Do we like Abiy Ahmed?
Our score: 3 out of 10. Real peacemaking and real reforms early on, but the war and the press clampdown in his government pull the number right down.
Abiy's origin story is a cracker. He started out as a radio operator attached to an Ethiopian army unit on the Eritrean border, and by 2019 he was collecting a Nobel Peace Prize in Oslo at age 43. He told the crowd he'd once ducked out of the foxhole just to get better antenna reception.
The prize was for ending the long standoff with Eritrea. He visited Asmara, the first Ethiopian leader to do so in about 20 years, and flights and phone lines resumed. Analysts at the time still noted the land border stayed closed and that tensions lingered, so even the shiny bit came with fine print.
Early on he was also a bit of a trailblazer on women in power. In October 2018 he named a cabinet with 10 women among 20 ministers, backed Ethiopia's first female president and appointed a former women's rights lawyer as chief justice. The catch, as the author of that piece noted, is that it was mostly about appointments, not proof of changed lives.
Then came the harm check, and it gets uglier. A UN expert commission found reasonable grounds to believe Ethiopian federal, Eritrean and allied forces committed war crimes and crimes against humanity in the Tigray war. Amnesty says the government later dropped its transitional justice plan. Eritrea rejects the allegations against its troops.
On the press, Human Rights Watch alleged in 2025 that arrests and harassment of journalists had intensified. It also pointed to a 2025 media law change that gave a regulator, headed by a prime ministerial appointee, wider powers. In February 2026 the regulator declined to renew Reuters' accreditation; CPJ called it a “troubling pattern of repressive regulatory action”. Accreditation was restored on 28 August.
On LGBTQ+ people, nothing in his own words turned up. A 2023 crackdown on same-sex acts in hotels and bars was announced by the Addis Ababa city administration, not by him. Rights groups say the community remains underground in Ethiopia.