Ousmane Sonko, the main opponent of the current president of Senegal Macky Sall, has been excluded from the next presidential elections, which will be held in the country on February 25. Senegal’s Constitutional Council published the final list of candidates on Saturday, and Sonko is not present. It was expected that Sonko could be excluded from the elections: at the beginning of January he had in fact been definitively convicted by the country’s Supreme Court for defaming Tourism Minister Mame Mbaye Niang.
Sonko is 49 years old and in 2019 he came third in the presidential elections. According to his supporters, especially young Senegalese people, the arrests and charges against him were decided to prevent him from participating in the elections, in which the current president Macky Sall will not run again.
The candidate of the current majority, made up of two main parties, the Socialist Party and the Alliance of Forces of Progress, will be Prime Minister Amadou Ba. Sall has governed Senegal since 2012 and was re-elected in 2019: his government has long been considered increasingly authoritarian and has been repeatedly accused of repressing his main political opponents. Ba’s candidacy is in line with the policy pursued by Sall. In addition to Ba, former Dakar mayor Khalifa Sall and former prime minister Idrissa Seck are candidates.
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