The Potemkin Party’s Delusional March to the Red Sea Must End

By Alula Frezghi

The Prosperity Party’s latest wave of expansionist rhetoric promising “Christmas in Assab,” fantasizing about celebrating Ereccha on the Red Sea, and circulating fabricated maps that erase Eritrea’s sovereign coastline marks a dangerous escalation from political dysfunction into outright fantasy. These are not policy positions; they are the utterances of a ruling elite that has abandoned governance and replaced it with illusion.

Senior figures within Ethiopia’s ruling party have publicly claimed that Eritreans “regret” their independence and secretly wish to rejoin a “Greater Ethiopia.” Such assertions are not merely false; they are historically illiterate and morally offensive. They trivialize one of Africa’s longest and most costly liberation struggles and reveal a political class so insecure that it must rewrite history to cope with present failure.

On this point, the historical and political record is clear: Eritreans have not regretted their independence.
What they regret is the persistence of Ethiopian elites who continue to refuse to accept it.

The Prosperity Party’s obsession with Assab has little to do with ports, trade corridors, or strategic depth. It functions instead as a psychological crutch for a government collapsing under the weight of its own contradictions, civil conflict, economic freefall, famine, mass displacement, and a profound crisis of legitimacy. When a state struggles to govern itself, it begins projecting power outward in the form of territorial fantasy.

This is the political logic at work. Ethiopia’s federal order is visibly unraveling. Armed insurgencies proliferate. Ethnic polarization deepens. Institutions hollow out. Rather than confront these realities, the ruling party reaches for a familiar escape: expansionist nostalgia repackaged as national destiny.

The Prosperity Party’s governing formula has been suggested to be brutally simple:

Optics + posturing + disinformation + delusion = policy by performance

Today, delusion does most of the work.

Eritrea, in this narrative, is not a country so much as a mirror reflecting everything the Prosperity Party lacks: clearly defined borders, sovereign continuity, national cohesion, and a people who secured independence through sacrifice rather than inheriting authority from imperial myth.

Let us be unequivocal:
* Eritrea’s sovereignty is not negotiable.
* Eritrea’s coastline is not a bargaining instrument.
* Eritrea’s independence is not reversible by rhetoric or force.
* Eritrea’s people are not awaiting absorption into a failing imperial project.

Assab is not a symbol of Ethiopian destiny, nostalgia, or redemption. The Red Sea is not a stage for political theater. And Eritrea will not serve as a distraction for Ethiopia’s internal collapse.

This rhetoric is not only false, it is strategically dangerous. It normalizes expansionist thinking in a volatile region that sits astride critical Red Sea shipping lanes, erodes diplomatic norms, and signals to domestic audiences that external ambition can substitute for internal reform. History offers no shortage of examples where such delusions end not in prestige or prosperity, but in isolation, conflict, and ruin.

Eritrea’s sovereignty rests on international law, historical fact, and the sacrifice of those who fought for it. It is not subject to revision by politicians who mistake microphones for mandates and fantasy for power.

The Potemkin march to the Red Sea must end before delusion hardens into doctrine, and rhetoric metastasizes into catastrophe.