Reading time: 40 minutes
Dyarchy at the top of the state:
understand the moment Diomaye-Sonko and think
the institutions of Senegal of tomorrow
The dysarchy supposedly not a personal conflict: it is the symptom of a political model that must evolve to accompany a Senegalese democracy that has entered a new era.
Since March 2024, Senegal's political history has seen a sequence of rare intensity. For the first time, Two major figures in the Senegalese political scene, each with a distinct legitimacy, live together at the top of the state in an institutional framework designed for a single head.
Senegal is thus faced with a school case: a de facto political dyarchy, born of an exceptional electoral context, but evolving in a constitutional architecture that does not provide for any real division of executive power.
From militant alliance to institutional cohabitation
To understand the current situation, we must return to the heart of the scenario that brought Pastef to power. The movement was structured around a fundamental duality.
- Weighted man, methodical
- Incarnation of silent integrity
- Powered by exceptional political circumstances
- Legality based on universal suffrage
- Symbolic reinforced by his election after detention
- Historical figure of the challenge
- Living Symbol of Breakage
- Legitmity forged at the price of a long fight
- Deep anchoring in the collective imagination of youth
- Mobilising an entire generation
This dyad, effective in times of struggle, allowed for a tremendous victory. But in the transition from activism to the state, logic changes radically. The fervor leaves room for technicality, ideology to arbitration, the symbol to administrative rigour. Where, in opposition, roles could overlap, in power they must distinguish themselves. Friction often arises from this transition.
Two legitimacys that coexist but do not add easily
In a parliamentary democracy or in an explicit bicephalic system, this duality would naturally find its place. But in a presidentialist regime as centralized as Senegal, it creates an ambiguous space:
- Who really embodies power?
- Who is the voice of the project?
- Who decides the strategic directions?
- Who arbitrates disputes within the majority?
This lack of clarity is not due to men, but to institutions. It feeds all the interpretations, including the most fanciful ones, fed by social networks and political circles that, like all over the world, often play an amplifying and sometimes toxic role.
The role of the entourage: invisible but decisive actors
The tensions frequently attributed to leaders come, in most cases, from their supporters, advisers, collaborators and activists. This is a historical constant.
Around the President, some may encourage a clearer statement of its authority, considering that its constitutional role must take precedence over any external influence. Around the Prime Minister, others may fear a dilution of the spirit of the rupture, fearing that the administrative machine will weaken the revolutionary momentum carried by Sonko.
These intermediate circles sometimes manipulate information, interpret signals to their advantage, and project their own ambitions into the relationship between the two men. Entourage thus becomes a deformed prism that accentuates perceived differences and even creates new, sometimes non-existent ones.
The psychology of power: an essential factor in current adjustments
Power has a transformative effect on those who exercise it. It creates a dynamic of empowerment: Every person with supreme responsibilities naturally seeks to exist by himself, to mark his mark, to define his own vision. This is the case for any Head of State, regardless of his personal history.
Conversely, the founding leader, once placed in a subordinate institutional function, may feel a gap between its past role and its present role. Popular pressure, the militant expectation, the awareness of having waged a historic fight can fuel frustration, even when they do not express themselves publicly.
These psychological dynamics are natural. They do not mean rupture or deep conflict, but they explain why an unincorporated dysarchy is still unstable.
International examples to shed light on the Senegalese situation
What Senegal is experiencing is nothing unusual in comparison. Everywhere, the lesson is the same: when two powerful leaders coexist without a clear institutional framework, friction becomes inevitable.
Tension between the founding historical leader and his technocrat successor, each with a distinct vision of post-apartheid transformation.
Macron / Philippe
Cohabitation or coexistence within the same majority between two strong personalities, with permanent tension on the definition of political course.
Senegal had itself experienced a diarchy of conflict between the founding president and his former prime minister-designate.
Senegal faces a challenge that far exceeds the personalities involved: It is a critical moment of institutional maturation.
Towards institutional reform: thinking about Senegal from 2029 and beyond
The dyarchy born from the election of 2024 strongly reveals that Our institutional architecture is no longer fully adapted to current political realities. The country is changing, leadership is diversifying, militant forces are emerging vigorously, and citizen expectations are becoming more demanding. The presidential model, as it was thought sixty years ago, now reaches its limits.
Several avenues for benchmarking emerge:
Vice-President elected
To establish a vice-president elected at the same time as the president, enabling the formal integration of a major political personality into the executive, with defined responsibilities. This model, common in West Africa (Ghana, Nigeria), would clarify the balance of power and avoid current ambiguities.
Parliamentary or semi-parliamentary regime
A head of government responsible to a strengthened Parliament becomes the real driver of national politics, while the president plays a role of arbiter and guarantor of institutions. This model provides a natural framework for the coexistence of multiple leaderships.
Organised institutional hierarchy — an original Senegalese model
The boldest way: to take a organised institutional hierarchy, clearly dividing the prerogatives between a sovereign pole (presidency) and a government pole (first ministry), with constitutionally defined powers, arbitration mechanisms and separate responsibility to the people.
Regardless of the formula chosen, there is evidence that: Senegal must adapt its Constitution if it wants to prevent the next alternation from reproducing the same ambiguities.
A founding moment for Senegalese democracy
The Diomaye–Sonko dynamic is not just a cyclical episode. It is a powerful indicator of the internal tensions in our institutional architecture. It highlights the vitality of a country capable of producing multiple leadership, but also the fragility of a system that does not yet know how to accommodate them harmoniously.
In 2029, when Bassirou Diomaye Faye finished his first term, the fundamental question would not only be who would run in the presidential election. The real question will be this: In what institutional framework do we want Senegal to be governed?
Refoundation as a Horizon
The time has come to think of a Republic where political ambitions cease to be perceived as competing, because the institutions themselves offer a clear, balanced and lasting space to welcome them.
A Republic where alternation no longer creates an informal dyarchy but an institutional partnership.
A Republic where political tensions no longer become loopholes, but forces of democratic regulation.
The present moment is not a sign of fragility: it is the prelude to a refoundation.
What the analysis of November 2025 anticipated as a latent institutional tension materialised, within a few weeks, in a political recomposition of remarkable speed and density. The events between May 22, 2026 and the days that followed form a coherent sequence, each stage of which requires a rigorous reading. To accurately account for this, it is necessary to reconstitute the chronology before proposing the analysis.
Chronology of events: a four-step sequence
22 May 2026 — The dismissal
President Bassirou Diomaye Faye terminates the office of Ousmane Sonko as Prime Minister by presidential decree. Act in accordance with the Constitution. Executive dysarchy is resolved by unilateral breakup.
• Appointment of a Prime Minister from civil society
The President appoints a successor outside the classical partisan field. This choice, deliberately technocratic, aims to depoliticize the government function and to affirm the presidential authority independently of the internal balances in Pastef.
Return of Sonko to the Assembly and election to the Presidency
Ousmane Sonko returns to office as MP. The outgoing President of the National Assembly resigns and gives him the place. Sonko is elected President of the National Assembly by the deputies of the majority.
Rumeurs for referral to the Constitutional Council
There are reports of a possible referral to the Constitutional Council by the President of the Republic for an advisory opinion on the legality of Sonko's return to the National Assembly and his election to the presidency.
Each of these four moments deserves a separate examination, because they fit into different logics and produce institutional effects that combine rather than compensate.
Dismissal: a constitutional act with unneutralized political consequences
On 22 May 2026, President Bassirou Diomaye Faye exercised the clearest constitutional prerogative: to terminate the office of his Prime Minister. Under strict law, this act is unattainable. The Senegalese Constitution places the head of government in a formal subordination vis-à-vis the president, and dismissal requires neither public motivation nor counter-signature.
What makes this act institutionally singular is therefore not its legality — it is indisputable — but its context. Ousman Sonko was not an ordinary prime minister. He was the founder of the movement that made victory possible, the figure whose charismatic legitimacy mobilized a generation and structured a parliamentary majority. By terminating his office, the president not only reorganized the executive: he changed the architecture of loyalty within the ruling coalition.
The Constitution resolves the question of government. It does not solve the question of loyalty. And in a regime where the parliamentary majority is based on personal as well as partisan ties, this dissociation is anything but annodine.
A Prime Minister of Civil Society: The Meaning of Choice
The appointment of a Prime Minister from civil society, without an explicit partisan anchor in Pastef, deserves to be read as a deliberate political signal, carrying several simultaneous messages.
A message inside the coalition
By choosing an outside personality to the militant ranks of Pastef, the president means that the government function is not the property of an internal political current, though it is dominant. This choice places the Prime Minister in a position of exclusive loyalty to the President, without partisan ties that could have created a new source of ambiguity. It avoids designating a « Sonto bis » which could quickly have built an autonomous base.
Message to the National Assembly
A technocratic Prime Minister, without a proper parliamentary base, is structurally dependent on presidential support for governance. It cannot rely on a personal activist network to resist parliamentary pressure. This relative fragility is perhaps assumed by the President as the price to be paid for having a head of government fully aligned with his line.
A message to opinion
The profile « civil society » refers to an image of technocratic competence, independence from party quarrels and renewal of practices. In a context of internal political crisis, this signal may aim to reassure a tired opinion of the struggles of influence at the top of the state.
But this choice also has considerable structural fragility: a Prime Minister without partisan anchor governs without proper parliamentary safety net. If the Pastef majority cracks on key votes, it has no proximity network to reconstitute a coalition of circumstances. It is entirely dependent on the President's ability to maintain discipline within his own camp. — which, precisely, has become the central uncertain variable since the dismissal of Sonko.
Return to the Assembly and election to its presidency: the institutional counter-manoeuvre
This is probably the most decisive sequence of this crisis. After his dismissal, Ousmane Sonko did not withdraw in the extra-parliamentary opposition or in strategic silence. He chose the strongest institutional path available in the current constitutional framework: to regain his mandate as a Member of Parliament, and then to become President of the National Assembly.
This trajectory deserves analysis at several levels.
The legality of return: a first ground of challenge
The question of the compatibility between the exercise of a government function and the retention of a parliamentary mandate, and then the right to return to the Chamber after the termination of these functions, is governed by constitutional and organic provisions whose interpretation may not be unambiguous. In many systems, entry into government leads to a temporary incompatibility with the parliamentary mandate, with return only possible under certain conditions and within certain deadlines. It is precisely on this point that the referral to the Constitutional Council, if confirmed, would be based.
The Presidency of the Assembly: a position of real institutional power
While returning to the Assembly is already in itself a strategic repositioning, the election to its presidency is a qualitative transformation of the institutional configuration. The presidency of the National Assembly is not an honorary function. It confers on its holder substantial prerogatives:
- Organization of parliamentary work The agenda is fixed, special sessions are convened, speaking time and debates are managed.
- The Presidency of the Congress in the event of a meeting of the two chambers, and a prominent protocol role in the institutional representation of the State.
- The third position in the protocol order of the Stateimmediately after the President of the Republic and the Prime Minister — which places Sonko, for the first time since his dismissal, in a position of institutional visibility comparable to that he occupied in Matignon.
- An advisory role in certain major constitutional proceduresin particular with regard to the dissolution of the Assembly or the implementation of exceptional powers.
- The Permanent Forum of the Hemicycle From this position, Sonko has a legitimate body of institutional resonance, which far exceeds that of a mere deputy.
The resignation of the outgoing Speaker of the Assembly to Sonko and the subsequent election are an unambiguous parliamentary signal: The majority in the National Assembly chose to recognize in Sonko its natural leader in the legislative space, at the same time as the executive excluded it. This simultaneous movement — exit from the bottom of the executive, entry from the top of the legislative — draws a dual power architecture whose Senegalese Constitution did not provide for configuration.
The executive dyarchy that the dismissal was supposed to solve has turned into an institutional dyarchy between executive and legislative. The scene has changed. The actors are the same. The balance of power has been redistributed.
Referral to the Constitutional Council: legal issues and political significance
The rumours of a possible referral to the Constitutional Council by the President of the Republic are, if confirmed, one of the most serious acts of consequence of this sequence. The springs should be analysed accurately.
What can the President ask the Constitutional Council?
The Senegalese Constitutional Council may be referred to the President of the Republic for an advisory opinion on the constitutionality of texts or on the interpretation of constitutional provisions. In this context, the referral could address two distinct but related issues:
- Return to mandate : Can a former Prime Minister, after the termination of his or her government duties, return to his or her term as a Member of Parliament under the conditions and deadlines in which this occurred? The answer depends on the interpretation of the incompatibility rules laid down in the Constitution and the Organic Law on Parliament.
- The question of the presidency of the Assembly Can the election to the presidency of the National Assembly be challenged if the very status of deputy of the elected president is subject to legal questioning?
The scope of an advisory opinion
It is important to stress that an advisory opinion of the Constitutional Council does not in itself have the same binding force as a judicial decision. In Senegalese law, the exact scope of such opinions and the institutional follow-up given to them may vary according to the circumstances and the interpretation of the actors. This means that even if the Council were to deliver an opinion in favour of the presidential thesis, the question of its practical effects on Sonko's mandate and his presidency of the Assembly would remain the subject of debate.
The political significance of the approach
Beyond the law, it is the political significance of the referral that matters. It reveals several simultaneous dynamics.
Institutional escalation
Seizing the Constitutional Council to question the legitimacy of Sonko's mandate and his presidency of the Assembly is tantamount to bringing the political conflict into the judicial space. This is a significant escalation that breaks with the logic of tacit coexistence and turns political rivalry into legal litigation.
A legitimate remedy
In this reading, the President would have referred the matter to the guardian of the Constitution to clarify an ambiguous legal situation. The referral would then be an act of good constitutional governance, designed to prevent legal uncertainty from settling permanently and weakening the institutions themselves.
A deterrent signal
The only announcement or rumour of a referral can also function as a political signal sent to Sonko and the parliamentary majority: the president has institutional levers and intends to use them if necessary. Without necessarily going to the decision, the threat itself redraws the balance of power.
The risks of a decision unfavourable to Sonko
If the Constitutional Council were to validate the presidential thesis and question the regularity of Soenko's return to the Assembly, the consequences would be politically explosive. Sonko would be forced to leave the Chamber and, as a result, the presidency of the National Assembly. This outcome, technically possible, would place the country in an unprecedented configuration in its constitutional history: a former Prime Minister, a major figure of the majority, excluded from the two institutional spaces of power — the executive by dismissal, the legislature by constitutional decision. The reaction of Pastef's militant base and the parliamentary group to such an outcome is impossible to predict with certainty, but the hypothesis of a mobilization of rare intensity cannot be ruled out.
The risks of a decision favourable to Sonko
On the other hand, if the Constitutional Council were to validate the regularity of Sonko's return and his election to the presidency of the Assembly, the President would have found himself in a weakened position: he would have committed his credibility in a legal approach that would have turned against him, simultaneously strengthening the institutional legitimacy of Sonko and the cohesion of the parliamentary camp around him.
The new institutional architecture: two distinct powers, the same majority
What emerges from this sequence is an institutional configuration of unprecedented complexity in recent Senegalese political history. It is no longer a dyarchy within the executive — This one was formally closed by the dismissal. It is a question of Structural tension between the executive and the legislature, animated by two figures from the same political camp, based on the same electoral base, but now occupying distinct and potentially antagonistic institutional spaces.
This configuration raises constitutional questions that the Senegalese system has not had to deal with so far:
- How can the Speaker of the National Assembly, who is also a recognized leader of the parliamentary majority, exercise his role of organizing legislative work in an institutional neutral manner when the government he is supposed to control is that of an executive with whom he is in tension?
- How can the Prime Minister from civil society hold his government accountable to an Assembly whose President is precisely the political figure he has been appointed to compensate for the eviction?
- How can the President of the Republic threaten the dissolution of an Assembly whose President is a major political figure on his own side, without risking a definitive fracture of the coalition that brought him to power?
Each of these questions reveals a gap in Senegalese institutional tools. African constitutions inherited from post-colonial models were designed for simple political configurations: a dominant party, an undisputed leader, a disciplined majority. They were not designed to manage coalitions based on two legitimacys of the same source and intensity, which diverge after victory.
Pastef's partisan identity at the test of the institutional divide
The question of Pastef's partisan identity, which the original version of this annex assumed, received a partial response from events. The fact that the parliamentary majority has, almost entirely, supported the return of Sonko to the Assembly and his election to his presidency indicates that, in the arbitration between presidential loyalty and partisan-military loyalty, Pastef MPs have, at least for the moment, decided in favour of Sonko.
This result does not invalidate the possibility that the situation may change. Pastef remains formally the party of President Diomaye, whose symbolic and institutional authority remains considerable. But he reveals that Sonko's gravitational force within Senegal's political space was not weakened by the dismissal — On the contrary, it was spectacularly confirmed by the parliamentary response that followed.
For the future of the party, two scenarios remain open. The first is that of formal coexistence: Pastef remains the common framework, President Diomaye is the constitutional guardian, Soenko is the de facto parliamentary leader, and the two poles learn to coexist in productive rather than destructive tension. The second is that of a gradual split, formal or informal, where the party is fragmented into two distinct currents. — One president, the other sонkist — before the election of 2029 forced a resolution.
Medium-term development scenarios
Cohabitation assumed
The Constitutional Council is either not seized or is valid. Sonko remains President of the Assembly. An informal modus vivendi was established between the presidential pole and the parliamentary pole: the Prime Minister of civil society ruled on technical matters, Sonko controlled the parliamentary agenda without causing an open crisis, and the two sides preserved a facade of unity with a view to 2029. This scenario is possible if the two protagonists consider that confrontation would cost more than it would cost each.
The legal arm
The Constitutional Council is seized of the matter, gives a favourable or unfavourable opinion to Sonko. In both cases, the decision is challenged politically. The crisis is taking place in the legal and media space rather than on the street, and ends up forcing a constitutional clarification whose result will permanently reshape the balance. This scenario presupposes resistance of the institutions to political pressure — which is not guaranteed.
Pastef's fracture
Legal and political escalation goes beyond what the coalition can absorb. Pastef is fragmented formally. Early elections or a successful motion of censure force a recomposition of the political landscape before 2029. This scenario is the most costly for the country, but it cannot be excluded if the institutions do not offer an acceptable resolution framework for both sides.
What this sequence teaches — and what it requires
Taken as a whole, the sequence opened on 22 May 2026 and which we still observe is one of the most demanding tests that Senegalese democracy has had to pass since the alternation of 2000. Not because it threatens stability in the direction of an institutional collapse — Senegal has a democratic culture and institutions that are strong enough to absorb political shocks. But because it reveals with unprecedented clarity the blind corners of its constitutional architecture.
Three teachings are required with special force.
First education: instruments for resolving political crises within a coalition cannot be reduced to the prerogative of revocation. The dismissal of a Prime Minister puts an end to a position; It does not end political legitimacy. When the two are dissociated, the crisis does not close — She's moving. Institutional mechanisms for managing strategic disagreement are needed that do not require rupture as the only option.
Second education: the Senegalese Constitution was not designed for the configuration that appeared — two leaders from the same source, from the same coalition, with legitimacys of the same intensity, occupying two distinct institutional poles in tension. This configuration calls for either a constitutional review that organizes the framework, a political agreement that defines the rules of the game, or a judicial clarification that resolves the ambiguities. In the absence of one of these three exits, the tension will persist and feed itself.
Third education: The Constitutional Council is placed, by the logic of events, in an arbitrator position between two major political forces. This position is both constitutionally legitimate and institutionally delicate. The credibility of Senegalese democracy is, at this time, based on the Council's ability to act in law, without being instrumentalised by either party, and to make a decision whose political consequences will have been measured wisely.
What one can say with certainty: Between May and June 2026, Senegal saw an accelerated sequence of institutional transformation whose effects will be felt far beyond the presidential election of 2029. The question asked in the body of this article — In what institutional framework do we want Senegal to be governed? — is no longer an academic issue. It has become a practical emergency.
What is at stake is not only the future of two politicians. It is the very definition of the rules of the democratic game in a country that has proven, on several occasions in its history, its ability to pass through crises without abandoning its democratic achievements. The quality of the institutional response to this sequence will tell a lot about Senegal's constitutional maturity.
Senegalese democracy has always been able to transform its crises into learning. The present moment, however turbulent it may be, does not escape this rule — provided that the institutional actors are able to match the stakes.
Annex written and updated by Moustapha DIENG — first version: 22 May 2026 · updated: June 2026. It completes the analysis published on 14 November 2025 without altering its original body.
