It is this Wednesday that the campaign to collect citizen sponsorships begins. A mandatory step to validate to be a candidate for the supreme office. So far, 75 Senegalese, mostly men, have declared their candidacy.
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With our correspondent in Dakar, Léa-Lisa Westerhoff
Among the declared candidates, there are six of the last eight Prime Ministers who have had to govern Senegal: Idrissa Seck for example, from 2002 to 2004, Amadou Ba currently in office or even Mahammed Boun Abdallah Dionne, head of government from 2014 to 2019.
The former mayor of Dakar, Khalifa Sall, is also one of the candidates, as is Aminata Touré, former chief of staff to Macky Sall and Prime Minister from 2013 to 2014.
Will Karim Wade run for the Senegalese Democratic Party? For now, the son of the former president is cultivating mystery…
What also about the candidacy ofOusmane Sonko ? Sentenced to a prison sentence of more than three months, he is, according to the Senegalese electoral code, automatically removed from the electoral lists. A provision that the opponent’s lawyers contest because their client would not have been notified of this cancellation.
Sponsorship is in any case designed as a test, a mechanism to assess the seriousness of a candidacy thanks to its capacity to garner support from voters: 0.6% of the electorate or 8% of deputies of the National Assembly . This phase will last two months.
In 2019, in the end, only five applications were validated by the Constitutional Council out of the 27 submitted for its examination.