LSenegalese voters do not lack consistency: seven months after having elected, in the first round of the presidential election, Bassirou Diomaye Faye, replacement candidate for the African Patriots of Senegal for Work, Ethics and Fraternity (Pastef) party, here they are who grant him an overwhelming majority in the National Assembly.
With 130 seats out of 165, it suffices to say that the Senegalese head of state now holds all the cards in hand to make the necessary changes and carry out the promised reforms.
For Senegal, it is yet another successful electoral event. The fourth in four years, after the municipal elections of January 2022, the legislative elections of July 2022 and the presidential election of March 2024. The soul of Senegalese democracy, fully alive, backed by an administration experienced in electoral engineering, is not , however, not appeased. The chaotic presidential election of March 2024 left a country divided. The legislative elections revealed a fractured society. Paroxysmal violence. Invectives. Rodomontades. Threats. Let’s betray.
Transhumances
From now on, at each election, François Mitterrand’s formula should be plastered on all the walls of Senegal: “On the path to betrayal, there is only the river of shame to cross. » In the country of grammarian Léopold Sédar Senghor, the word “transhumance” has now entered political mores. It designates lawless political men and women who, at the cost of a double denial of their political ideas and convictions of yesterday, join with weapons and baggage any new power that is established. In this case, the leading “transhumants” who yesterday, alongside Macky Sall, derided Ousmane Sonko, joined him with weapons and luggage. We suspect many of them, convinced that they have to blame themselves for some misdeeds and prevarications linked to their previous management, of having joined Pastef to escape the rigors of justice. Ousmane Sonko, who previously swore that his political party would never welcome such people, now displays a more than nuanced position on the issue. He recalled, for all intents and purposes, that no one would be protected if they were found guilty. Let us accept the omen.
The fact remains that the phenomenon has taken on alarming proportions. Candidates nominated by opposition coalitions joined the ruling party in the middle of the electoral campaign. Politics being above all electoral arithmetic, the contribution of these “transhumants” undoubtedly weighed even more on the victory of Pastef.
This new way of “doing politics” as we “do business” has destabilized the common Senegalese and frustrated the faithful of Pastef from the start, who take a very dim view of the arrival of these twilight activists. Senegalese political life certainly deserves to be sanitized.
Using this phenomenon as a pretext, the opposition believed it had to campaign mainly on the grounds of ethics and morality in politics. By muting their social project, by reminding Ousmane Sonko of his unkept promises and the more than mixed record of his government, the main tenors of the opposition had bet on raising the awareness of voters. However, the followers of Ousmane Sonko, who maintain an almost messianic relationship with their leader, pass him everything: his frankness and his outbursts, his denials and his excesses, his ruptures and his permanence. They are not asking him for an assessment. They allow themselves to be guided towards the shores of the prosperity promised in the Senegal 2050 plan, Pastef’s social project.
Political recomposition
This election has shown, more than before, what the author of these lines wrote here the day after the presidential election of March 24. Pastef, now an undeniable sociological reality and major political force in Senegal today, has dissipated the face-to-face confrontation between social democrats and liberals which has punctuated the political life of the country since 1960.
Faced with the severe decline of the traditional parties, who have not yet said their last word, and faced with the powerful wave of Pastef, which for the moment nothing seems to be able to stop, a new form of opposition is emerging under minus two forms:
On the street side, these are men and women who, for the most part, believe in good faith that a second round of the 2024 presidential election would, had it occurred, guaranteed a better balance of political forces. This neo-opposition evolves at the confines of civil society and the media. Conscientious objectors and self-proclaimed watchdogs of democracy, those who make it up promise to stand up to Ousmane Sonko. They suspect him of having the hidden design, once he has finished domesticating political parties and sucking in civil society, of wanting to weaken the large press groups to impose a new, more docile media ecosystem.
On the other hand, it is more than likely that, despite its very weak representation in the new National Assembly, the opposition will not bend under the weight of numbers. The experienced statesmen, the seasoned parliamentarians, the strong on the subject and the curmudgeons that the opposition sends to the National Assembly will know how to bring the contradiction to the Pastef deputies, for the most part novices. The debates are likely to be lively.
Is Sonko really Diomaye?
Today’s Senegal is an unprecedented political laboratory and the future of Senegal will depend, in large part, on the nature of the relationship between President Bassirou Diomaye Faye and his Prime Minister Ousmane Sonko. The slogan of the presidential campaign which had hit the mark – “Sonko, it’s Diomaye” – was used in minor mode during the legislative elections. The style of the Senegalese head of state, who slowly but surely inhabits the supreme office, deviates from that of his fiery Prime Minister.
In recent weeks, certain comments from the Senegalese number one have taken on the appearance of clarifications and calls to order addressed indirectly to his Prime Minister and political mentor. However, the arrival of Pastef to power and the clear victories in the presidential elections of March 2024 and then in the legislative elections bear first and foremost the imprint of Prime Minister Ousmane Sonko, who, alone for a decade, brought his party, of which he is the alpha and omega, the compass and the rudder. It was not the Pastef machine that installed Ousmane Sonko in power.
To Discover
Kangaroo of the day
Answer
This is why the place of Ousmane Sonko in the future institutional system, the probable formation of a new government and the games of alliance and allegiance of the majority in the National Assembly will be decisive for President Faye. We will then know whether the ambition of Ousmane Sonko – like a certain Abdoulaye Wade before him – to install his political family in power for fifty years is a utopia or not.
* Tidiane Dioh is an international consultant. Academic, former magazine journalist Young Africa and at the television channel TV5 Monde, he was an international civil servant for around twenty years.
