A new schism in Senegal marks uncharted territory for Africa’s democratic beacon

On May 22^nd President Bassirou Diomaye Faye dismissed his Prime Minister, Ousmane Sonko, and dissolved his cabinet. The decision punctuated a tumultuous few months in Senegal, during which Sonko publicly condemned several of Faye’s decisions, most notably over Faye’s decision to negotiate with the IMF to help the country crawl out of $13 billion in hidden debt accumulated under the previous administration. This dismissal will hold ramifications for not only Senegal’s political future but also its broader economic stability.

Rise and fall of a political partnership

The political divorce between Faye and Sonko is notable given that the two have traditionally been strong allies—sharing a history as tax inspectors who became political activists and opposition leaders during the tenure of Macky Sall. In 2014, Sonko founded the party known as the African Patriots of Senegal for Work, Ethics, and Fraternity, known by its French acronym, PASTEF, with Faye becoming its Secretary General in 2022. The party gained significant support, especially from the country’s youth, and Sonko became one of the most competitive opposition leaders, coming in third in the 2019 presidential elections. He then went on to be elected mayor of the southern city of Ziguinchor.  But in 2023, he was charged with rape and making death threats to an employee in a massage parlor in a trial viewed by his backers as politically motivated. While those charges were dismissed, he was convicted on two lesser charges, defamation and “corrupting youth,” (as the massage parlor employee was under 21 at the time) and sentenced to two years in prison. The sentence effectively barred him from contesting the 2024 presidential elections.  

Faye, long a close associate of Sonko, had also been jailed for critiquing Sonko’s judicial process; however, he was never convicted and therefore still eligible to run in elections. Thus, when Sall released both Faye and Sonko in March 2024 from prison, the two agreed that Faye would represent them both. Using the slogan “Sonko is Diomaye, Diomaye is Sonko” the two formed the Diomaye Président Coalition, which encompassed a range of parties, including PASTEF, that supported Faye’s candidacy. Faye went on to defeat Sall’s preferred successor, Amadou Ba from the Alliance for the Republic (APR) party, in a landslide. He appointed Sonko as the prime minister, and in the legislative elections that followed in November, PASTEF won most of parliament’s 165 seats, gaining a supermajority.

While the close history of the two politicians makes their political divorce all the more dramatic, the outcome was not surprising. Tensions had been simmering for almost a year. In July 2025, while Faye was in the U.S. during a meeting at the White House, Sonko took advantage of Faye’s absence in Senegal  to argue in a PASTEF anniversary meeting that he was being sidelined and lacked sufficient authority to govern. Several months later, Faye began to revive the Diomaye Président coalition to gain some political autonomy from Sonko. Notably, in late 2025, Faye removed Aïssatou Mbodj as the coordinator of the coalition, replacing her with Aminata Touré, a former Prime Minister under Sall but one who opposed the latter’s third-term bid for the presidency. This move, along with several other removals of PASTEF stalwarts from high-level positions within the coalition, further provoked Sonko’s ire. He began to publicly question Faye’s leadership in December, stating in a public rally “Diomaye is not Sonko.” Underlying these tensions is whether Faye would run for re-election in 2029 or clear the way for Sonko.

Debt dilemmas

Despite growing tension, the ostensible reason for the split among the two politicians has been how to address the debt crisis. The $13 billion in debt that was hidden by Sall’s administration has resulted in a debt-to-GDP ratio of 132%. Faye has been negotiating for months for an IMF program, but Sonko has opposed any restructuring program, especially joining the G20 Common Framework on debt. For Sonko, often portrayed as a populist who argues for greater respect for African sovereignty, such restructuring is unacceptable. After an IMF mission in November 2025, Sonko claimed that restructured debt would be a “disgrace.” Instead, he has argued that the country can depend on domestic tax mobilization to make up its shortfall. He revoked the licenses of dozens of extractive industries and renegotiated offshore gas projects. By contrast, the IMF has issued several pre-conditions for any program, which include a 40% increase in national tax revenues, clearance of arrears with bilateral creditors, and full disclosure and audit of public debt, including a review of several loans the government took out in 2025 as part of total return swaps (TRS) from First Abu Dhabi Bank, Société Générale, and the Africa Finance Corporation. A TRS is essentially a loan from a foreign bank that enables countries to use their domestic bonds as collateral to a lender to borrow more cash in return; if the bonds fall in prices, the borrowing government has to provide more collateral or repay in additional cash. The IMF has worried about the opacity of the terms that Senegal agreed to as part of its TRS arrangements.    

In the meantime, the hidden debt scandal has prevented many of the spending programs that Faye and Sonko had originally planned and outlined in their “National Transformation Agenda- Senegal 2050.” The country’s credit ratings have been downgraded twice in less than a year, to B- in June 2025 and then to CCC+ in November 2025, triggering higher interest rates on debt repayments.  The country now faces almost $10 billion in repayments—interest plus principal, resulting in few resources for productive and social investments. The impacts have been broadly felt, including earlier this year when university students protested over unpaid grants, resulting in the death of one student in the ensuing police crackdown. Economic growth is also being affected by the broader instability among Senegal’s neighbors; blockades from jihadists in Mali on Senegal’s eastern border have likewise hurt trade between the Dakar-Bamako corridor, which typically accounts for one-quarter of Senegal’s exports. Pressures on oil prices due to the war in Iran are also creating challenges. Sonko told parliament earlier in May that it would need almost $2 billion (1 trillion CFA) in fuel subsidies to protect consumers from price surges and rejected the Ministry of Finance’s request to instead increase fuel prices given the country’s constrained budget. 

Unchartered territory

Political breakups are common in Senegal. Early in the 1960s, Léopold Senghor and Mamoudou Dia worked together to push for Senegal’s independence from France, and Senghor served as the country’s first president with Dia as his prime minister.  In 1962, however, after a period of growing power struggle between the erstwhile allies, Senghor accused Dia of planning a coup and jailed him for more than a decade. More recently, former president Abdoulaye Wade developed an increasingly acrimonious relationship with two of his protégés, prime ministers Idrissa Seck and Macky Sall, after he suspected they were challenging him for power. But this current fracture is decidedly different for several reasons.

First, Sonko remains incredibly powerful within PASTEF and popular among Senegal’s restive urban youth. His previous imprisonment and disqualification from elections in 2023 triggered massive protests in the capital of Dakar, resulting in the deaths of at least 23 people. Unlike Seck or Sall, Sonko therefore has enough public, grassroots support to be a source of opposition in the heart of the government.

Second, after Sonko’s dismissal, the parliamentary speaker stepped down, ostensibly in protest. On May 26, Sonko’s PASTEF supporters in parliament then elected him as the new speaker, despite opposition parties’ claims that this was unconstitutional since Sonko is not an elected parliamentary member. If he remains in this office, he will have substantial power within the legislative body. Legally, Faye cannot dissolve the National Assembly until at least November 2026, two years after the last legislative elections, so he cannot shift this dynamic in the short term. Moreover, on June 1, PASTEF announced it will not participate in the new cabinet that Faye is forming, therefore becoming an opposition force to the president that was elected on the party’s ticket.

Third, PASTEF held its first party congress ever on June 6, during which the rank-and-file overwhelmingly voted for Sonko as the party leader.  This positions him to be PASTEF’s party bearer for the 2029 presidential elections. In fact, after his victory, he declared “Le PROS (President Ousmane Sonko) is back among you, and Senegal is going to shake!” Sonko’s hold over PASTEF and the National Assembly could doom any IMF deal, which requires parliamentary approval. This is particularly worrying as two Eurobond deals are due in June and July 2026, respectively, on which Senegal could default, causing further credit downgrades. For his part, Faye’s Diomaye President movement within PASTEF does not carry equivalent momentum. Faye could effectively become a lame president if Sonko is able to mobilize the PASTEF supermajority to block his agenda. As such, Sonko has enough institutional support through party structures to de-facto create a parallel government.

Fourth, the fracture is indicative of a larger tension facing the continent. Many African countries are currently negotiating programs with the IMF to ameliorate debt distress. As in the 1990s and 2000s during another period of high debt in the region, this has involved difficult restrictions on policy autonomy, including controls over exchange rate policy, reductions in subsidies, and curtailment of certain investments. In most cases, the tensions over debt negotiation have resulted in protests by African citizens against their governments rather than a public fracturing within the political elite.

Thus, Senegal is in an unchartered political and economic territory, with the roots of the split tied to an unstable alliance between a populist and a pragmatist. Nevertheless, it has elevated a major policy trade-off, i.e. how to protect consumers from economic crises, improve their welfare, and protect national policy sovereignty while still upholding commitments to creditors and regaining credibility on international markets. In this way, the divergence in policy visions may nonetheless be viewed as an important sign of the maturity of Senegal’s political landscape around important programmatic issues, with widespread implications beyond its borders.