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There were, initially at least, no tanks on the streets. There were no soldiers dressed in a fetching array of khaki and camouflage announcing on national television that they had taken control of state functions. A president had not been bolted in his basement by his own guard. But the events that unfolded in Senegal this week amounted to a coup nonetheless.
That it was a “constitutional coup” with no shots fired and little involvement of the armed forces is small comfort. Senegal has never before missed a presidential election. It has never had a coup d’état. Since the 1980s, it has been a multi-party democracy with regular changes of government.
But on Saturday afternoon, three weeks before elections were due to take place, two-term President Macky Sall announced that they would be postponed.
No date was given for a new vote and only the flimsiest of excuses provided for its deferment. Parliament — or what was left of it after police in riot gear forcibly ejected opposition lawmakers — subsequently set the date for December 15, a ludicrously long delay to solve a technical issue over candidate selection.
As in Pakistan — another wobbly democracy with an election to slog through — the internet in Senegal flickered off. Troops were deployed to forestall a repeat of last summer’s protests when there were already signs that democratic and civil rights were being slowly asphyxiated. In a year when more than 2bn people worldwide go to the polls, Senegal’s contribution to upholding teetering democratic principles has been to cast doubt over whether its citizens will actually get to vote at all.
The country’s coup was milder than those in neighbours in which weak leaders were elbowed aside by soldiers. In west Africa since 2020, governments in Mali, Burkina Faso, Guinea and Niger have all succumbed to the gun. Coups have unfolded in Chad, Sudan and Gabon. In many nominal democracies, including Cameroon, Rwanda and Uganda, incumbent leaders have made little pretence of running fair elections.
Yet Senegal’s constitutional breach may turn out to be of equal, or greater, significance. Senegal was not an impoverished state fighting an Islamist insurgency. Unlike paper democracies, it was practising something like the real thing. It had been a mostly peaceful, fast-growing economy with large reserves of gas regularly cited as one of Africa’s brightest prospects.
The dimming of its democracy has repercussions beyond its borders. Senegal is one of the linchpins of the Economic Community of West African States, a 15-member grouping that has a history of safeguarding regional democratic norms. Now, Ecowas looks impotent. Its threats to reverse Niger’s coup turned out to be empty. Last month, Niger’s emboldened generals joined those of Burkina Faso and Mali to quit the group. While leaders talk of reviving pan-Africanism through the African Continental Free Trade Area, one of the continent’s strongest regional blocks is crumbling.
Sall may have been emboldened by democratic backsliding everywhere. The US, which once made a song and dance about upholding democratic norms in far-off countries, has vacated the moral high ground. France is reluctant to wade in after losing its grip on the Sahel amid anti-French sentiment.
Senegal is merely the latest democratic light to flicker. In Africa, there are counter-examples such as Ghana, Botswana and Mauritius, which all maintain a semblance of electoral integrity. Last November, in Liberia, George Weah, a former striker at AC Milan and Chelsea, redeemed his abysmal six-year spell as president by magnanimously conceding defeat. Nothing in his presidency became him like the leaving of it.
That a flawed former football star should represent a light in the democratic gloom shows just how bad things have become.
