The suspense had lasted for several months: Senegalese President Macky Sall announced, Monday evening, July 3, that he will not ultimately be a candidate for a third term in the February 2024 presidential election, at a time when the country is experiencing strong tensions.
“My dear compatriots, my long and well-considered decision is not to be a candidate in the next election of February 25, 2024,” he said during an address to the nation broadcast on public television.
The head of state maintained the vagueness on his candidacy, while Senegal experienced at the beginning of June its deadliest troubles for years. This decision, in a region marked by repeated coups d’etat, somewhat restores the recently damaged reputation of Senegalese democracy, while opponents of Macky Sall had for months attributed to him the intention of presenting himself to a third mandate, illegal in their eyes.
“Senegal exceeds my person”
Elected in 2012, re-elected in 2019, Macky Sall, 61, had the Constitution revised in 2016. It stipulates that “no one can serve more than two consecutive terms”, but he explained that this did not concern him since he had served his first term before the reform.
After having been a leader of the movement against the candidacy for a third term of his predecessor, Abdoulaye Wade (in power from 2000 to 2012), and having repeatedly maintained that he would only serve two terms, President Sall had since refused several months to dispel doubt about his intentions and had placed no dolphins in the spotlight.
“Senegal is beyond me and it is full of leaders capable of pushing the country towards emergence,” he said. “There has been so much speculation, commented on my candidacy for this election (…) My priorities focused above all on the management of a country, of a coherent government team, and committed to action for emergence, especially in a socio-economic context. -economically difficult and uncertain,” he stressed.
“I have a clear conscience and memory of what I have said, written and repeated, here and elsewhere, that is to say that the term of 2019 was my second and last term,” he said. said, adding, “I have a code of honor and a sense of historical responsibility that commands me to preserve my dignity and my word. »
Guilty of an “authoritarian drift” for his opponents
President builder and advocate of Africa internationally for his supporters, guilty of “authoritarian drift” for his opponents who accuse him of having restricted freedoms, President Sall is paving the way for a successful exit.
He strongly condemned the violence that followed the two-year prison sentence of his main opponent, Ousmane Sonko, in a sex scandal which currently makes the latter ineligible. At the beginning of June, it caused the most serious unrest in years in Senegal, killing sixteen people according to the authorities, twenty-four according to Amnesty International and around thirty according to the opposition.
“The nefarious objective of the instigators, perpetrators and accomplices of this unprecedented violence was clear: to sow terror, bring our country to a standstill and destabilize it. It is a real organized crime against the Senegalese nation, against the State, against the Republic and its institutions,” President Sall said in his speech.
Mr. Sonko, who enjoys great popularity with young people, has for his part constantly shouted at the plot of power – which refutes him – to exclude him from the presidential election of February 2024. He is blocked by the security forces at his home in Dakar, “sequestered” according to him, since May 28. In a video Sunday evening on social networks, the opponent called on the Senegalese to demonstrate “massively” the next few days, whether Macky Sall shows up or not.
Call for unity
According to the opponent, if the president does not show up, it would be to better eliminate him. If arrested and if he is not released within two hours, “I call on all Senegalese people to stand up as one man and come out in droves and this time to put an end to this criminal regime “, he said. “If there’s going to be a fight, it has to be final. I call for a national leap forward. The days and weeks ahead will be crucial” and “difficult”, he added.
In a recent column, intellectuals, Mohamed Mbougar Sarr, Felwine Sarr and Boubacar Boris Diop, castigated “the hubris of a power that imprisons or exiles its most threatening opponents, represses freedoms”.
Conversely, Macky Sall presents himself as the guarantor of institutions and security in the face of “destabilization attempts” and boasts of his record in economic matters. On Saturday, in front of local elected officials who had petitioned to support him, he called on his political family to unite and to place “the general interest” and “the interest of the coalition” before any other consideration. “My fight and my greatest pride is really to lead you to victory and to pursue our economic policy for the benefit of our people,” he said, stressing that the roadmap to make Senegal an emerging country in 2035 was already “tagged”.