Large protests have been going on for days in various cities of Senegal against President Macky Sall’s decision to postpone the presidential elections that were scheduled for February 25 to December 15: on Friday there were violent clashes between demonstrators and the police, and a student was killed in Saint-Louis, a coastal city in the north of the country. In Dakar, the capital, the police have shot tear gas, grenades and rubber bullets against a group of protesters who were throwing stones and setting car tires on fire. Protests have blocked roads and rail networks in several areas around Dakar.
Macky Sall is 62 years old, has been in office since 2012 and was re-elected in 2019. He has long been seen as increasingly authoritarian and has been accused of repressing his main political rivals. In the last two years he had been accused of being involved in the arrest and two-year prison sentence of Ousmane Sonko, leader of the opposition party PASTEF: according to his supporters, the arrest was decided precisely to prevent him from running for office. His conviction had provoked protests and clashes in June 2023 in which 9 people died.
Last Saturday Sall announced the indefinite postponement of the elections in a televised address to the nation, claiming that the reason was a dispute over the lists of candidates who could participate. It is the first time such an event has occurred in the history of the country, which has one of the strongest histories of democracy in West Africa. Yassine Fall, vice president of PASTEF, had told ad Al Jazeera to consider Sall’s decision “a constitutional coup”.