Anisha

‎For those of us following the Senegal political drama that reads like a political thriller, we have an update. 😁
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‎Senegal's President Bassirou Diomaye Faye has unveiled a new government, and PASTEF, the party that put him in office, will not be part of it. Sonko announced it himself after a meeting with Faye on Monday produced what he described as "points of disagreement" about the future role of the party in the executive. Recall, PASTEF holds a parliamentary majority. Its founder is Speaker of the National Assembly. And it will not be represented by a single minister in the government of the country it governs.
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‎The context of this development is that PASTEF didn't simply refuse to participate. Before that refusal, the party's Executive Committee had published a formal document laying out seven conditions for participation: faithfulness to the 2024 electoral programme, clarity on debt management, a block on cost-of-living increases, and continuation of strategic contract renegotiations. Faye met none of them. Instead, he went around the party entirely, recruited individual PASTEF members directly for the cabinet, and appointed a technocratic economist as Prime Minister with a specific mandate to re-engage the IMF. Conclusion? PASTEF put terms on the table. The terms were rejected. The party walked.
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‎What this means in practice is that Faye has now answered, definitively, the question every political marriage of this kind must eventually answer: when two people share power, who is actually in charge?
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‎Faye says: the president is.
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‎Sonko says: the movement is.
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‎And thing is, ironically, both of them are right. Faye controls the executive. Sonko controls everything else. The party, the legislature, the activist base, the ideological soul of a movement that millions of young Senegalese built their political identity around. And in four days, Sonko convenes PASTEF's first-ever party congress where the agenda includes, in his own words, clarifying "the relationship between the party and the state." At a congress he controls. With a party that just voted 132 to 1 to make him Speaker.
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‎Meanwhile Senegal has until June 30 to reach key agreement points with the IMF on a frozen $1.8 billion programme, against a debt burden sitting at 132% of GDP. The man Faye appointed to handle that crisis leads a cabinet that the parliamentary majority has just formally rejected. Every piece of legislation that crisis response requires has to pass through a legislature controlled by the man Faye fired. This is either a very bold presidential assertion of independence or the most expensive political miscalculation in Senegal's post-independence history. I genuinely don't know which one yet. But I am watching and enjoying these developments way more than I should. It's like a live action seminar on political rivalry. Riveting! 😁