2023-05-10 10:00:07
Le President of Senegal, Macky Sall, is he playing with a fire that risks igniting the street if he goes through with the intention that many attribute to him, to run for a third presidential term in February 2024? Legally, it looks like he can. The Constitution does provide that “No one may serve more than two consecutive terms”. But the Minister of Justice has already decided by affirming that “the first mandate is that going from 2019 to 2024”. According to him, the 2016 constitutional revision reset the counters and therefore “erased” Mr. Sall’s first election in 2012.
The question overflows from the muffled debate of constitutionalists. Opponents of the third term recall that President Macky Sall had pledged several months ago to stop where he is. Since then, it has maintained an ambiguity which every day further accredits the scenario of a new candidacy. Especially since the structures of the presidential coalition, Benno Bokk Yakaar (BBY), are multiplying “spontaneous” demonstrations of support for their champion.
President Sall is however well placed to assess the risks of such an undertaking. In 2012, he was elected by skillfully surfing on a broad rejection movement of Abdoulaye Wade, who had written the same scenario: constitutional amendment, subtraction of one of his mandates, then new candidacy. This adventure had triggered monster demonstrations, violently repressed. Ultimately, the “everything but Wade” won, to the benefit of the current Head of State.
Accused of instrumentalizing justice
Like his predecessor, Macky Sall suffers from the wear and tear of time spent in business. Suspected of wanting to go once morest the spirit of the Constitution, he is also accused by his opponents of instrumentalizing justice for political ends. In fact, disturbingly, his main rivals cannot or risk not being able to present themselves in the 2024 elections. This is the case of the former mayor of Dakar, Khalifa Sall, convicted in 2018 of embezzlement; of Karim Wade, the son of the former president, exiled to Qatar following being tried in 2015 for illicit enrichment.
The latest to suffer the wrath of the courts, Ousmane Sonko was sentenced, Monday, May 8, to six months in prison suspended for defamation and public insult. He risks ineligibility. Unlike the other two opponents, the mayor of Ziguinchor, popular with an idle youth, is threatening the street to defend his presidential dream.
Who can try to calm things down? At the regional level, the moral authority of the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) is on its knees, mowed down by the democratic sprains of some of its members: military coups in Mali, in Burkina Faso and Guinea, controversial third term of Alassane Ouattara in Côte d’Ivoire. France, the former colonial power, remains in the background and the United States seems to be playing the card of continuity.
Whether the legal proceedings once morest each other are justified or not matters little to opponents and to a large part of public opinion who denounce selective justice. This feeling reflects the weakening of Senegalese democratic institutions and the personalities who embody it. At the forefront of which is Macky Sall, who should nevertheless be the guarantor of the stability of this country so quick to praise its democratic model.
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