The political alliance between Senegal’s President Bassirou Diomaye Faye and Prime Minister Ousmane Sonko collapsed in late May, leading to Faye dismissing Sonko as prime minister and members of the National Assembly from the PASTEF party electing Sonko as Speaker. The split had been anticipated, due to the growing tensions between them for nearly a year. Sonko continues to hold significant influence in PASTEF and enjoys popularity among Senegal’s urban youth. Conversely, Faye’s Diomaye President movement lacks comparable momentum within the party. Faye risks becoming an ineffective president if Sonko successfully mobilizes the PASTEF supermajority in the National Assembly to obstruct his agenda. Meanwhile, Senegal is navigating massive political and economic challenges. Danielle Resnick reports.
On May 22, Senegal 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 International Monetary Fund 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.
The political divorce between Faye and Sonko is notable, as the two had 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 had been under 21), 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 criticizing Sonko’s prosecution; however, he was never convicted and therefore still eligible to run in elections. Thus, when Sall released the two from prison in March 2024, they agreed that Faye would represent them both. Using the slogan “Sonko is Diomaye, Diomaye is Sonko” the two formed the Diomaye Président Coalition, which en-compassed 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 party, in a landslide. He appointed Sonko as the prime minister, and in the legislative elections that followed in November, PASTEF won 130 of the parliament’s 165 seats, gaining a supermajority.
Their political divorce 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, he 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 the terms of offshore gas projects.
By contrast, the IMF has issued several preconditions for any program, which include a 40% increase in national tax revenues, clearance of arrears with bi- lateral 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’ prices fall, 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 in 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.
Uncharted 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, grass-roots 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 member. If he remains in this office, he will have substantial power within the legislative body.
For instance, on June 29, Sonko and the National Assembly adopted a controversial constitutional amendment that expands their role and reduces presidential powers, but the government said it will be put to a referendum.
The opposition views the initiative, proposed by Sonko’s party, as political revenge by the former prime minister.
Responding to calls from several opposition parties and civil society organizations, demonstrators gathered in front of the parliament building to denounce the changes, waving placards and chanting the slogan “Hands off my Constitution!” Police fired tear gas and detained several opposition leaders and activists.
The reform strengthens parliament’s powers, such as requiring the government to inform the legislature of agreements related to the exploitation of natural resources. It also expands the powers of parliamentary inquiry committees.
The text also proposes the creation of a Constitutional Court to replace the current Constitutional Council. The new court would be composed of nine members, compared to the current seven.
Other changes include the incompatibility of the functions of head of state and leader of a political party, a limitation on the decisions that can be made by the executive branch between the presidential election and the official proclamation of the results, and stricter controls on the president’s power to dissolve the National Assembly.
The government said it will organize a referendum on the changes. It did not say when it will take place.
Legally, President Faye cannot dissolve the National Assembly until at least this November, two years after the last legislative elections, so he cannot change 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 its 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 standard-bearer for the 2029 presidential elections. 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 this June and July 2026, respectively, on which Senegal could default, causing further credit downgrades.
Faye’s Diomaye President movement within PASTEF does not carry equivalent momentum. He could effectively become a lame-duck 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 create a de facto 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 uncharted 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 tradeoff: 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 might 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.