Senegal is reputed to be one of the African countries that can claim to have built a certain democratic basis for decades. With three peaceful alternations of power through the ballot box now to its credit, the country of ‘Teranga’ has come a long way to reach the level of the great African democracies. Particularly in French-speaking Africa, where democracy is nothing more than a mirage, and where supposedly democratic instruments are used to legitimise anti-democratic acts, Senegal is an example, and the election of Bassirou Diomaye Diakhar Faye on 24 March 2024 has firmly anchored the country in this restricted circle of democratic countries. In reality, Senegalese democracy has been seriously threatened, flayed and flayed to such an extent that the arrival in power of Faye, the replacement candidate for Ousmane Sonko who, since 2014, has become the fiercest opponent of the now former Senegalese President, Macky Sall, almost seems like a miracle. Their party, PASTEF -Patriotes Africains du Sénégal pour le Travail l'Ethique et la Fraternité- has been subjected to all kinds of persecution, from threats to killings, imprisonment and exile, so that the ‘Project’, which has become the leitmotif of the party's activists, cannot be realised at the top of the State. In this article, we look back at the ideas put forward by PASTEF, which meant that Ousmane Sonko's arrival in power was feared by a certain Senegalese political and aristocratic class. In the second part, we will look briefly at the historic outcome of 24 March 2024, when Bassirou Diomaye Faye was elected, while a month earlier Senegal was in a total political stalemate.
PASTEF: the Anti-System
Founded in 2014, PASTEF has gradually taken its place in Senegal's political landscape. Through its President, Ousmane Sonko, who has become the symbol of resistance to Macky Sall perceived by many as a pro-Western President, PASTEF very quickly positioned itself at the opposite end of the spectrum from traditional political parties in Senegal. Encouraging political debate, publishing critical texts, fundraising (crowdfunding) by activists to finance the party's activities, creating a dynamic movement of executives (the Movement of Patriotic Executives - MONCAP) which regularly organises the ‘MONCAP Universities’, etc. Little by little, its leader Ousmane Sonko, with his mastery of taxation (he was a tax inspector), public policy and economics, began to attract more attention. In 2016, he was struck off the civil service for denouncing the fact that Parliamentary members were not fulfilling their tax requirements. A year later, he published his first book, ‘Senegal: gas and oil, a chronicle of despoilment’, in which he exposed embezzlement of oil contracts involving the President of the Republic Macky Sall, his brother Aliou Sall and a Romanian businessman Franck Timis, known for his multiple financial crimes in this sector. In 2017, he was elected as a Member of Parliament and continued his political ascent in the National Assembly, where his diatribes against the government and its shortcomings made the rounds on social networks.
The position in the hemicycle enabled Ousmane Sonko and PASTEF to build a narrative around their politics and convince more and more Senegalese, especially young people, that there was an oligarchic ‘system’ in the pay of foreign powers, France in this case, that needed to be dismantled. Ousmane Sonko's rhetoric against the political elites who had been in power until then was very scathing, and he made the fight against corruption one of the major issues on which the PASTEF project was based. His anti-imperialist rhetoric and increasingly assertive pan-Africanist ideology quickly made him a new figure in pan-Africanism even before the 2019 presidential election, in which Ousmane Sonko took part for the first time. He finished third with around 16% behind former Prime Minister Idrissa Seck, who was taking part for the third time, and Macky Sall, who was re-elected President for a second term with 58% of the votes cast. The way in which PASTEF had managed to be in the top 3 candidates in almost all of Senegal's 14 regions had finally demonstrated a formidable new political force emerging in the Senegalese political sphere.
In 2020, Idrissa Seck above all joined the presidential movement, which further consolidated Ousmane Sonko as the undisputed leader of the opposition. But in the face of this rise, Senegal will experience the worst moments in its political history, with the emergence of a dictatorship destined to work like a steamroller on PASTEF and its leader Ousmane Sonko, who was already seen as the favourite in the 2024 presidential election.
March 2021-March 2024: From Darkness to Democratic Light
During his second term in office, Macky Sall made it a priority, according to many observers, to destroy PASTEF in a certain way. The fight against corruption and the change of system announced by PASTEF did not only make people happy. Over time, a number of figures from the religious, media, financial and political spheres have, in a way, supported a policy of Macky Sall aimed at ensuring not only that Ousmane Sonko cannot be a candidate in the 2024 presidential election, but also that his very dense political apparatus, capable of raising more than 300 million CFA francs (498,000 dollars) in 48 hours, cannot survive.
Between 2021 and 2024, Ousmane Sonko faced a series of legal and political episodes: the best-known case, that of Adji Sarr, a massage parlour employee who accused him of rape, caused terrible riots on several occasions. First, in March 2021, Ousmane Sonko was arrested on his way to answer a summons from the research section. At least 14 people were killed over the course of four to six days, during which a large part of the population, especially young people, came out to defend the PASTEF leader against what they saw as a plot to prevent him from standing for election. This episode was halted by mediation from religious leaders, but the case came back on the table, culminating in June 2023 in a conviction in absentia against the PASTEF leader for the corruption of young people, after he had been acquitted of rape.
This sentence also provoked huge demonstrations in which at least 23 people were killed, according to Amnesty International. Arrested at the end of July, Ousmane Sonko's sentence in absentia was dropped (as provided for by Senegalese law), but he is also facing another case, that of defamation against the former Minister for Youth and Tourism, who, according to the opponent, had been singled out by reports from auditing offices for his management of PRODAC (an agricultural project for young people). It was this dossier that ended up preventing his candidacy for the 2024 presidential election. But in all this hullabaloo, Macky Sall is losing himself in his schemes and strategies. Ousmane Sonko had also succeeded in getting Bassirou Diomaye Faye to stand as a substitute candidate.
Unprecedented Postponement
On 3 February, just as the presidential election campaign was about to get underway for the election on 24 February 2024, Macky Sall announced the postponement of the election by repealing the decree convening the electoral body. This was an unprecedented decision in the country's history. In an emergency procedure, his deputies in the National Assembly, in complicity with the PDS (Senegalese Democratic Party), which had put Karim Wade's candidacy on the ballot after it had been rejected by the Constitutional Council, voted to postpone the presidential election in complete violation of the Constitution and even opened a commission of enquiry into the alleged corruption of judges on the Constitutional Council, whom they accused of having been bribed by Macky Sall's candidate, the then Prime Minister, Amadou Ba. The cacophony was at its height. According to several sources, relations between Prime Minister Ba and President Sall deteriorated over time, and the polls were predicting a victory for Bassirou Diomaye Faye in the first round. A fact that Macky Sall now had to take into account...
But amid all this hullabaloo, the light came from the ‘Wise Men’ of the Constitutional Council. In a decision handed down on 16 February, the Council ruled that the decree repealing the convocation of the electoral body, issued on the basis of the draft law notified to the President of the Republic, lacked a legal basis and was therefore liable to annulment.
With regard to the bill validated by Parliament and postponing the presidential election until 15 December, the Council ruled that it was contrary to the Constitution. While specifying that it would henceforth be impossible to maintain the date of 25 February for the presidential election, the Council enjoined President Macky Sall to find a reasonable date before, in particular, the end of his term of office scheduled for 2 April. Despite a national dialogue organised to maintain a postponement beyond this date, the Constitutional Council even returned to setting the date of 30 March 2024, before Macky Sall came to his senses and set the date of 24 March 2024.
At the same time, with 10 days to go before the presidential election, Ousmane Sonko and Bassirou Diomaye Faye, who had still been in prison months earlier, were released after the vote on a controversial amnesty law covering political events from 2021 to 2024.
The Outcome
In the end, it was the authority of the Constitutional Council that enabled Senegal to emerge from an abyss that had all but obliterated the long democratic tradition of the Land of Teranga. On 24 March 2024, Bassirou Diomaye Faye was elected President of the Republic of Senegal. Ousmane Sonko became his prime minister a few days later.
During these unprecedented events in Senegal's political history, the activism and maturity of the Senegalese people and civil society stood out. Senegal only owes its salvation to this passion for freedom and democracy shared by all the Senegalese people, which in a way is part of the DNA and identity of the Senegalese people, and which made it possible to guarantee a peaceful transfer of power (despite the tensions) without resorting to the coups d'état that are now plaguing West Africa. The bamboo has bent but never broken...
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