“Dn the whole, the national tendencies give our coalition largely winning in several regional and departmental capitals […]. However, our desire to conquer Dakar and Ziguinchor, in particular, has not been conclusive,” said Bennoo Bokk Yaakaar, the coalition of parties in power, in a press release published on Sunday evening. The opposition lists were led in Dakar by Barthélemy Dias, close to former mayor Khalifa Sall, and in Ziguinchor, the largest city in the south, in the natural region of Casamance, by Ousmane Sonko, tipped as one of the main competitors. in the 2024 presidential election and a central figure in the March 2021 protests that rocked Senegal.
A test ballot for the political life of Senegal
Sunday’s ballot to elect mayors and presidents of departments is a test for power and the opposition five months before the legislative elections. About more than 6 million Senegalese, out of a population of 17 million, were called upon to decide between 3,200 lists in more than 500 town halls and more than 40 departments.
The consultation was to gauge the popularity of the coalition that has governed since 2012, five months before the legislative elections and two years before the end of President Macky Sall’s second term. Mr. Sall, reelected in 2019, a leader listened to by the international community on the crisis in the Sahel or the question of the debt, maintains the vagueness on his intentions in 2024.
A constitutional revision approved in 2016 limits the number of presidential terms to two. Voices suggest that this reform could have reset the counters to zero, as was notably the case in Côte d’Ivoire for Alassane Ouattara in 2020. The refusal to see Mr. Sall run for a third term was one of the slogans of the opposition demonstrations in 2021.
The elections will be “a good barometer before the legislative elections to see if the grip of power on local communities will erode and undermine the omnipotence of the ruling coalition, whose engine remains the APR”, the Alliance for the Republic, the president’s party, explained political analyst Barka Ba.
