On Senegal's Legislative Elections

President Diomaye Faye, Prime Minister Ousmane Sonko, and their party won big - now the challenge is whether they can deliver on promises of reform.

Senegal held parliamentary elections on November 17. The result - a smashing victory for the party of President Diomaye Bassirou Faye - gives him and Prime Minister Ousmane Sonko a chance to pursue their reform agenda. At the same time, it gives them full ownership over how that agenda performs, potentially setting them up for political blowback down the road. Meanwhile, signs of authoritarianism from Faye and Sonko put an asterisk on the media/analyst refrain in 2024 that “Senegalese democracy is the real winner.”

Background and Results

These snap elections were called by President Faye, who won an upset victory in March of this year amid a series of dramatic events - (1) then-President Macky Sall’s announcement of an indefinite postponement of elections initially scheduled for February, followed by an announcement that elections would occur in December, (2) mass protests and international pressure, leading to a rescheduling of the elections for March, (3) the release of political prisoners and opposition leaders Ousmane Sonko and Faye, and (4) Faye’s victory over ruling party candidate and Prime Minister Amadou Ba, Sall’s would-be successor.

Faye was the candidate of the African Patriots of Senegal for Work, Ethics and Fraternity (French acronym PASTEF, founded 2014) because Sonko, who has been confronting legal troubles since 2021, was ineligible to run. Faye scored over 54% in the first round to Ba’s nearly 36%, which is a smashing victory in the Senegalese context (and most contexts, for that matter) - in Senegal previous opposition wins against incumbents (2000 and 2012) had always involved elections that went to a second round, giving the divided opposition a chance and an incentive to rally behind a single candidate.* Faye thus entered office with a huge mandate, partly reflecting popular disenchantment with Sall (and thus Ba too) and partly reflecting the message of change, anti-corruption, and left-leaning economic empowerment and sovereignty that PASTEF has long articulated. Upon becoming president, Faye named Sonko as prime minister, effectively setting up what resembles a co-presidency.

Facing a legislature still dominated by Sall’s allies, however, Faye and Sonko found their reform agenda stymied, leading to the decision to call snap elections at the earliest possible juncture allowed by the constitution, namely two years after the seating of the last legislature. In the 2022 legislative elections, for context, PASTEF and allies had cut deeply into Sall’s then-majority, leaving Sall’s Benno Bokk Yakaar (United in Hope, BBY) coalition with 82 seats out of 165, a sharp drop from the 125 seats that BBY had won in the previous contest in 2017.

In the 2024 elections, PASTEF competed against three major opposition coalitions representing, in effect, the old guard - former President Sall, former President Abdoulaye Wade, former Prime Minister Amadou Ba, former Prime Minister/National Assembly President Moustapha Niasse, former Dakar Mayor Khalifa Sall, etc.

Preliminary results show an overwhelming victory for PASTEF - some 130-132 seats out of 165, victory in something like 47 of the 54 electoral districts, etc. As journalists are pointing out, PASTEF not only won massively but even improved on Faye’s performance from March.

What Does It Mean?

The first thing that strikes me is not the size of Faye, Sonko, and PASTEF’s victory, but the rebuke of the opposition and what I called, above, the old guard. Senegalese party politics is full of alliances, schisms, and new party formation - but the characters often remain the same. Since the country’s independence in 1960, there has not been a presidential election without one or more of Leopold Senghor, Abdoulaye Diouf, Abdoulaye Wade, or Macky Sall on the ballot; even the unsuccessful candidates, such as Idrissa Seck, are often repeated aspirants in election after election. Voters may simply be tired of these figures and ready to give a new generation, and a new approach, a try. Note that the rebuke of the political establishment was also a huge factor in (what seems to be a large degree of) popular support for the coups in Mali, Burkina Faso, and Niger between 2020 and 2023.

Second, Senegalese voters behaved in a rational manner - if you’re going to vote Faye into office hoping for change, why not give him the tools needed to implement that change? One could note that when opposition candidates won the presidency previously (2000 and 2012, as mentioned above), voters often rewarded the new president’s party at the next legislative election (2001 and 2012, respectively).

Third, as I mentioned above, Faye, Sonko, and PASTEF now face an even bigger test - can they make a material difference in the lives of the mass of Senegalese citizens? It is ridiculous to call Faye and Sonko “radical,” as the BBC does in this headline; if anything, Faye and Sonko have already shown themselves to be less “radical” than advertised so far. Faye and Sonko come across to me as center-left reformists with a populist bent, figures who are interested in things like boosting Senegal’s oil exports, auditing the previous government’s contracts and statistics, etc. In any case, they did solidly bill themselves as change candidates and voters are expecting change - as they did with Abdoulaye Wade in 2000 and with Macky Sall in 2012. If Faye and Sonko can’t meet expectations, they in turn will become the resented incumbents.

Fourth, the BBC headline about “Senegal’s radical government” is itself one part of a broader international effort to discipline Faye and Sonko through diplomatic, commercial, and media pressures. The two tax inspectors-turned-rulers face an array of powerful forces with leverage over Senegal - the International Monetary Fund, France, other international investors, etc. - that could seriously constrain the reform agenda of PASTEF (and cause more internal divisions within the party). Faye and Sonko now have serious power to get their agenda passed and implemented, but another test will be how they manage external pressures to pare down the degree of change they are pursuing.

How Is Senegalese Democracy Faring?

Since March and Faye’s victory, there have been many analyses proclaiming that Senegal’s democratic credentials are once again solid. There’s a lot of truth to that - Senegal has indeed had a remarkable trajectory both in its lack of any military coups and in its multiple peaceful incumbent-to-opposition transfers of power. At the same time, the pattern I alluded to above (change candidate turns into hated incumbent) is intertwined with another pattern (opposition candidate, treated unfairly when out of power, turns around and shows some authoritarian tendencies once in power). Senegal has a powerful presidency and the men who have held it have typically not shied away from using those powers, including in ways that reshape the electoral arena and other spheres of democratic expression. Sall certainly appeared to be using the law and the courts, virtually throughout his presidency, to handicap whoever his main political opponent of the time was (first Karim Wade, then Khalifa Sall, then Sonko). And Sall’s acquiescence to abandoning his hopes of a third term in 2023, followed by his attempt to distort the electoral calendar in 2024, followed by his retreat, do show the strength of Senegalese democracy - but these events also show the vulnerabilities and weaknesses of that democracy. Street pressure is often, in my view, the deciding factor, and both Wade in 2012 and Sall in 2024 were pushed back from the cliff’s edge of a third term due to mass protests and international lobbying. So the institutions themselves are not necessarily that strong. Moreover, if Senegal has not seen a successful third term bid this century, that does not mean there are no problems - indeed, where Senegalese democracy appears most distorted is often at each incumbent’s halfway mark/first re-election.

All this to say that Faye and Sonko have made some decisions so far that concern me - use of heated rhetoric against the opposition and the press, arrests of opposition politicians and journalists, etc. I’m not saying Faye and Sonko are dictators. And I think both of them were treated quite unfairly by Sall’s administration. But that does not mean they will be democrats, through and through, now that they are in power and especially now that they have legislative control.

In sum, this is a crucial moment for Senegal. One crossroads has been passed, and the road not taken involved a constrained presidency struggling against a hostile legislature. The new path now forks again - (1) do Faye and Sonko achieve major reforms that benefit ordinary Senegalese and win them an enduring electoral majority through 2029? or (2) do Faye and Sonko find themselves boxed in, either by their own imaginations or by external pressure groups, and end up disappointing voters and turning into a repeat, in broad strokes, of Wade and Sall? or (3) do Faye and Sonko take Senegal into a more authoritarian place than their predecessors? I think it’s probably somewhere in between (1) and (2), and more along the lines of (2), but (3) is certainly a possibility.

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*Of course, 2024 was technically an open election, in contrast to 2000 and 2012, but I would argue that Ba was incumbent-adjacent as Prime Minister and as Sall’s designated successor.