"I leave office with a sense of relief after 12 years at the head of the country. I've had an exceptional political adventure," Macky Sall told Le Monde one evening in the last days of December. At the time, the president of Senegal was calmly putting the finishing touches to what was to be his last speech before stepping down as president. On December 31, as agreed, the farewell was long and solemn.
When the president reappeared on TV screens on Saturday, February 3, with a serious expression on his face, the country was stunned. After referring to the accusations of corruption leveled at the Constitutional Council, he announced that he had rescinded the decree convening the presidential election for February 25. Without ever uttering the word "postponement," he provoked a political earthquake. Not since 1963 has a presidential election been postponed in Senegal. With just a few hours to go before the start of the campaign, the nation found itself plunged into uncertainty. The rumor of a postponement of the election had hovered for months, and it had now become reality.
After the violence in March 2021 and June 2023, following the conviction of Sall's main opponent Ousmane Sonko, some religious authorities, opponents and even leaders in Sall's coalition had defended the idea. "Their argument was that the country needed to be pacified before an election could be organized. Otherwise, there was a risk of unrest. This became even more acute following the president's decision not to run for a third term," said Moussa Diaw, a research lecturer at the Gaston-Berger University in Saint- Louis.
Sall's resignation in July seems to have disoriented his party, where a number of executives were backing a new candidate for the presidency. In fact, they opposed the president's designation of Prime Minister Amadou Ba as the ruling party's candidate. Although he joined the presidential party Alliance pour la République (APR) in 2017, Ba has never managed to build a consensus around himself. His campaign has struggled to get going. His detractors, often members of the first lady's entourage, argued maintaining his candidacy condemned the government to defeat.
"The polls [commissioned by the government] showed him losing to Bassirou Diomaye Faye [the candidate nominated by Sonko to replace him], whose party has promised to shed light on the bad governance of the current regime if he is elected," said Diaw. The authorities were all the more worried when Diomaye Faye's candidacy was validated by the Constitutional Council, despite his party's dissolution. "This postponement is a political maneuver, as there is no real crisis or institutional deadlock. The authorities have created a fake crisis in order to postpone the election."
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