Current President Faye’s ruling party stands a good chance of securing a majority in the upcoming parliamentary elections, on November 17.
Reasons for holding extraordinary parliamentary elections
He justified his move on the grounds that, as a President without a majority in Parliament, he was unable to implement the reforms he had promised in his campaign. These include the renegotiation of contracts with oil and gas companies and fishing permits for foreign companies in Senegal’s territorial waters, and measures to improve living standards and combat widespread corruption in a country with the highest inflation rate in West Africa and from which thousands of people, especially the young, leave every year in search of a better life elsewhere.
More than 60 percent of Senegalese are under 25 years of age, and of these, most are not in permanent employment. As a result, the country has become a major source of illegal migration to Europe, with many travelling in fishing boats, risking their lives in a journey to the Canary Islands, the main transit point. Last year over 32,000 people, mostly Senegalese, traveled via the Canary Islands.
Speaking in Parliament, the President stated that he had “concluded that the pledge of a frank collaboration with the parliamentary majority in order to carry out economic reforms in the interests of the Senegalese people was an illusion.” In a televised address he appealed to the people to give his party a mandate to carry out a “systemic transformation” of Senegalese society by choosing representatives who would support the implementation of his program of institutional and economic transformation, as he had promised in his electoral program.
Tension before the elections
The main obstacle to the implementation of these reforms was the opposition in the National Assembly, with 106 out of 165 MPs remaining loyal to his predecessor, Macky Sall. The National Assembly has passed a vote of no confidence in Prime Minister Ousmane Sonko, refused to hold mandatory budget debates and opposed the abolition of several bureaucratic bodies, such as the Supreme Council for Local Governments and the Economic Social and Environmental Council, which the current government deems redundant at a time when the country’s financial situation demanded “rationalization and reduction of the state.”
In addition, the parliamentary opposition has blocked the renegotiation of hydrocarbon contracts concluded with foreign companies by the previous administration. The renegotiation was initiated by Ousmane Sonko’s government to enable Senegal to claim a greater share of the resulting revenues, in line with President Faye’s pre-election promises.
As the Paris-based website Africa Intelligence notes, despite the fact that after coming to power President Faye reshuffled the government, the Ministry of Defense, the intelligence services and the police, influential political figures from the former regime still occupy positions of authority in the highest bodies of state power.
The backlash from the opposition stems from the fact that President Faye has ordered a thorough review of the country’s financial situation and launched an investigation into the “widespread corruption” that flourished under the previous government.
The investigation led to the arrest in September of Lat Diop, a former sports minister in the Macky Sall government, on charges of extortion, embezzlement and money laundering to the tune of $8.5 million during his tenure as head of Senegal’s National Lottery from 2020 to 2023.
The review of the country’s financial and economic situation ordered by Ousmane Sonko’s government was highly critical of the previous administration. Ousmane Sonko described Senegal’s financial situation as “catastrophic,” with the budget deficit, which the former administration had assessed as 5.5 percent of GDP in 2023, was actually 10.4 percent of GDP, while, for the same year, the national debt, reported as 65.9 percent of GDP, was actually 76.3 percent of GDP.
As Senegal’s Channels Television reports, Ousmane Sonko named former President Macky Sall, former Prime Minister Amadou Ba and two former finance ministers as among those who “lied to the people… and fiddled with the figures to give an economic and financial picture that had nothing to do with reality.”
This eventually led international rating’s agency Moody’s to downgrade Senegal’s long-term credit rating four notches below investment grade on October 3, basing its decision on the findings of the government commission headed by Prime Minister Ousmane Sonko.
The opposition continues to hamper the country’s reform process
After the new president announced the holding of extraordinary parliamentary elections scheduled for November 17 in a bid to obtain a majority that would support his reform program, the former ruling elite, seeing this as a threat to its survival, began to form a bloc of opposition parties.
In early October this year, the opposition coalition Takku Wallu nominated former President Macky Sall, who vacated the post in July this year following the election of President Faye, as its main election candidate.
The coalition is led by the former ruling parties of ex-presidents Macky Sall and Abdoulaye Wade, the Alliance for the Republic (APR) and the Senegalese Democratic Party (PDS) respectively. Together, these parties held 106 of the 165 seats in the dissolved National Assembly. The announcement of their political alliance, Reuters noted, was a surprise development, as the two party leaders have been major political rivals in recent years.
Moreover, in the presidential elections held this March, Abdoulaye Wade’s party supported Bassirou Diomaye Faye, and voted against the candidate from the Alliance for the Republic, former Prime Minister Amadou Ba, who won 35 per cent of the vote.
This U-turn by the former Prime Minister’s policies was due to the fact that neither he, as leader of the Senegalese Democratic Party, nor any of the other members of his party, were included in the government formed by the new Prime Minister, Ousmane Sonko.
According to Bloomberg, Macky Sall, 62, who currently resides in Morocco, intends to return to Senegal briefly to run in the parliamentary elections as the head of the Takku Wallu coalition, which also includes former president Abdoulaye Wada and 2019 presidential election runner-up Idrissa Seck, a former prime minister and the leader of the REWMI (“Nation” in Wolof) party.
“I have agreed to strengthen the opposition to avoid an all-powerful majority that could be tempted to lead the country down the wrong path,” the former president emphasized in an interview with Bloomberg.
For its part, the current ruling party, PASTEF (Patriots of Senegal for Labor, Ethics and Fraternity) has nominated the incumbent Prime Minister Ousmane Sonko, who, like President Faye, is an advocate of strengthening national sovereignty and left-wing Pan-Africanism, with the support of the country’s young people. Three quarters of Senegal’s population are under 35 years of age.
Thus, notes Senegal’s Channels Television, the longtime political rivals Macky Sall and Ousmane Sonko are once again at the epicenter of the country’s long-running power struggle. During Macky Sall’s rule, Ousmane Sonko was imprisoned for seven months and was barred from standing as a candidate in the presidential election in March this year.
In view of their past rivalry, many experts believe that the participation of these two leading political figures today significantly raises the stakes in the struggle between the opposing parties—a struggle, which will determine who controls the National Assembly and thus who will determine Senegal’s future domestic and foreign policy.
According to experts at Verisk Maplecroft, a US political risk consulting firm, the ruling party, under the incumbent President Faye, has a good chance of winning a parliamentary majority in the upcoming November 17 legislative elections.
Canada’s Victoria Times Colonist also predicts that PASTEF is likely to win, with its experts citing the current president’s wide popularity among young people and his recent victory, with a wide margin, in March’s presidential election.
Moreover, Eurasia Group, another US political risk consultancy, agrees, noting: “Our experts say that historically, legislative elections results tend to follow the presidential election’s outcome when held soon after.” According to the group’s experts, the popularity of the new government’s initiatives, aimed at reforming the judicial system, reviewing contracts with foreign oil and gas companies and fighting corruption, will help the ruling party gain a majority in parliament.
Viktor Goncharov, African expert, PhD in Economics, exclusively for the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook”
