(Dakar) The Parliament of Senegal ratified in great confusion the bill aimed at postponing the presidential election to December 15, 2024, a vote which plunges the country into the unknown on Tuesday and raises fears of boiling over.
The law was adopted on the night of Monday to Tuesday almost unanimously, by 105 votes for and one vote against, after the opposition deputies who obstructed the vote were evacuated manu militari by the gendarmerie.
President Macky Sall will remain in office until the installation of his successor, specifies another provision of the law.
“The situation is completely catastrophic, the image of Senegal is ruined and I do not think that we will soon recover from this democratic failure, from this tsunami in the rule of law”, reacted after the vote Ayib Daffé, a opposition MP.
The debate which began on Monday morning continued until the middle of the night in an electric atmosphere, with parliamentarians even coming to blows in the afternoon.
Sporadic clashes
Tension rose a notch in Senegal, considered an island of stability in West Africa, after President Sall’s announcement on Saturday to postpone the presidential election scheduled for February 25, a few hours before the opening of the campaign.
This unprecedented decision, virulently denounced by its detractors as a “constitutional coup,” caused an outcry among qualified candidates and in civil society, including religious circles.
PHOTO JOHN WESSELS, AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE
Monday morning, around Parliament, the gendarmes repelled sporadic attempts to gather at the call of the opposition with tear gas. Small groups retreated further, chanting “Macky Sall dictator!” “.
The Plateau district, seat of political decision-making, offered the extremely rare spectacle of protesters in small numbers playing cat and mouse with the security forces among the Dakar residents going about their activities around the Assembly placed under the protection of dozens of gendarmes and police supported by heavy vehicles.
“The main thing for me is to say no to this political agenda, this coup to try to stay in power,” one of the demonstrators, Malick Diouf, 37, told AFP.
The authorities had already repressed the first attempts at gatherings on Sunday.
The internet was cut off on Monday, a means that has become commonplace in order to stop the mobilizations and already used by the Senegalese government in June 2023, in a context of political crisis.
International concern
PHOTO JOHN WESSELS, AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE
Demonstrations took place on Sunday in Dakar.
With this adoption of the law by Parliament, the situation in this country which has regularly elected its presidents and has never experienced a coup d’état, a rarity on the continent, remains highly volatile.
The Community of West African States (ECOWAS), the African Union, the United States, the European Union, France, the United Kingdom and Germany, important partners of Senegal, expressed their worry.
Many rights defense organizations, Senegalese and international, have condemned the internet restrictions as well as the suspension of the license of the private television station Walf TV. They called on the authorities to guard against excessive use of force, arbitrary arrests and attacks on freedoms.
“Senegal has long been considered a model of democracy in the region. This reality is now under threat,” Human Rights Watch wrote.
The crisis makes Senegal fear a new bout of fever like those it experienced in March 2021 and June 2023, which caused dozens of deaths and gave rise to hundreds of arrests.
The vagueness maintained for months by President Sall on a new candidacy in 2024 had contributed to the tensions at the time. He finally announced in July 2023 that he would not seek a new mandate.
Despite widely shared indignation on social networks, the protest against the postponement of the presidential election did not massively reach the streets. The University of Dakar, a historic center of protest, has been closed since the unrest of 2023 and the anti-system Pastef party has been hit by the arrests.
The opposition denounces an authoritarian drift in power. With the postponement of the presidential election, she suspects a plan to avoid the inevitable defeat, according to her, of the presidential camp, or even to prolong the Macky Sall presidency, despite the commitment reiterated on Saturday by the latter not to run again.