105 votes for, one against. The adoption, on the night of Monday February 5, of a law allowing the postponement of the presidential election, scheduled for February 25, plunged Senegal into the unknown. The government took only two days to validate this decision, announced during the weekend by outgoing President Macky Sall, who had repeated that he would not run for a third term. Motivated by “a dispute between the National Assembly and the Constitutional Council”, this postponement, three weeks before the election, caused an earthquake.
This is the first time since 1963, the year a presidential regime was established, that an election has been postponed in this country considered a center of stability in West Africa. The opposition, which sees this as a maneuver by Macky Sall to keep his camp in power, is calling for an “institutional coup.” While several candidates are calling for the campaign to continue, the risk of a conflagration is growing and raising fears of a new outbreak of fever, like the violence of 2021 and 2023 which caused dozens of deaths. To stem the mobilization, the government suspended access to mobile Internet and several opponents were arrested.
ECOWAS out of breath
But the repression risks fueling the anger of a youth tired of political shenanigans and increasingly seduced by the anti-system speeches of the main opponent Ousmane Sonko, imprisoned. While France, which has lost its footing in several countries in the region, follows with concern the evolution of the situation in its historic partner and calls for the election to be held as soon as possible, the putschists in the Sahel can rub hands. Macky Sall’s “coup de force” tarnishes the image of the Senegalese “democratic flagship” and weakens an Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) which is out of breath in the face of the series of putsches in the Sahel. .
Especially since the political crisis in Senegal comes barely a week after the withdrawal of Burkina Faso, Mali and Niger from the organization, now united under their own coalition, the Alliance of Sahel States, facing the West. “If the maneuver in Senegal passes without firm opposition from ECOWAS, this should give grist to the mill of the Sahelians, who criticize its culpable silence in the face of the constitutional manipulations of civil heads of state,” underlines Fahiraman Rodrigue Koné, researcher at the Dakar Institute for Security Studies. Between chaos and the risk of authoritarian drift, or even a coup d’état, the future of Senegal suddenly seems very bleak.