The Over-Powered Presidency
Macky Sall's attempt to manipulate Senegal's presidential election shows the allure of a powerful presidential office and how it can distort national politics.
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On February 3, Senegal’s President Macky Sall announced that he was unilaterally and indefinitely postponing the country’s presidential elections, which had been scheduled for February 25. Two days later, 105 out of the Senegalese legislature’s 165 members voted to set December 15 as the new election date. Some opposition members of parliament attempted to physically block that vote from occurring, and three were arrested on February 6. On February 15, Senegal’s Constitutional Court ruled that elections must take place before Sall’s term expires on April 2. In a February 22 press conference, Sall promised that he would leave office by that date, and pledged to hold a “national dialogue” to determine the new election date. The dialogue panel ultimately proposed June 2. Large public protests demanding an earlier date ensued. Then, in a second ruling on March 6, the Court rejected the June 2 date and again insisted that the vote must take place before Sall’s term ends. That same day, Sall set March 24 as the election date.
The March 24 scheduling, which the court subsequently upheld, seems to have ended this election saga, although further disruptions are certainly possible before Sunday. Whatever else may happen, Sall’s attempt to postpone the vote has resulted in one of the most fraught periods in recent West African politics, with concerns emanating far beyond Senegal itself.
The crisis has received intensive attention not just because Senegal is considered relatively stable, but also because of a wider context that has seen four West African civilian presidents fall to coups since 2020. The blows to democracy (or, if democracy is too strong a word, let’s say the blows to civilian-led multi-party systems) have flummoxed American and European diplomats, as well as African regional organizations such as the African Union (AU) and the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS). There will be many sighs of relief when and if Sall moves on, and the Constitutional Court’s show of judicial independence suggests that institutions do have weight in Senegal alongside personalities. Yet the episode shows how vulnerable almost any country is to what we might call the “politics of ambiguity”—a theme I’ll return to below.
The story also highlights how the presidency has become an object of obsession in West Africa and around the world. The intensive effort to obtain and hold presidencies threatens to crowd out serious policymaking as well as other forms of politics. The state, and the position that controls at least some of its levers, is so powerful that many officeholders will do whatever they can get away with to stay there. Contests over presidencies come to monopolize a considerable portion of the public’s attention and energies, from Dakar to DC.
A Brief History of Senegal’s Political System
Senegal has the distinction, unique in West Africa, of having been coup-free throughout its post-independence history since 1960. Yet that does not mean there has been no autocracy in the country. As Rama Dieng writes, “All incumbent presidents have attempted to remain in power through manipulating electoral laws.” President Leopold Senghor ruled from 1960-1980, and his handpicked successor Abdou Diouf ruled from 1981 (the succession was on December 31-January 1) until 2000. Senghor jailed and suppressed various opponents, and ran unopposed in the presidential elections of 1963 and 1968. Even the semi-competitive elections in 1978, 1983, 1988, and 1993 saw the incumbent (Senghor in 1978, and Diouf the next three times) take decisive majorities, including over 80% for Senghor in 1978 and for Diouf in 1983. Tellingly, and in what appears to be more a sign of authoritarian nervousness than of the actual popular will, Diouf’s vote share fell steadily from 1983 through 2000, when he lost decisively in the second round.
The long road to Senegal’s “alternance” in 2000 did not necessarily produce a thriving democracy. The chief opposition candidate from 1978-2000, the lawyer and economist Abdoulaye Wade, partly reproduced a pseudo-authoritarian style when he finally became president in 2000. In a trend that continued under Sall, Wade appeared keen to tinker with the political system to his own advantage, notably by changing the length of presidential terms from seven years to five years and then back—changes that eventually facilitated a shaky legal argument on Wade’s part that he was eligible for a third term, despite constitutional limits. Wade was ultimately defeated at the ballot box in the second round of the 2012 election, a defeat that could be read as a win for the streets (mass protests and mobilization were key factors in pressuring him to concede) but a blow to procedure and the integrity of the system. If street pressure in combination with elite mobilization and international pressure can force out a stubborn incumbent, it suggests that the system is highly vulnerable to presidents who want to test how much strain it can bear.
Sall has understood this, I think. As the beneficiary of Wade’s fall—just as with Wade versus Diouf in 2000, the opposition rallied around Sall in the second round of the 2012 election—Sall nevertheless again proved more a power-maximizing manipulator of the system than a committed democrat. Particularly egregious were two issues, one of which saw Sall replicating some of Wade’s techniques and the other of which saw Sall go even further. First, then, Sall continued Wade’s practice of tinkering with the system, again especially on the issue of presidential term lengths. While serving his first, seven-year term from 2012-2019, Sall shepherded through a referendum that, among other provisions, changed term lengths back to five years. Sall later flirted with making a similar argument to Wade’s from 2012, namely that the varied term lengths somehow meant that his first term did not count towards the two-term limit. Unlike Wade, Sall eventually backed down—under domestic and international pressure—from seeking a third term, announcing in July 2023 that he would not do so.
Second, and to a greater level than during Wade’s presidency, the Senegalese judiciary appeared to become a servant of Sall’s political interests. Three prominent cases targeted, in turn, Sall’s greatest rival at any given moment—first Wade’s son Karim, then the capital’s mayor Khalifa Sall (no relation to the president), and finally the tax inspector-turned-firebrand Ousmane Sonko. The accusations varied from corruption (for Karim Wade and Khalifa Sall) to rape (for Sonko). It has been difficult to assess the credibility of each charge given how politically convenient they have proven for Macky Sall. In 2019, Karim Wade and Khalifa Sall’s respective court cases blocked the two from contesting that year’s elections, which Sall won in the first round with 58% (thus avoiding the scenario that had occurred in 2000 and 2012, when the opposition had rallied around a single candidate in the second round and had thereby unseated the incumbent). In the lead-up to 2024, it has been Sonko’s turn to see his candidacy denied. The court cases, which ended with pardons for Karim Wade and Khalifa Sall, have functioned not just to block candidacies, but also to keep key figures in legal limbo during critical periods.
If Macky Sall had all these levers to use to control the system, how did we get here? Initially, it had seemed that when Plan A (a third term) didn’t work out, then Sall would be comfortable with Plan B—designating a successor, namely Prime Minister Amadou Ba. Through February 3, I had expected that this year’s election would be a coronation for Ba, especially with Sonko denied a place on the ballot. I can only speculate as to what prompted Sall’s attempted postponement of the election, but one thing on his mind may be that such arrangements—wherein the departing president picks a loyalist successor—have not gone that smoothly in West Africa of late:
In Senegal’s neighbor Mauritania in 2019, departing President Mohamed Ould Abdel Aziz handed power to his longtime associate Mohamed Ould Ghazouani. The two men had served together for four decades at that point, orchestrating two coups together (in 2005 and 2008) and seeming to jointly incarnate the country’s military-dominated politics. None of that stopped the two men from almost immediately falling out after Ould Ghazouani took office; within months, Ould Abdel Aziz had lost control of the ruling party and was facing a parliamentary investigation over corruption allegations. Last summer, he received a five-year prison sentence.
Further afield, in Niger, President Mahamadou Issoufou (in office 2011-2021) seemed similarly close to his longtime fellow party member and top advisor Mohamed Bazoum, who succeeded him. Yet when a coup struck Niger in July 2023, rumors flew that Issoufou was implicated.
Sall may calculate, and reasonably so, that once Ba takes the oath of office he will no longer be under his patron’s thumb. Perhaps the past several weeks have simply been Sall’s attempt to buy time to rethink his succession plans. Now it seems he may have considered a return to Plan A, only to reverse course in the face of public and institutional opposition. At any rate, the precedent of Issoufou suggests that Sall’s involvement in Senegalese politics will not end even after he leaves office.
Perhaps Sall also pushed the courts too far. It is one thing for courts to wittingly or unwittingly aid the incumbent in tipping and manipulating the playing field during the course of scheduled elections. It is another for the incumbent to throw the entire system into question. Sall may have miscalculated about exactly how compliant the country’s institutions were—the legislature fell into line, but not the judiciary.
The Politics of Ambiguity
Sall, during this episode, leaned on a politics of ambiguity. He allowed years of speculation about his possible third term intentions, and the current cycle of postponements and adjustments to the electoral calendar has involved considerable uncertainty. Politicians have a lot to gain by cultivating and perpetuating uncertainty around their intentions; not only does it keep opponents and popular protesters off balance, it also subtly reinforces the corrosive idea that nothing is sacrosanct. If an election can be delayed to December (or even June), then perhaps it could be delayed again (and again).
Many other leaders in the region are also deploying a similar politics of ambiguity. Are transitions back to civilian rule actually underway in Mali, Burkina Faso, Niger, and Guinea? Officially yes, but the timelines have proven infinitely malleable, and always in ways that advantage the ruling juntas.
Of course, delaying tactics and obfuscation only work sometimes. In 2015, Nigeria’s then-President Goodluck Jonathan postponed high-stakes elections in six weeks, in what his administration called a response to the Boko Haram crisis (which was truly raging at the time) but what many critics (including me) also read as a play for more time. Ultimately, Jonathan was decisively beaten. Even third term bids can backfire—just ask Niger’s Mamadou Tandja or Guinea’s Alpha Condé, both of whom secured third terms only to see themselves overthrown just months later.
Still, there are many zones where heads of state can benefit from ambiguity. The referendum is a favorite tactic. Does a strong “yes” vote for the incumbent’s proposals indicate meaningful popular support, or does the “yes” vote rather indicate an atmosphere of intimidation and/or apathy? Another key tactic, as mentioned above, is the court case or corruption investigation targeting an opponent—is there merit to the case, or is it a trumped-up political charge? Yet another tactic is the court ruling vis-à-vis an election. Are rulings that favor the incumbent simply representative of courts adjudicating the facts, or are the courts in the incumbent’s pocket?
Such ambiguity, I think, is especially beneficial to incumbents in the international arena. Particularly when it comes to Africa, Washington, Paris, Brussels, etc. are slow to criticize incumbents, and even slower to criticize incumbents perceived as allies. One consequence is that incumbents can make a lot of aggressive moves before Western diplomats react to the “crisis.” In Mali’s case, for example, Western diplomats appeared to ignore then-President Ibrahim Boubacar Keïta’s problematic re-election in 2018 and the even more problematic legislative elections of 2020, when a court cushioned the presidential party’s losses by reversing the outcomes of numerous races. The “crisis” became apparent in summer 2020 with mass protests against Keïta and then a coup, but the actual crisis was not limited to those few months’ events, and had rather been festering for years.
Similarly, the warning signs were there for years about Sall’s executive overreach, but there was relatively little international pushback against his treatment of Sonko or other opponents. We could multiply examples here; Niger is another. Again, the ambiguity advantages incumbents—it is rare for one to come out and say “I’m forcing through this referendum for my own benefit” or “I’m manipulating the courts to harass my opponents.” These forms of plausible deniability can enable bigger and bigger forms of overreach until a country finds itself beyond a point of no return.
Is There a Way to De-Center the Presidency?
The power of the presidency distorts many countries’ politics. For one thing, the skills needed to capture the presidency are quite different from the skills needed to govern. As the presidency becomes more and more powerful, the contests for presidencies reward several archetypes. One archetype is the figure with tremendous staying power, someone who has “paid their dues” over time either within dominant parties (Joe Biden comes to mind) or as the long-time face of the opposition (Abdoulaye Wade of Senegal and Muhammadu Buhari of Nigeria are two examples). Another archetype is the charismatic figure who bursts onto the scene relatively quickly but then secures considerable elite support (Barack Obama comes to mind). In West Africa currently, yet another archetype is the ambitious colonel or general who seizes the reins of power from an embattled civilian.
Common to all these archetypes, however, is that their skills (longevity, charisma, coup-making) really have little to do with their ability to devise effective policies. Sall, for example, can boast of some GDP growth and infrastructural improvements, but some of the basic problems that have haunted Senegal for a long time—electricity supply and water security, among others—remain dire as Sall nears the end of his tenure. Another example is Nigeria’s current President Bola Tinubu, almost the epitome of the country’s “godfather” style politics, a master of coalition-building and hardball electoral politics but now visibly struggling (as almost anyone would be, in fairness) to rein in a severe economic crisis, to say nothing of multiple security challenges. As I’ve written here before, in country after country, from the U.S. to Nigeria, populations bemoan the lack of strong presidents, but in a way the obsession with the presidency plays into the hands of would-be strongmen while also vacuuming up political energies that could be deployed elsewhere.
That’s not an injunction to just “go local” and ignore the obvious weight of the presidency in many countries. (Although the local is bound up with the national in many ways, obviously; notably, two of the three key challengers to Sall have been mayors, just as Sall himself was a mayor when he challenged Wade.) In any case, the presidency cannot be ignored: Senegal shows just how vulnerable a country can be to incumbents’ efforts at manipulating the system, and how it takes a combination of street protests and institutional independence to push back. Not every country has that.
For the left, finally, there’s a dilemma here. A strong state, presumably with a strong executive, is crucial to many left visions of social transformation, yet the strong executive can be one of the biggest barriers to such policies or even to meaningful change at all. The maneuvering of figures like Sall can end up dominating countries for years if not decades, and even when those maneuvers come to ruin (as with the Issoufou-Bazoum transition in Niger), the aftermath is often even worse. How to discipline and then harness presidencies is one of the great political challenges of our time; in Senegal, battling back Sall’s ambitions may yield yet one of many thin victories that consists of forcing one ambitious incumbent out, but without generating a fundamentally new chapter wherein politics becomes something more than a contest of personalities for a single office.
Postscript (April 4, 2024)
Macky Sall overreached badly. A flood he had been holding back during his second term finally overspilled all the legal levees he had erected against it. On March 14, under massive pressure from protesters, he released his main political opponent Ousmane Sonko from prison, along with Sonko’s ally Bassirou Diomaye Faye. Although Sonko’s legal troubles prevented him from running for president, Faye ran in his stead, and achieved a smashing first-round victory ten days later—an unprecedented outcome for any Senegalese election (opposition candidates have previously won only on the second round) and one of the most remarkable stories in West African politics since independence.
Faye took office on April 2 and soon appointed Sonko as his prime minister. There is tremendous excitement within Senegal and abroad concerning their tenure—albeit with some skepticism from “investors.”
Faye and Sonko undoubtedly represent something new in Senegalese politics. They are both tax collectors turned politicians, both relatively young, both open to upending the status quo. On economic issues from fishing to gas to currency, Faye and Sonko have promised an overhaul of arrangements and systems that they feel disfavor—or outright cheat—ordinary Senegalese.
Looking ahead, a number of questions come to mind:
Can Faye and Sonko achieve something transformative for the economy and against corruption? If so, what will the ripple effects be? Will this give new momentum to opposition figures, particularly on the left, elsewhere? Will their tenure represent a democratic alternative to the juntas in various nearby Sahelian countries? Or will it rather become the democratic expression of a common anti-French and anti-status quo wave in the sub-region?
Will the investor class, the domestic political class, and/or the exigencies of office tame the radicalism of Faye and Sonko’s vision—with a corresponding backlash from the streets? Will the country’s economic problems simply prove too entrenched to budge? Will Senegal’s “hyperpresidentialism” prove to be a powerful tool for crafting systemic change, or will Faye be seduced by presidential power into replicating the same repressive maneuvers favored by Macky Sall and other past presidents?
Is it possible for Faye and Sonko to sustain a kind of co-presidency over the long term? Or will the pattern of alliances-turned-rivalry I mentioned in my original piece—Ould Abdel Aziz and Ould Ghazouani in Mauritania, or Issoufou and Bazoum in Niger—play out in Senegal as well? If so, will that falling out become the story of Faye’s presidency, rather than any substantive accomplishments?
I certainly think Faye has a chance to prove that he is something different from the past. These elections represented a real three-way crossroads for Senegal. The worst option would have been a power grab by Sall, the mediocre option would have been a coronation for Sall’s designated successor Amadou Ba, and there is no question in my mind that Faye’s election was the best of the three possible outcomes. The cynic in me was quite surprised by the election’s outcome, actually. And I hope now that I will be surprised again by Faye’s presidency itself.
I don't know much about West Africa. Thanks for the knowledge.