Within a week of being inaugurated in April as Senegal’s youngest president, Bassirou Diomaye Faye named his political mentor, Ousmane Sonko, as prime minister and announced his 25 cabinet appointments.
Faye had swept to power on a leftist, anti-establishment and pan-African agenda promising radical reform, and said in his victory speech that his administration would focus on national reconciliation, easing the cost of living crisis and fighting corruption.
His first-round victory in March over Amadou Ba, who represented the ruling administration, was all the more remarkable because Faye and Sonko had been released from prison only 10 days before the vote, under an amnesty announced by the previous president, Macky Sall.
Sall, in power for 12 years, had tried to delay the vote, and left office with his country facing widespread poverty and almost a third of Senegal’s youth unemployed.
“We fought body and soul to protect [Sonko] because the project represents hope for the young Senegalese,” said Moustapha Sano, a 28-year-old law and political science student at Cheikh Anta Diop University (UCAD) in Dakar, who helped Sonko’s Patriots of Senegal (Pastef) party organise campus protests against the Sall administration when it started jailing opposition members.
Six months on, however, the promises of far-reaching change have not come to fruition. Faye and Sonko blame parliament, where Sall’s supporters still hold a majority won in 2022.
Sonko has refused to present his policy agenda – known as the general policy declaration (GPD) – to parliament, on the grounds that parliament does not recognise the role of prime minister. Sall scrapped the position in 2019 and reinstated it in 2022, but MPs did not apply the reinstatement to parliamentary regulations until late August.
Aminata Touré, a former prime minister and ex-ally of Sall who joined the opposition camp three years ago, says the parliament no longer has legitimacy. “We have to align the legitimacy of 24 March when President Faye won by 54%, with the representation of the parliament,” she said.
Other parties in parliament think Sonko is stalling until he can gain parliamentary control.
“[He] wants to impose his law,” said Thierno Alassane Sall, the party leader of La République des Valeurs. “He forgets that he was not elected by anyone and he only draws his legitimacy … from the president of the republic who appointed him.”
On 4 September, Sonko said Faye would dissolve the opposition-dominated parliament in the coming days, which would pave the way for elections.
Senegal’s parliament cannot be dissolved by the president until it has sat for two years. According to media reports, this threshold will be reached on 12 September.
Faye has been active on the diplomatic front since taking office, mediating between the Economic Community of West African States (Ecowas) and three countries – Burkina Faso, Mali and Niger – whose military rulers split from the bloc in January to form the Association of Sahel States.
“The whole idea is to build a stronger Africa” said Touré, who urged the association to be “open-minded” to reconciliatory talks. “In a family, people have differences, but we remain family and I believe President [Faye] will succeed in rebuilding that family.”
The government’s critics say Faye’s diplomacy is a distraction from the domestic scene, where debt is more than 72% of its GDP, and youth unemployment remains high.
Accusations of cronyism, which dogged the Sall administration, have resurfaced. Almost half of Faye’s cabinet appointments – generally picked on the basis of merit, not party affiliation – are Pastef members or people linked to the party. Hopes of more gender equality have also been dashed: only 46 of the 300 appointments made by the new administration are women.
In July, as Faye marked 100 days in office, the United in Hope coalition led by Sall’s Alliance pour la République party criticised the president’s tenure for having “a lack of direction” and said Senegal had been on pause since the election. A month later, privately owned news outlets staged a one-day nationwide blackout to protest against the state freezing the bank accounts of media companies and seizing their equipment over alleged non-payment of taxes.
On the campaign trail, Faye vowed to achieve sovereignty, including by abandoning the West African CFA franc, the currency used by eight states in West Africa. He also promised to review Senegal’s relationship with its former colonial master, France, which is often thought to receive preferential treatment. But his first visit outside the continent was to Emmanuel Macron, the French president. Jean-Luc Mélenchon, the left-leaning French opposition leader, has also visited Sonko in Dakar.
“Once you are in a position of responsibility, whether you are entrusted with the reins of power or the reins of a country, you have a much more complex view of things,” said Boubacar Ba, associate professor of public law at UCAD. “So this difference in discourse is perfectly understandable … When you’re president, you have to take a lot of things into account, because today your word is binding on the credibility of the state.”
In April, Faye pledged to review deals with foreign partners in the extractive sector. Two months later, a decade after oil and gas was discovered off the Senegalese coast, production began at the country’s first offshore oil project, a partnership with Australian firm. It is uncertain what the terms of the deal are.
For Touré, the change in rhetoric is not evidence of the new leader backtracking on his promises.
“The point is, whoever we are partnering with, we’re going to make sure that it’s on a win-win situation. The new generation of leaders made it very clear that they want [a] more balanced relationship and that’s what the people of Africa have been longing for.”
Indeed, many youths like Sano who rooted for Pastef are optimistic that the party can still change the country’s fortunes.
“We want all young Senegalese to be able to benefit from Senegal’s natural resources … because we don’t want to continue to see so many thousands of young people perishing in the Atlantic Ocean, perishing in the Sahara desert,” he said, referring to the thousands of young people who have left for Europe in recent years.
