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SENEGAL’S ELITES WANTED TO TRASH DEMOCRACY. VOTERS DIDN’T.  
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Gregory Valdespino
March 23, 2024
Jacobin
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_ Tomorrow, Senegal votes in an election that French-backed president
Macky Sall repeatedly delayed. The fact that the election is going
ahead is a victory for young and poor Senegalese, whose protests
resisted elites’ democratic backsliding. _

Supporters of opposition presidential candidate Bassirou Diomaye Faye
and opposition leader Ousmane Sonko cheer during their final campaign
rally in Mbour, Senegal, on March 22, 2024. , John Wessels / AFP via
Getty Images

 

Last Thursday night, cheers bellowed across Senegal’s capital Dakar.
A few blocks from where I stood in the city’s posh Plateau district,
Ousmane Sonko and Bassirou Diomaye Faye left the prison
[[link removed]] they
had been held in for months. Since 2017, Sonko has led a powerful
opposition movement that has railed against current president Macky
Sall and the status quo he represents. Since Sonko is unable to run
himself, Faye will represent his party in the presidential election.
The jubilation that swept through this metropolis reveals much about
the limits and possibilities of democracy not only in Senegal, or even
West Africa, but across the world.

In recent years, people have gotten used to hearing about democratic
backsliding. Senegal’s neighbors and fellow former French colonies
Burkina Faso, Mali, and Niger have epitomized this worrying trend.
Within this so-called junta belt
[[link removed]], many citizens
rallied behind military coups that toppled democratically elected
leaders widely seen as French puppets or self-serving elites. Beyond
these countries, voters have seemed to lose faith in postcolonial
democracies from Nigeria
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This is to say nothing of the poor state of democracy in Europe and
North America. Taken together, these stories make it seem that voters
across the world have given up on the democratic process. Instead,
citizens have placed their faith in generals and strongmen. The
people, it seems, have left democracy behind.

Senegal challenges this narrative. Over the past few weeks, it has
become clear that it is the country’s rulers, and not its voters,
who have lost faith in the democratic process. The Senegalese people
pushed back, just as they have for decades. In doing so, they breathed
new life into the country’s political system in a way that should
inspire anyone hoping to defend and revitalize democracy.

Avoiding the Vote

Senegal has been gripped in a political crisis for weeks. On February
3, President Sall suspended the election
[[link removed]] originally
scheduled for February 25. Sall’s party then violently pushed a bill
through the National Assembly that scheduled a new election
on December 15 [[link removed]], which
would have allowed him to remain in power long after the official end
of his term at the beginning of next month. Sall and his followers
took this unprecedented step as it became increasingly clear that
Sonko’s party had a serious chance of winning. If this happened,
many in Sall’s camp feared that they could all go to jail on charges
of corruption or human rights abuses
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To protect themselves, Sall and his followers plunged their country
into the unknown.

For now at least, Sall has failed to destroy his country’s
democracy.

What does Sonko represent? Vague policy platforms and grandiose
promises of revolutionary change make it hard to know
[[link removed]]. At its core however,
Sonko and his party the African Patriots of Senegal for Work, Ethics,
and Fraternity (PASTEF) [[link removed]] combine populist
economic policies, anti-colonial rhetoric, and attacks on Senegal’s
political elite. PASTEF leaders have demanded
[[link removed](Reuters),renegotiate%20mining%20and%20energy%20contracts.] monetary
sovereignty, a renegotiation of extractive contracts with foreign
entities, and an end to French political intervention. Millions of
younger voters, particularly in poor urban areas like Dakar’s
oft-maligned suburbs, have found new hope in these positions. When
Sall upended the planned election, these dreams seemed more imperiled
than ever.

 

Protesters, activists, and journalists across Senegal immediately
condemned the election postponement as nothing short of a
“constitutional coup
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Clashes between protesters and police exploded across the
country, leading to at least three deaths
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Meanwhile opposition parties and civil society groups demanded the
Constitutional Council, the country’s highest court, intervene.
And intervene
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did. The court overturned two separate efforts by Sall’s government
to hold elections after his term ends. Thanks to these moves, the
election is scheduled for this Sunday. For now at least, Sall has
failed to destroy his country’s democracy.

Fed Up

Ihave spent the last ten years researching and writing about Dakar. I
have come to love this city’s beautiful blend of frenetic energy and
secure calm. Yet after Sall postponed the elections, my phone filled
up with stressful messages from friends in Dakar — and frightening
images circulating online. I went to Senegal last week with an
unfamiliar level of anxiety about what I would find. To my delight, I
returned to the familiar sights and sounds of a Senegalese campaign
season. Busses draped with candidates faces blasted raucous campaign
songs. Political arguments on sidewalks and television sets filled the
air. These sensations have long been so common in this country that
many people call politics Senegal’s national sport. But do these
facts really mean democracy is working here?

Macky Sall has revealed a systemic rot within the country’s ruling
class. As the historian Mamadou Diouf argues
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Sall has violently degraded the country’s democratic institutions.
He has shut down the country’s prestigious University Cheikh Anta
Diop
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cracked down on journalists
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and given a green light
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violent attacks against protesters. He ruled out running for an
unconstitutional third term only after massive and deadly protests
last summer
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All is not well in Senegal.

These crises did not come out of nowhere. Observers often present
Senegal as one of Africa’s most stable democracies. Sadly, this rosy
claim masks a much darker history. In a recent book
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democracy in France’s former African colonies, the economist Ndongo
Samba Sylla and journalist Fanny Pigeaud deem Senegal, like other
former French colonies in Africa, an “imperial democracy.” All of
Senegal’s leaders since it became independent in 1960 have
maintained close ties to the country’s former ruler. Like many of
their counterparts across francophone Africa
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Senegal’s political class has long defended a system that largely
serves French economic and political interests as well as those of a
small cadre of local elites. Potential spoils from the country’s
emerging oil markets have only made this corrupt dynamic worse
[[link removed]]. Even when elections are
held, winners rarely help the people who voted them into power.

True democracies give all their members the ability to shape their
country’s fate.

But alongside this neocolonial past there also stands another history,
one built by Senegalese people trying to transform their country’s
political system. Young people in particular have spent decades
arguing that democracy means more than just voting. In the 1980s
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Dakar residents responded to government austerity by forming their own
community sanitation programs. In the early 2010s
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and journalists formed the powerful “Y’en a Marre” movement.
Meaning “Fed Up” in French, this group mobilized hundreds of
thousands of young people before and after the 2012 election. Like
their counterparts across Africa
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activists have shown that democracy is not just about elections. True
democracies give all their members the ability to shape their
country’s fate.

We Need Elections, but Real Democracy, Too

To be sure, people in Senegal have doubts about electoral change. Many
have tired of fighting year after year, only to see costs rise and
jobs decline. Like millions of people across the world, many voters in
Senegal feel elections alone cannot truly transform their lives.

This pessimism, however, has not stopped people from defending the
country’s democracy over the past few weeks. The friends, colleagues
and strangers I spoke with in Dakar are divided about Sonko, his
movement, and even the possibility of structural change. They
recognize that no single election can solve the country’s problems.
Despite these divisions and doubts, no one I spoke with rejected the
democratic process outright. In my conversations, one phrase came up
time and again: “Don’t touch my democracy.” Flawed as elections
are, they still have a sacred place in Senegal.

As it stands, the vote is finally scheduled for Sunday. Some of my
friends are confident it will proceed. Others believe nothing is
guaranteed in Macky Sall’s Senegal. Even if the vote goes ahead,
that will not be the end of this story. Elections alone do not make
democracy. Yet without them, it stands no chance at all.

As noisy as Dakar became last Thursday, I expect this Sunday will be
even louder. Whether that noise will reflect hopes, fury, or despair
is the question. Millions of Senegalese people clearly want a
democracy. Will the country’s ruling class let them have one? The
consequences matter not only for voters in Dakar’s poor suburbs or
the country’s wealthy politicians. What happens in Senegal matters
for anyone trying to reinvent, or at least defend, the very belief in
democracy.

_GREGORY VALDESPINO is a postdoctoral fellow at Princeton University
and specialist in West African and French history._

_If you liked this article please subscribe
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* senegal
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* Politics
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* democracy
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* French colonialism
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* elections
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* youth movement
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