The Tigray People’s Liberation Front appears once again to be on a war footing, preparing the Tigray region for another confrontation with the federal government. Yet the circumstances surrounding this mobilisation are unlike those that preceded past confrontations and may point instead to a party approaching its own existential decline.

The TPLF’s centre of power, and the ideological grounding that animated it, has long rested on Tigrayan ethno-nationalism, emerging in the 1970s against the backdrop of a turbulent revolutionary period in Ethiopia that produced ethno-nationalist movements shaped by Marxism-Leninism, secessionist groups such as the Eritrean People’s Liberation Front (EPLF) seeking to separate Eritrea from Ethiopia, and the Derg, the Marxist military government that held power in Addis Ababa and fought these armed groups across the country, from the capital to the far northern reaches near the Eritrean desert.

The TPLF and its close ideological and operational ally, the EPLF, drew on ethnic and nationalist sentiment in their war against the Derg, Tigrayanism for the TPLF and Eritrean nationalism for the EPLF, both framed around liberation from what they termed Ethiopian colonialism/oppression. That narrative gained traction alongside the Derg’s increasingly unproductive maximalist position, seeking victory through force, a posture that hardened under the later totalitarian rule of Mengistu Hailemariam and, in doing so, inadvertently strengthened both movements’ efforts at recruitment and mobilisation.

The TPLF-EPLF alliance proved victorious in 1991, toppling the Derg and installing a government led by the TPLF’s coalition, the Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF), which would go on to govern Ethiopia for nearly three decades.

When the TPLF retreated from the federal structure into Tigray following the political shifts of 2018, it had already built a capable fighting force under the region’s Special Forces, whose ranks were staffed by veterans of the war against the Derg who had for decades dominated Ethiopia’s security institutions under the EPRDF. This force, under the party’s command, mounted an offensive against the Ethiopian state in 2020, opening with a surprise attack on the army’s Northern Command stationed in Tigray, its most capable and experienced wing.

That offensive failed to produce the collapse of the Ethiopian state, the outcome the front had sought, much as it had against the Derg decades earlier, and instead saw the newly formed federal administration rally the country against the TPLF, capturing Mekelle within weeks and taking the regional capital on November 2020. Yet the administration’s position remained precarious even in victory, having inherited security institutions already weakened before the conflict broke out, and the proliferation of armed groups meant that the fight against the TPLF came to rely heavily on local forces, including the Amhara Special Forces (ASF) and the Fano militia, alongside the Eritrean Defence Forces (EDF), which entered the conflict after the front fired rockets at Asmara.

The involvement of armed groups from neighbouring Amhara, at a moment when ethnic nationalism and inter-ethnic tensions across Ethiopia had reached their peak, combined with the EDF’s conduct in Tigray, which drew accusations of war crimes, became instrumental in the narrative to revitalise the TPLF’s fighting position. Its ethno-nationalist ideology found renewed audience among a Tigrayan population that felt increasingly alienated amid the war and the front’s extensive propaganda, rallying behind what the TPLF termed a people’s war and allowing it to raise a large fighting force and mount a fresh challenge to the Ethiopian forces. The front also came to dominate the narrative reaching the international community, where messaging aimed at portraying the Ethiopian Defence Forces as the aggressor helped pressure the Ethiopian government and lend legitimacy to the front’s war effort.

Despite the scale of violence that followed, the Ethiopian government secured victory, and the TPLF survived through the Cessation of Hostilities Agreement (CoHA), more widely known as the Pretoria peace agreement, which halted further fighting and preserved the party at a point when its fighting strength had been significantly eroded and political survival had become its overriding priority. In the years since Pretoria, however, the TPLF has steadily undermined that peace, with its leadership effectively voiding the terms of the CoHA, and a series of escalatory moves now suggests the front is preparing for a fresh challenge.

By most measures, though, the party’s standing within Ethiopian politics is deteriorating. Once at the helm of the EPRDF, the coalition that governed Ethiopia for 27 years, the TPLF is now struggling to sell its ethno-nationalist narrative to the Tigrayan population, just as its framing of a righteous struggle is gaining little traction internationally.

The party’s recent trajectory since the conclusion of the Tigray conflict illustrates a decline that may prove fatal. Internal fighting became visible first through the sidelining and eventual removal of then Interim President Getachew Reda, long considered the party’s public face and a key figure in its wartime narrative, along with his deputy, Tsadkan Gebretinsae, a veteran fighter and former Chief of Staff of the Ethiopian Defence Force. That same friction resurfaced with the sidelining of Getachew’s successor, Tadesse Werede, a senior military leader and veteran of UN peacekeeping, whose removal accompanied the dismantling of the interim administration and the reinstatement of a regional council that had been elected unconstitutionally in 2020.

More recently, the party moved in June to install a draconian recruitment law, driving a mass conscription campaign that drew widespread condemnation from the rest of Ethiopia and the international community.

Sanctions from Washington, combined with critical reporting from Human Rights Watch, suggest the front’s ability to shape international perceptions of Tigray and Ethiopia has weakened considerably compared with its position at the height of the Tigray conflict between 2020 and 2022.

More troubling for the party is the reaction within Tigray itself, which lays bare the difficult position it now occupies. For a region devastated by the earlier fighting, the prospect of renewed conflict holds little appeal, and many Tigrayans increasingly see the fragile peace established at Pretoria as threatened not by federal authorities but by the TPLF itself, a suspicion reinforced by the forced conscriptions that have met fierce local opposition and revealed a war footing the population appears wary of following.

This presents the party with a danger that extends beyond Ethiopia’s current balance of power. A movement that built its struggle on Tigrayan ethnic sentiment, and that imposed tight control over political expression and organisation within the region to sustain that struggle, is now visibly losing its grip on it, as Tigrayans who once rallied behind the party’s call to arms, framed as an existential fight, appear increasingly disillusioned with the direction the TPLF has taken since Pretoria.

Equally damaging for the party are its clandestine alliances beyond Ethiopia’s borders, including its role within the Tsimdo network alongside Eritrean authorities and the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) in Sudan, where Tigrayan fighters, mobilised previously under the banner of the Tigray Defence Forces, ostensibly to protect Tigray, now find themselves fighting in a brutal civil war in which they hold little direct stake, serving instead the front’s own strategic calculations around the regional balance of power.

The TPLF, despite its long history, now stands at a critical juncture. Its disastrous decisions following the failure to reach a political settlement with the administration that emerged in Addis Ababa in 2018 have brought lasting damage to Tigray and its people, and the forced conscriptions now compounding Tigrayan rejection of the party’s long-standing ethnic vanguardism may ultimately culminate in the TPLF’s existential decline and disappearance from a political system in which it had been a consequential force for half a century.

By Mahder Nesibu and Dagim Yohannes, Researchers, Horn Review