SENEGAL’S CIVILIAN RULE HAS come under intense scrutiny as the alliance that brought Bassirou Diomaye Faye and Ousmane Sonko to power has finally ruptured. What began as a genuine political partnership broke down decisively on May 22, 2026, when President Faye dismissed Prime Minister Sonko and dissolved the government. The foreboding had been clear much earlier. The rupture became even more definitive in July, when Faye launched his own political party, Kiiraay–The Republican Patriots, formalising his break with Sonko and PASTEF.
It was a sour turning point in a relationship that had evolved through friendship, political partnership and shared struggle, only to end in irreconcilable differences over power, governance and economic direction. At the heart of the crisis is a question that has confronted Senegalese politics before: what happens when two political figures who rise together find themselves competing for control of the same political project?
The Faye-Sonko partnership was unusual from the beginning. Sonko was the more established and charismatic political figure, while Faye was the quieter, more discreet lieutenant who eventually became the presidential candidate when Sonko was barred from contesting the 2024 election. Faye’s candidacy was therefore presented within the movement as an extension of Sonko’s own political project.
The campaign slogan captured the arrangement perfectly: “Diomaye mooy Sonko, Sonko mooy Diomaye” — “Diomaye is Sonko, Sonko is Diomaye.” It was an extraordinary political formula, but it also contained the seeds of a future dilemma. Who, ultimately, would exercise political authority: the president occupying the constitutional centre of the state or the popular political leader whose movement had propelled him there?
Faye won the March 2024 presidential election with 54.28 percent of the vote in the first round, an extraordinary victory for a relatively little-known opposition figure. His victory came shortly after his release from prison and after Sonko, who had been barred from running, endorsed him as the candidate of their political movement. Faye subsequently appointed Sonko prime minister.
The arrangement worked initially because the two men represented complementary strengths. Faye occupied the presidency and brought institutional authority; Sonko brought the political energy, grassroots mobilisation and ideological force that had built PASTEF into a formidable opposition movement.
But a dual-centre political arrangement is difficult to sustain when both centres command legitimacy.
The tension became increasingly visible as the two men differed over governance and economic strategy. Sonko championed an approach centred on economic sovereignty: greater domestic control over national resources, tougher scrutiny of foreign contracts and less dependence on multilateral lenders and foreign contractors. Faye, meanwhile, increasingly had to confront the practical constraints of governing a heavily indebted state, including negotiations with international financial institutions.
The debt crisis made the disagreement more consequential. Senegal’s public debt was estimated by the International Monetary Fund at about 132 percent of GDP at the end of 2024 after the discovery of previously misreported liabilities. The IMF’s lending programme was suspended, leaving the government facing the difficult task of managing debt, restoring fiscal credibility and sustaining public confidence at the same time.
For Sonko, economic sovereignty was not merely an economic policy. It was part of the political identity of the movement that brought the two men to power. His government challenged existing arrangements in strategic sectors and sought greater Senegalese control over natural resources.
The Yakaar-Teranga gas field became one of the clearest examples. In April 2026, Kosmos Energy withdrew from the project, leaving Senegal’s state-owned PETROSEN positioned to take exclusive control of the licence. Sonko presented the development as a major step towards national control of the country’s energy resources. Yet the project also illustrates the difficulty of turning resource sovereignty into an economically viable development strategy, particularly for a country already under severe debt pressure.
The economic argument, however, was only one dimension of the growing political tension. Sonko’s continued popularity and political influence made it difficult for the presidency to establish an uncontested centre of authority. His ability to command support within PASTEF and among its grassroots base meant that the prime minister was not simply a subordinate official operating under presidential authority. He remained the principal political figure around whom much of the movement’s identity had been built.
Eventually, the tension became unsustainable.
On May 22, Faye dismissed Sonko and dissolved the government, bringing an end to their governing arrangement. The move came after months of growing tensions and amid Senegal’s mounting economic difficulties and difficult negotiations with the IMF.
Yet removing Sonko from the executive did not remove him from Senegalese politics.
Within days, lawmakers elected him Speaker of the National Assembly, giving the former prime minister a powerful institutional platform from which to influence national policy and scrutinise the executive. The political divorce therefore did not eliminate the rivalry; it simply moved part of it from the executive branch into the legislature.
That development exposed the deeper nature of the crisis. Senegal was no longer dealing merely with a disagreement between a president and his prime minister. It was confronting a contest between two political centres, each claiming legitimacy from the same electoral movement.
The formal political divorce came in July, when Faye launched Kiiraay–The Republican Patriots, establishing an independent political vehicle outside PASTEF. The move made clear that the alliance that had brought the two men to power was no longer being repaired. It was being replaced.
This is not entirely unfamiliar territory in Senegalese political history.
The partnership between Léopold Sédar Senghor and Mamadou Dia offers an earlier and more consequential example. The two men were close political allies in the struggle for independence and subsequently occupied complementary positions within the new state, with Senghor as president and Dia as president of the Council.
But their relationship gradually deteriorated over questions of political power, economic policy and the organisation of the state. The crisis of December 1962 culminated in Dia’s arrest and imprisonment after what was portrayed by Senghor’s camp as an attempted constitutional coup. The crisis ultimately helped establish a more presidential system and demonstrated the difficulty of sustaining competing centres of authority at the top of the state.
Under Abdoulaye Wade, another political partnership produced a different but familiar rupture. Idrissa Seck was for years regarded as Wade’s political heir. Their relationship deteriorated, however, and Seck was detained in 2005 over allegations connected to public-works projects in Thiès and other charges. He was later released after months in detention. The episode showed again how quickly political loyalty can become political rivalry when succession, influence and control of the political machinery come into question.
The Faye-Sonko rupture belongs to this broader Senegalese pattern, although its circumstances are distinctly contemporary.
The difference today is that the rivalry is unfolding against the backdrop of a serious economic crisis. Public debt is extraordinarily high, the country is under pressure to restore fiscal credibility and the government must balance domestic expectations with the demands of creditors and international financial institutions.
That is particularly difficult for a political movement that came to power promising systemic rupture.
Faye’s 2024 victory was built on enormous public expectations. Young Senegalese voters, in particular, supported the promise of jobs, reform, transparency, economic sovereignty and an end to the political order associated with the previous administration. But governing has proved more complicated than campaigning. Economic hardship has not disappeared, while debt and fiscal pressures have constrained the speed with which the government can deliver on its promises.
The danger for Faye is therefore not simply that he has lost an ally. He risks losing the political narrative that brought him to office.
His presidency initially benefited from the extraordinary popularity of the movement he shared with Sonko. But that popularity was never entirely separable from Sonko’s political influence. Faye was the candidate who could enter the ballot when Sonko could not; Sonko was the political force whose endorsement gave the candidacy its mass appeal.
That distinction now matters.
Faye must establish that he can command political legitimacy in his own right rather than as the institutional successor to Sonko’s movement. The creation of Kiiraay is an important part of that effort, but building a new political organisation is not the same thing as building a new mass constituency.
Sonko, meanwhile, retains significant political capital. His election as Speaker of the National Assembly gives him a formal institutional role, while his continued connection with PASTEF and its grassroots supporters provides him with a political base outside the presidency. His position is therefore different from what it was when he served as prime minister, but it is hardly weaker in political terms.
Indeed, his own approach to the debt crisis has shown signs of pragmatism. In June, after becoming Speaker, Sonko softened some of his earlier opposition to debt restructuring, saying that he was not opposed to solutions that responded to the country’s circumstances. This suggests that the political divide between the two men cannot be reduced simply to “Sonko the radical” versus “Faye the pragmatist.” Both men are being forced to reconcile political promises with the realities of governing a debt-laden state.
This is perhaps the most important point about the rupture.
The Faye-Sonko conflict is not merely a clash of personalities. It is a struggle over what the political project they built together should become now that it has moved from opposition into government.
Opposition politics rewards mobilisation, confrontation and promises of rupture. Government requires compromise, fiscal discipline, institutional management and difficult decisions that can disappoint the same voters who demanded change.
That contradiction is now being played out in Senegal at the highest level.
The consequences could extend beyond domestic politics. Senegal remains one of West Africa’s most important democratic states, and its political stability has traditionally given it influence beyond its borders. A prolonged rivalry between the presidency and a powerful parliamentary opposition rooted in the former ruling movement could produce legislative friction, policy paralysis and renewed uncertainty at a time when the country can least afford it.
The historical lesson is therefore worth remembering. Senghor and Dia began as comrades; Wade and Seck began as political partners. Their alliances eventually became struggles over authority and direction. Faye and Sonko have now entered the same difficult terrain.
Whether their rivalry becomes another chapter in Senegal’s history of political succession and broken alliances—or whether the country’s democratic institutions prove strong enough to contain it—will depend on what happens next.
For now, Senegal is hanging in the balance: between a movement born in opposition and the responsibilities of power, between economic sovereignty and financial necessity, and between two political figures who once insisted that they were one and the same.
The question is no longer whether Faye and Sonko can restore their old alliance. That chapter appears to have closed.
The real question is whether Senegal can emerge from their political divorce with its institutions, economy and democratic tradition intact.
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Dr. Olukayode Oyeleye, Business a.m.’s Editorial Advisor, who graduated in veterinary medicine from the University of Ibadan, Nigeria, before establishing himself in science and public policy journalism and communication, also has a postgraduate diploma in public administration, and is a former special adviser to two former Nigerian ministers of agriculture. He specialises in development and policy issues in the areas of food, trade and competition, security, governance, environment and innovation, politics and emerging economies.
