The counting continued in the 46 departmental counting commissions of the country’s votes and the eight constituencies abroad which must publish their results no later than Tuesday at midnight, an official of the electoral commission told AFP.
The documents of the departmental and constituency commissions abroad must then be submitted to the National Vote Census Commission (CNRV) for the disclosure of the official provisional global figures no later than Friday.
These legislative elections are a test 19 months before the presidential election. The opposition claims to want to control Parliament to impose cohabitation on the power camp, unprecedented in this West African country.
She also wants to push President Macky Sall to give up the project he has been given to run for president in 2024. President Sall, elected in 2012 for seven years and re-elected in 2019 for five years, remains unclear about his intentions.
The presidential camp announced on Sunday evening that it had won the election, before being challenged by the alliance formed by the coalitions Yewwi Askan Wi (liberate the people in Wolof) and Wallu Senegal (Save Senegal), led respectively by the main opponent Ousmane Sonko and ex-president Abdoulaye Wade (2000-2012).
“What is undeniable is that we are the ones who won this election,” said Khalifa Sall, one of the leaders of Yewwi Askan Wi, on Monday evening. “We won and we will not accept that our victory is stolen from us,” he continued.
“For the first time in the history of Senegal, a sitting president will find himself without a majority in the National Assembly,” said former minister Karim Wade, son of ex-president Wade, who belongs to to the Wallu Senegal movement.
He has been in exile abroad, since a presidential pardon in June 2016 after a sentence in March 2015 to six years in prison and more than 210 million euros in fines for “illicit enrichment”.
“We reject any possibility of cohabitation and (…) reassure our activists that we remain in the majority at the end of this election, despite an advance by the opposition”, retorted Monday evening Aminata Touré, head of the list of the coalition presidential.
The power and the opposition must “let the competent bodies empowered to give the results”, tweeted for his part Alioune Tine founder of Afrikajom center and figure of civil society, calling for “serenity and restraint”.
