After the surprise announcement by President Macky Sall on Saturday 3 February, Parliament yesterday voted to postpone the presidential elections to 15 December, amid protests from the opposition and many citizens
Last February 3, a few days before the elections scheduled for the 25th, Senegalese president Macky Sall surprisingly announced their postponement to a date yet to be determined. Grenades, tear gas and arrests: the police chose a hard line against the demonstrators who took to the streets to protest against this decision. Initially, many citizens of Dakar demonstrated peacefully, wearing the national football team’s shirt and waving Senegalese flags. But everything came to a head after violent police attacks.
It is the first time since 1963 that electoral deadlines have not been respected in Senegal, a country that has one of the strongest traditions of democracy and stability in West Africa. Yesterday Parliament decided to postpone it to December 15th in a tense session.
The standoff also led to the arrest of Aminata Touré, prime minister between 2013 and 2014, and Anta Babacar Ngom, presidential candidate, and to the blocking of the television channel’s signal Walf, a private channel that was broadcasting images of the demonstration, accused of “incitement to violence”. The protests spread to other cities in the country, while even within Parliament there were violent verbal clashes with the intervention of the army which forcibly took away some opposition deputies, who accused Sall of being a “dictator”.
In office since 2012 and re-elected in 2019, the president – who cannot stand for re-election – was accused of also being involved in the arrest and two-year prison sentence of his main challenger, Ousmane Sonko, leader of the opposition Pastef party to prevent him from run, given his great influence especially among young people who represent the vast majority of the electorate. Already in 2023, demonstrations in favor of Sonko were violently repressed, resulting in deaths and injuries.
Yassine Fall, vice president of Pastef, said ad Al Jazeera to consider Sall’s decision “a constitutional coup”. Last month the Constitutional Council caused great discontent by excluding some important opposition members from the list of candidates. Among these is also the candidate of the Senegalese Democratic Party (PDS) Karim Wade – son of Abdoulaye Wade, president between 2000 and 2012 – who was not allowed to run because he has dual French-Senegalese citizenship. Meanwhile, Sonko’s party published a harsh statement in which it stigmatized the fact that the stability of Senegal, one of the few West African countries to have never suffered a coup d’état, «is now compromised, because the people will never accept this abuse of authority.”
The European Union, for its part, has instead underlined how the delay in the vote opens the way to a “period of uncertainty”, while the Economic Community of West African States (Ecowas) has expressed its “concern”.
The Senegalese diaspora in Italy is also particularly alarmed. This is testified by, among others, Sebastian Dieng, a thirty-year-old from Kaolack, who arrived in our country in 2007. “I’m afraid of never being able to see my family again”, he admits worriedly. Sebastian currently lives in Sardinia and was about to return to Senegal to vote, but after hearing about other people who were arrested upon arrival at the airport he decided not to leave. He, like many other political opponents, has a guilt that he feels sewn upon him: that of not accepting Macky Sall’s authoritarian turn and making it visible on social channels. Dieng, however, does not give up and patiently waits for the day when he can return to his country to contribute to its change and development. Even through voting.