, sugar, industrial parks, hotels and various manufacturing firms, may be fully privatised.

[106] Aside from representing an ideological shift with respect to views on the degree of government control over the economy, the move was seen as a pragmatic measure aimed at improving the country's dwindling foreign-exchange reserves, which by the end of the 2017 fiscal year were equal in value to less than two months worth of imports, as well as easing its growing sovereign debt load.

[112] In early May 2023, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz met with Abiy Ahmed in Addis Ababa to normalize relations between Germany and Ethiopia that had been strained by the Tigray War.

Shortly before his assumption of office it was announced that the Ethiopian government would take a 19% stake in Berbera Port in the Somaliland region located in northern Somalia as part of a joint venture with DP World.

[103] Ethiopia had until then rejected the international boundary commission's ruling awarding Badme to Eritrea, resulting in a frozen conflict (popularly termed a policy of "no war, but no peace") between the two states.

During the national celebration on 20 June 2018, the president of Eritrea, Isaias Afwerki, accepted the peace initiative put forward by Abiy and suggested that he would send a delegation to Addis Ababa.

[127] In July 2020, Eritrea's Ministry of Information said: "Two years after the signing of the Peace Agreement, Ethiopian troops continue to be present in our sovereign territories, Trade and economic ties of both countries have not resumed to the desired extent or scale.

[131][132] In an opinion piece, Simon Tisdall, one-time foreign editor of The Guardian, wrote that Abiy "should hand back his Nobel Peace Prize over his actions in the breakaway region".

[142] In June 2018, Abiy, speaking to senior commanders of the Ethiopian National Defense Force (ENDF) declared his intention to carry out reforms of the military to strengthen its effectiveness and professionalism, with the view of limiting its role in politics.

[144] Notably, he has also called for the eventual reconstitution of the Ethiopian Navy, dissolved in 1996 in the aftermath of Eritrea's secession after an extraterritorial sojourn in Djibouti, saying that "we should build our naval force capacity in the future.

[149][150][151][152] In the parliamentary session held on 16 October 2018, Abiy proposed to reduce the number of ministries from 28 to 20 with half of the cabinet positions for female ministers, a first in the history of the country.

The previous day, Abiy had given a speech in Parliament in which he had accused "media owners who don't have Ethiopian passports" of "playing it both ways", a thinly veiled reference to Jawar, adding that "if this is going to undermine the peace and existence of Ethiopia... we will take measures.

In December 2021, Declan Walsh reported in The New York Times that Abiy and Isaias had been secretly planning the Tigray War even before the former's Nobel Prize was awarded, in order to settle their grudges against the TPLF.

According to EHRC, in 4 densely populated kebeles in Debre Birhan, civilians including in a hospital, church, and school as well as residents in their neighborhoods and workers in their workplaces apparently killed due to fragments from heavy artillery or in crossfire between 6 and 7 August 2023.

[citation needed] Alemayehu Weldemariam, a U.S.-based Ethiopian lawyer and public intellectual, has called Abiy "an opportunistic populist jockeying for power on a democratizing platform.

However, Gardner acknowledges that Abiy has "occasionally used language that can be read as euphemistic and conspiracy-minded", and might have "exploited the system's vulnerabilities, such as a pliable media and politicized judiciary, for his own ends.

Numerous watchdogs and human rights groups accused Abiy's government of "increasingly intimidating" the media as well as harassing opponents to propel unrest.

[219][220][221][222] Similarly, the founder of Terara Network was arrested in Addis Ababa on 10 December 2021 in allegation of "disseminating misinformation", which was transferred to Sabata Daliti police station in Oromia Special Zone.