Senegal: Presidential Candidacies of Karim Wade and Khalifa Sall Blocked

Today, Senegal’s Constitutional Council turned down the candidacies of Karim Wade and Khalifa Sall for the 24 February presidential elections. The candidacies had been provisionally advanced last week after they met the requirements for candidates’ dossiers, such as collecting signatures. Twenty other candidacies had been rejected at that stage.

Wade is the son of former President Abdoulaye Wade (in office 2000-2012), and Sall is the former mayor of Dakar. The Council ruled that Sall, who has been sentenced to a five-year prison term on embezzlement charges, lacks the right to run, while Wade cannot run because he lacks an elector’s card – which he lacks because of an earlier judicial sentence. Both candidates have been blocked for essentially the same reason, although the applicable sections of the electoral code (L27 and L31 in Sall’s case, L115 in Wade’s) are different.

There are now five candidates remaining:

• Macky Sall, the President (BBY)
• Ousmane Sonko, parliamentary deputy (Pastef)
• El Hadj Issa Sall, parliamentary deputy (PUR)
• Madicke Niang, former Minister of Foreign Affairs (dissident PDS)
• Idrissa Seck, former Prime Minister (Rewmi)

And a victory by the president looks virtually assured now.

Senegal’s Presidential Elections: The Seven Candidates So Far

Senegal will hold presidential elections on 24 February. As of 9 January, seven candidates had been approved by the Constitutional Council. Here are their micro-bios, with their party affiliations in parentheses:

• Macky Sall, the President (BBY)
• Khalifa Sall, former Mayor of Dakar (Taxawu Senegaal)
• Karim Wade, former Minister of State for International Cooperation, Regional Development, Air Transport, and Infrastructure and son of ex-President Abdoulaye Wade (PDS)
• Ousmane Sonko, parliamentary deputy (Pastef)
• El Hadj Issa Sall, parliamentary deputy (PUR)
• Madicke Niang, former Minister of Foreign Affairs (dissident PDS)
• Idrissa Seck, former Prime Minister (Rewmi)

Twenty-seven candidacies were initially presented. Among those rejected, the one getting the most attention is Malick Gakou (Grand Parti), who the Council said was 546 signatures short on his dossier.

The definitive list of candidates is supposed to come out on January 20.

Analysis of Senegal’s Legislative Elections

I’m up at World Politics Review with a piece on Senegal’s legislative elections, which took place July 30. An excerpt:

A closely fought site was Dakar, symbolically important as the home turf of the president’s main rival and politically important as the country’s capital and most populous city. Initially, both [the ruling coalition Benno Bokk Yakaar] BBY and [Dakar mayor] Khalifa Sall’s coalition claimed victory there, with a margin of less than 3,000 votes. Winning Dakar would not fundamentally change the balance of power in parliament, but the opposition hoped to prevent a rout. In the end, official results accorded a narrow victory to BBY.

Brief Notes on Senegal’s Upcoming Legislative Elections

On July 30, Senegal will hold legislative elections to fill 165 seats in the unicameral National Assembly, including 15 seats to represent the Senegalese diaspora. Legislators serve five-year terms. The elections come between the 2012 presidential election and the 2019 presidential election, and as such they are the field of considerable maneuvering in advance of the 2019 contest. These elections are also the first to follow the 2016 referendum that brought various changes to Senegal’s political system. Most relevant to these legislative elections are “amendments [that] encourage even more party splintering, since the new constitution reduces barriers to independent candidacy.”

As Jeune Afrique (French) explains, before the official campaign began on May 30/31, there were initially two major coalitions of parties: Benno Bokk Yakaar (United in Hope), associated with incumbent President Macky Sall and the current parliamentary majority, and the opposition coalition Manko Taxawu Sénégal.

Within the opposition, however, disagreements (French) about who should head the coalition’s list caused a split, resulting in the formation of a major splinter group called Coalition gagnante Wattu Sénégal, with a list headed by former President Abdoulaye Wade. The remnants of Manko Taxawu Sénégal put forth a list headed by Khalifa Sall, mayor of the capital Dakar – who remains in jail, in a case I discussed here. Khalifa Sall’s key ally in the coalition is former Prime Minister Idrissa Seck.

Meanwhile, Benno Bokk Yakaar’s list (French) is headed by current Prime Minister Mohammed Dionne. BBY also includes veteran politicians such as Ousmane Tanor Dieng of the Socialist Party* and Moustapha Niasse, current president of the National Assembly and head of the Alliance of the Forces of Progress. The international Francophone press largely expects BBY to win, given the opposition’s internal divisions and BBY’s big tent. Nevertheless, it will be interesting to see what Wade is like in parliament, and also to see whether Khalifa Sall’s partisans are successful not just in getting him elected, but in getting him freed.

*Khalifa Sall is the leader of a dissident wing of the Socialist Party.

 

 

Senegal, Niger, and West African Democracy

I’m up to Global Observatory today with a post discussing two legal battles I have blogged about separately here – the trial of Hama Amadou in Niger, and the proceedings against Khalifa Sall in Senegal. My post at GO compares the two situations and assesses the implications for democracy in West Africa.

Senegal: The Arrest of Dakar Mayor Khalifa Sall and Its Effects

Khalifa Sall is the mayor of Dakar, the capital of Senegal. He is also a key opponent of Senegal’s President Macky Sall, and a prominent member of the Socialist Party. On March 7, the Dakar High Court indicted and detained Khalifa Sall on charges of embezzlement. Today, he is supposed to appear for a new hearing (French).

The mayor’s defenders see the case as politically motivated – as a way for Macky Sall to attempt to shape the coming legislative elections in July and to neutralize a potential challenger for the next presidential elections, scheduled for 2019.

Politically, the short-term impact seems to have been to raise Khalifa Sall’s profile even further, especially among the opposition (French). He is now, Le Monde says, “the man to beat” in the legislative elections, in which he plans to run his own slate of candidates. Jeune Afrique (French) says that the situation has “galvanized the opposition.”

The case is having noticeable effects not just on the political sphere, but also on the religious plane. Interestingly, the Sy family of Tivaouane, one of the most prominent Sufi families in the country (they are leaders within the Tijaniyya order), is intervening on Khalifa Sall’s behalf. If this source (French) can be trusted, the new head (khalifa) of the family has telephoned Macky Sall to ask for Khalifa Sall’s release. The khalifa invoked the Sy family’s ties to Khalifa Sall by marriage as the reason for his intervention. A younger but quite prominent member of the Sy family, Mansour Sy, was even more outspoken in his support (French) for the Dakar mayor, pledging that he would go to prison with him if he is convicted. How much the entreaties and threats from Tivaouane matter to Macky Sall will be interesting to see.

Senegal: Conflict Inside the Socialist Party

Senegal’s Socialist Party (Parti Socialiste) was in power from 1960-2000 and remains one the country’s major political parties. It helped current President Macky Sall win the second round of the 2012 elections, but a Jeune Afrique article (French) this week gives some insight into the party’s internal divisions. These divisions partly concern the 2019 elections and whether the party should back Sall or run its own candidate.

Highlighting these divisions, as the article shows, is the aftermath of clashes at the party’s headquarters in Dakar, the capital, last March 5. The clashes (French) were between supporters of longtime party leader Ousmane Tanor Dieng and Dakar’s Mayor Khalifa Sall. At stake last March was the party’s decision regarding a referendum on changes to the structure of Senegal’s presidency – Dieng supported the “yes” vote (and thereby supported Macky Sall’s camp) while Khalifa Sall supported the “no” camp. In the referendum, the “yes” camp won heavily. Khalifa Sall, I’ve been told by journalists in Dakar, is perhaps the politician whom Macky Sall fears the most.

Going back to the Jeune Afrique article, some of Khalifa Sall’s supporters were recently jailed. The group includes some local politicians and other party officials, including Bamba Fall, the mayor of a major neighborhood in Dakar called Medina. Jeune Afrique writes that the jailing has evoked bitterness among Khalifa Sall’s supporters, who are gearing up for a broader intra-party conflict over the 2019 elections. While Dieng and his camp appear likely to support the incumbent president, Khalifa Sall’s camp leans toward running an independent socialist candidate.

Another opposition newspaper (French) complains that different instances of political violence in Senegal are being treated differently – in other words, that the powers that be are using the courts to suppress political dissent. Senegal is not a major theatre of political violence, but the legal battles, intra-party struggles, and occasional clashes now all offer insights into how the 2019 campaign is already beginning.