Every political cult needs enemies.

Not opponents in the ordinary democratic sense, but permanent villains: figures blamed not just for disagreement, but for the system’s inability to deliver peace, prosperity, or coherence. The enemy explains everything. If hopes collapse, the enemy sabotaged them. If violence spreads, the enemy forced it. If promises rot, the enemy delayed the mission.

Abiy Ahmed’s political world has long depended on this logic. Old elites, ethnic hardliners, foreign meddlers, cynical critics, regional spoilers, internal traitors — the cast changes, but the structure remains. Failure is never simply failure. It must be assigned outward.

That strategy works best early in a leader’s rise, when charisma is still fresh and the public is willing to believe that power has not yet fully arrived in the ruler’s hands. But time is cruel to blame politics. The longer a man governs, the more the excuses begin to expire. Eventually the public notices that the sabotage is always everywhere, yet accountability is nowhere.

This is where Abiy’s image has started to narrow. He still has language. He still has symbolism. He still has loyalists who frame every criticism as malice and every setback as proof that he threatens entrenched interests. But rhetoric ages. Citizens begin measuring not the poetry of the promise, but the residue of the years.

And the residue is hard to ignore: a more distrustful state, a more normalized political brutality, a thinner line between unity talk and coercive practice, and a public sphere in which spectacle repeatedly outruns substance. The enemies are still named, but the governing result remains the same.

The deeper problem for a blame-driven political culture is that it eventually becomes self-devouring. It cannot admit limits without puncturing the myth. It cannot absorb criticism without redefining critics as traitors. It cannot correct course easily because every correction sounds like confession. So it doubles down. It hunts for fresher villains. It intensifies the moral drama because it can no longer convincingly raise the material results.

Abiy’s cult has not run out of language. It has run out of innocence. And once that happens, enemies no longer explain as much as they used to.