Senegal has long been a rare positive exception to other trends in governance when analyzing democratic successes in Africa. In spite of former President Macky Sall’s authoritarian slide during his terms from 2012 to 2024, the opposition victory this past April, followed by a peaceful transfer of power are confirmations of Senegal’s democratic trajectory. This article will examine the conditions, in terms of both domestic politics and foreign engagement, that have produced this optimistic result, and how transferable these conditions are to democratization efforts in the rest of Africa.
President Sall’s regime was a period marked by repeated subversions of the rule of law and democratic norms. Prior to the 2019 election, the nation’s two leading opposition figures were convicted of “corruption” on charges most election observers considered dubious. They were then banned from running by Sall-appointed judges. In 2021, Sall’s government widened defamation laws using them to shut down two opposition-supporting news stations and prosecute opposition activists and candidates. In the run-up to the 2024 election (constitutionally due in 2023), the courts controlled by Sall appointees instituted another ban against opposition leader Ousmane Sonke and sentenced him to two years in jail. The grounds of the charge and the sentence were, once again, dubious. Clearly, Sall and his administration were aiming to maintain power by undermining all democratic norms, with an ultimate aim of ending even the notional rules of democracy as well.
Under the terms of the Senegalese constitution, President Sall was set to term out by 2023. He then manufactured a crisis of the nation’s infrastructure “not being ready” for an election and postponed it. The initial delay was for a period of 10 months, before Sall sought to postpone it indefinitely. However, the Constitutional Court, Senegal’s highest legal body, in spite of being filled with Sall loyalists, intervened and ordered an election on March 24. Sall respected the order. The opposition candidate, Bassimou Faye, convincingly defeated Amadou Ba (Sall’s friend and appointed Prime Minister). Both Sall and Ba conceded and facilitated a peaceful transfer of power. As the subsequent paragraphs will explain, there are many possible reasons Senegal’s institutions rejected authoritarianism. The two widely considered to be the most pressing were Senegal’s previous experience with, and consequent institutional capacity for democratic rule, as well as strong pressure by all of Senegal’s traditional international economic and security partners.
For decades prior to Sall’s administration, Senegal was widely considered a classic “flawed” or “hybrid” democracy. Its democratic history began during the French colonial era in the 1850s when Senegal was known as “Les Quatres Communes” (Eng. the four communes). The French administered local government elections with varying degrees of legitimacy. Senegal experienced its first peaceful transfer of power in 1975, which was a very rare phenomenon in Africa during that period. This transition is widely considered to be a result of the awareness of Senegal’s political class of the lack of development caused by absolute presidential authoritarianism in the rest of newly-independent Africa. A range of measures were initiated to prevent similar stagnation in Senegal. One of the most significant followed the presidential transition in 1975, Abdou Diouf immediately removed the law banning multi-party elections. Peaceful transfers of power between opposing parties occurred in 2000, 2012, and now 2024. According to Afrobarometer, 65% of all population subgroups in Senegal surveyed prefer democracy to any other form of governance.
Within this context, it is understandable that domestic resistance to President Sall’s attempt to end elections was widespread. There were frequent and large popular protests, the demographic makeup of which ranged from university students to rural farmers. Muslim religious leaders, secular business leaders, as well as union and professional association leaders denounced Sall’s attempted slow moving coup. All of these groups put strong pressures on the constitutional court to strike down the election postponement, as it ultimately did.
Under Sall’s administration, Senegal continued its deep economic, cultural, and security ties with France, increased economic integration with the USA, as well as deepening security integration with ECOWAS (West African Union). Following 2023, all these actors also applied significant pressure on Sall’s administration to change course away from its authoritarian slide. This consisted of a multi-pronged approach of personal and sector-based restrictions on economic and security cooperation. These were, of course, contingent and would be replaced with new investments should Sall allow a free election. These foreign incentives were certainly relevant in influencing Senegalese political elites to restrain the authoritarian slide and enforce free elections. However, given that the military coups in eight other Francophone West-African countries have persisted in spite of varying degrees of Western opposition, it is reasonable to assume the foreign pressure in Senegal was not the only determinant. This reaffirms the essential role of an ingrained domestic democratic political culture.
Every nation’s circumstances are unique. However, Senegal’s 2024 trajectory can still be instructive for the promotion of democracy in other parts of Africa, including the “coup belt”. Concerning the replicability of a democratic political culture, such popular support is difficult to build up in other recipient countries that do not have similar histories or institutions. Emmanuel Macron’s administration has made significant investments in building Western-looking and pro-democratic institutions in West Africa as a means of expanding French soft power. This approach has had mixed results. It has not stopped the wave of coups in West Africa led by juntas that are fundamentally opposed to French influence in the region. The second aspect of the case of Senegal, economic carrots-and-sticks, is much more transferable and effective. For example, the EU, NATO members, and ECOWAS have leveraged economic and security ties with Mali and Niger. However they have not achieved positive developments for democratic norms in those countries.
Senegal’s democratic success indicates that leveraging economic incentives is likely to be a prolonged part of Western political and security-based actions in Africa. However, efforts to engineer popular domestic buy-in to a democratic culture will take longer and may be limited to the countries where some forms of democracy have already been established.
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Photo: “‘Africa Celebrates Democracy’ concert, Dakar.”- Mokobe and young performers on stage at the concert. (2012), by Mo Ibrahim foundation via Flickr. Licensed under CC Noncommercial 2.0 Generic.
