Mackey Sall’s departure spells what his supporters hoped for – liberation

Several hundred voters of the outgoing president gathered at party headquarters on Monday evening, hoping to hear him announce his participation in the February 2024 presidential election. An evening turned out to be a disappointment.

“Although the Constitution gives me the right, my long-term decision is not to contest the elections.” If the outgoing president’s sentence should free more than one Senegalese, eager to see social peace in troubled times, it has thrown a chill into the headquarters of the Senegalese party Alliance for the Republic (APR), founded in 2008 by Mackie. Sal – whose street-side facade features a white pouf, tinted glasses, and greets his audience with raised arms like a rapper at a concert.

So the outgoing president will not be on the starting line for the February 2024 presidential election, running for a third term — a hypothesis that has electrified the country for months, even as his opponents consider it unconstitutional. What about starting a way out of the crisis when the country experienced deadly unrest in early June? Political opponent Ousmane Sonko called to prove whatever is happening on the country’s streets.

Elected alternately in 2012 and 2019, Macky Sall amended the constitution. “No one can act on more than two consecutive orders”. However, he explained that this provision did not concern him as he had exercised his first mandate before the reformation.