Senegal's Constitutional Reform Amid a Political Divide at the Summit of the Executive
Senegal’s 2026 constitutional reform package promises to rebalance executive power, reform electoral and political parties’ governance, and strengthen constitutional oversight. Yet the proposals arrive amid a growing political divide between President Bassirou Diomaye Faye and former Prime Minister Ousmane Sonko, now President of the National Assembly. While the reforms reflect long-standing commitments of the ruling PASTEF movement, their impact may ultimately depend less on the texts themselves than on the struggle over their adoption and political ownership. As Senegal enters an unprecedented period of institutional cohabitation, the reform process has become inseparable from the power contest at its centre — writes Abdou Khadre Diop.
On 24 March 2024, the election of President Bassirou Diomaye Faye opened a sequence of reform commitments distilled from the political commitments under which the ruling PASTEF coalition came to power. On 27 April 2026, the Presidency released a package of four draft texts: a draft law revising the Constitution, a draft organic law replacing the Constitutional Council with a Constitutional Court of expanded jurisdiction, a draft Electoral Code and a draft law on political parties. The four texts are anchored in the conclusions of the Assises de la Justice held in 2024 to discuss issues related to judicial independence and the modernization of justice and of the National Dialogue on the Political System convened in 2025 to discuss issues such as hyper-presidentialism, executive-legislative imbalance and the credibility of electoral management. Both consultations were organized on the occasion of the annual National Dialogue Day inaugurated on 28 May 2024 around a rotating civic theme.
This piece examines the architecture proposed by the draft laws and places them within the current political context. It argues that the practical reach of the reforms will be determined less by the ingenuity of the texts than by the dynamics of the executive that is expected to move them forward. As the recent promulgation of an amendment to the Electoral Code over publicly expressed presidential dissent illustrates, the very fracture the reform seeks to mitigate is already reshaping the terms of its own adoption. It has since hardened in the most institutional terms: on 22 May 2026 President Faye dismissed Prime Minister Sonko who was returned four days later to the National Assembly as a deputy. Sonko was subsequently elected President of the National Assembly during a session the opposition boycotted in protest over what it described as a "constitutional coup".
Overview of the Draft Laws
Draft constitutional revision
If adopted, the draft constitutional revision would reshape the architecture of the executive. Under the proposed new Article 53, the Prime Minister “leads and coordinates the policy of the Nation”, while the revised Article 42 reframes the President’s policy-setting prerogative as exercised “in consultation with the Prime Minister”. The reform's normative ambition, however, sits in tension with a textual ambiguity that may well prove decisive in practice. The phrase “in consultation with the Prime Minister” imposes a procedural duty to consult yet remains silent on the locus of final arbitration when the President and the Prime Minister diverge on the substance of national policy. The rebalancing extends beyond the redefinition of the policy-setting prerogative, since the draft strengthens the constitutional standing of the Prime Minister by granting him, for the first time, the capacity to seize the Constitutional Court for a priori review of a law (Article 74) and for advisory opinions (Article 92). However, the mode of designation of the Prime Minister remains a discretionary prerogative of the President, who retains the unilateral power to appoint and dismiss the head of government at will — a preserved asymmetry that casts serious doubt on the feasibility of the textual rebalancing.
[President] Faye has been increasingly perceived as detached from the party machinery whose mobilization had carried his victory (...).
The draft constitutional revision also makes the function of President of the Republic incompatible with the leadership of a political party or coalition (Article 38), a rupture with the constitutional practice that has prevailed in Senegal since independence. Article 38 pursues a normative depoliticization of the presidential function entirely consistent with the founding ambition of PASTEF and the recommendations of the National Dialogue. President Faye has already anticipated this logic by stepping down from his functions as Secretary General of PASTEF. The same configuration, however, reveals the structural cost of such withdrawal. Faye has been increasingly perceived as detached from the party machinery whose mobilization had carried his victory and was recently compelled to revive his Diomaye Président coalition to restore the political traction that his resignation from PASTEF had eroded. The contrast with Sonko, who retained the presidency of PASTEF and continues to embody the political legitimacy of the dominant parliamentary force, makes the asymmetry more visible still, and suggests that the depoliticization pursued by Article 38 may weaken any President whose accession rests on the mobilization of a partisan apparatus.
Finally, a new transitional restraint clause confines outgoing authorities to the conduct of current affairs between the vote and the proclamation of results (Article 36), a safeguard rooted in the experience that preceded the reform when the outgoing administration adopted a series of decrees of contested timing in the weeks separating the proclamation of President Faye’s victory and his formal entry into office. At the time of writing, the Constitutional Council has rendered its opinion (Decision n° 4/C/2026, 13 May 2026), declaring the initiative regular while requiring a series of corrections, including the deletion of the clause that would have rendered the Court's opinions merely consultative (Article 92 of the draft).
Draft organic law on the Constitutional Court
The draft organic law proposes replacing the Constitutional Council with a Constitutional Court of nine members serving a single, non-renewable six-year term, six of whom are to be appointed by the President of the Republic and three drawn from a list of five personalities proposed by the President of the National Assembly. The new Court is expressly entrusted with the regulation of the functioning of institutions, a competence of considerable doctrinal weight that the constitutional jurisdiction had already arrogated to itself in its landmark decision n° 1/C/2024 of 15 February 2024. The same logic of textual consolidation governs the recognition of the plenary competence of the constitutional judge in electoral matters, formulated in terms broad enough to encompass any act, whether legislative or regulatory, potentially affecting the regularity of national elections. The advisory jurisdiction of the Court, previously reserved to the Head of State, is now opened to the President of the National Assembly, the Prime Minister and the body in charge of elections.
The refusal to allow for direct individual access to the Court (...) deprives the reform of the democratic deepening that the renaming had made possible.
The reading of the reform from the twin standpoints of independence and legitimacy is one of structural continuity. The independence of the new Court remains largely structural. The safeguards already afforded to the Council (namely, non-renewable terms and security of tenure during those terms) had been entrenched under the previous framework, while the power of appointment continues to rest, in substance, with the executive. The opening of the composition to profiles drawn from beyond the magistracy and the professors of law may, in time, diversify the deliberative culture of the jurisdiction, yet this gain depends on the actual appointment practice and remains contingent on choices the text leaves to the discretion of the appointing authorities. The legitimacy gains are correspondingly modest. The symbolic prestige associated with the status of the Court, together with the formal consolidation of doctrinal competences previously established through jurisprudential innovation, strengthens the institution’s standing within the architecture of public power. Yet these developments leave its democratic anchorage broadly unchanged. Vis-à-vis the citizen, the new Court inherits the same vertical posture that characterized the Council. The refusal to allow for direct individual access to the Court, as in Benin or Gabon, deprives the reform of the democratic deepening that the renaming had made possible.
Finally, the new architecture also proposes replacing the Conseil supérieur de la Magistrature by a Conseil supérieur de la Justice open to the broader community of judicial actors, whose precise composition is referred to a future organic law.
Draft law on political parties
The draft law on political parties responds directly to Recommendations 2 and 3 of the 2025 National Dialogue, which called for stricter regulation of the creation, functioning and dissolution of parties; the establishment of public financing based on clearly defined criteria; and a review of private financing, including contributions from the Senegalese diaspora. The text breaks with the 1981 framework (still in force) on four salient points:
- It conditions the effect of an administrative dissolution on the exhaustion of legal remedies (Article 31), fixing the loophole that allowed the 2023 dissolution of PASTEF by simple decree.
- It operationalizes, from the 2028 budget year, the public financing announced by the 2016 constitutional revision which was never implemented (Articles 21–24).
- It explicitly exempts the Senegalese diaspora from the foreign-funding prohibition (Article 20), settling a long-running interpretive ambiguity that had previously been used to threaten opposition formations.
- Finally, it places the certified accounts of political formations under the control of the Cour des Comptes (Article 27).
The draft law also introduces a fifteen-thousand-sponsorship threshold for the constitution of a party and authorizes the dissolution of formations absent from three successive elections. While this translates the Dialogue's call for "rationalization", in the hands of an entrenched parliamentary majority, it effectively raises the cost of entry and consolidates established formations.
Draft Electoral Code
The draft Electoral Code responds to a wider set of National Dialogue recommendations on the political system. Its centrepiece is the creation of a Commission Electorale Nationale Indépendante (CENI), an independent administrative authority with legal personality and financial autonomy that would absorb the operational role of the Direction Générale des Elections (DGE), the supervisory role of the Commission Electorale Nationale Autonome (CENA), and the parrainage (sponsorship) and candidacy-reception functions previously housed at the Constitutional Council.
The draft makes the payment of a caution deposit a precondition for the issuance of parrainage collection equipment; introduces a single ballot; places the electoral roll under continuous revision; recognizes detainees retaining their civic rights as electors; sequences the dematerialization of the process under the mandatory independent audit of each platform; and requires the media regulator to organize at least one programmatic debate between the two presidential candidates in the second round.
The design fixes much of the structural deficits that enabled the cycle of administrative obstructions documented in 2023–2024. The twelve CENI Commissioners nonetheless remain nominated by decree under a porous “apolitical criterion”, an arrangement that sits in tension with the regional standards set by the African Court on Human and Peoples' Rights in APDH v Côte d'Ivoire. What is more, the same body regulates both the organization and the supervision of elections, two functions that the 2025 Dialogue had expressly recommended keeping separate.
The Faye-Sonko Political Divide
Bassirou Diomaye Faye won the 2024 election under the formula “Sonko moy Diomaye” (Sonko is Diomaye) a slogan that signalled an imagined fusion between the two leaders. By early 2026 that fusion has been openly displaced by what Prime Minister Sonko himself described as a “soft cohabitation”. The divide is visible across three areas of competition: leadership of the ruling coalition, control over the legislative agenda, and the 2029 presidential election. President Faye has consolidated a parallel coalition, “Diomaye Président”, while Sonko has tightened his command of PASTEF and announced a party congress widely understood as a vehicle for his own presidential positioning.
PASTEF holds 130 of 165 seats in the National Assembly, comfortably exceeding the three-fifths majority required for constitutional revision (...).
The legislative arithmetic compounds the political tension. PASTEF holds 130 of 165 seats in the National Assembly, comfortably exceeding the three-fifths majority required for constitutional revision under Article 103 of the Constitution. The supermajority is therefore an autonomous source of constitutional initiative, and recent events demonstrate that it can be activated independently of the broader reform process. On 28 April 2026, the PASTEF-dominated National Assembly adopted an amendment to Articles L.29 and L.30 of the Electoral Code, narrowing the range of criminal convictions that trigger electoral disqualification, the very legal architecture that excluded Sonko from the 2024 presidential ballot. The President returned the text to the Assembly for a second reading under Article 73 of the Constitution, citing the transmission of two divergent versions. The Assembly reconfirmed adoption of the text on 9 May, and the President promulgated it on 15 May. He then publicly distanced himself from the law during a televised interview, criticizing it as bypassing the consensual dynamic of the 2025 National Dialogue. This rare moment where a Head of State publicly disowns a law he has just promulgated reveals an institutional configuration in which the ordinary parliamentary track has been mobilized in parallel to, and ahead of, the constitutional revision still under discussion. It also exposes the political fault line through which the drafts must now travel.
The institutional configuration has since hardened into a fully-fledged cohabitation. President Faye has exercised his constitutional prerogative by dismissing Prime Minister Sonko who was subsequently elected President of the National Assembly. Sonko has announced his intention to exercise in full the prerogatives of parliamentary control over the executive and has invited Faye to consult the majoritarian party before forming the new government.
The architecture of constraint is asymmetric. The parliamentary majority retains, under Article 86 of the Constitution, the power to pass a motion of censure capable of bringing down the cabinet, while the presidential power of dissolution under Article 87 remains constitutionally suspended until the legislature completes its first two years following its installation in December 2024, becoming available at the end of 2026. In this configuration, the draft revision carries a paradoxical charge: it elevates the policy-setting role of the Prime Minister, severs the head of State from party leadership, and consolidates the constitutional jurisdiction, all within a balance of power that political practice has already effectively imposed.
Implications of the Divide on the Reforms
The implications of the divide over the reform package operate at a different level from the substantive content of the four texts. Each of the draft laws released on 27 April 2026 translates a doctrinal position long defended by PASTEF and consolidated through the 2025 National Dialogue. As such, they enjoy broad consensus within the political camp from which both President Faye and President Sonko derive their legitimacy.
The political stakes of the divide are therefore procedural. They concern the modalities through which the package will be adopted, the institutional vehicle chosen for the constitutional revision, the timetable governing its passage—whether before or after the opening of the dissolution window at the end of 2026—the attribution of authorship as the texts move from draft to law, and the symbolic credit that adoption will confer between the head of State and the head of the parliamentary majority.
In terms of procedural architecture, the constitutional revision may follow two distinct routes. Article 103 of the Constitution requires a three-fifths majority of the members composing the National Assembly, a threshold that PASTEF comfortably exceeds and can easily mobilize. Article 51 allows the President to submit the proposal to a popular referendum following consultation with the Prime Minister and the President of the National Assembly. The organic law on the Constitutional Court and organic provisions to amend the Electoral Code would need to follow the procedure under Article 78, requiring the absolute majority of the National Assembly members and the a priori review of the constitutional jurisdiction. The ordinary statutes of the package (the law on Political Parties and the non-organic provisions of the Electoral Code) only require the simple majority of votes cast, a threshold that the parliamentary majority can satisfy in any sitting it controls.
The reform package thus enters its decisive phase at a moment when its doctrinal content has reached substantive convergence within the ruling camp, while its institutional carriage has become the principal contestation between its two leading figures.
Conclusion
Senegal's proposed reforms remain, on substantive examination, essentially modest. The doctrinal ambition the four texts carry is tempered by a textual prudence that leaves the structural architecture of the regime broadly continuous with the previous dispensation. The proposal to end hyper-presidentialism ultimately produces only a measured rebalancing of the executive. The Prime Minister—whose policy-setting role Article 53 elevates—would still hold office at the sole discretion of a President whose unconditioned powers of nomination and dismissal remain fully intact under the draft. The transformation of the Constitutional Council into a Court operates a comparable adjustment: it consolidates the institutional stature of the constitutional jurisdiction while retaining the indirect access regime that confines the protection of fundamental rights to the same circle of qualified seizing authorities already in place. Moreover, the pathway from draft to a functioning institutional order will have to navigate the political divide that has emerged within the ruling formation itself. The form, timing and signature under which the package crosses that pathway will ultimately determine its substantive reach.
About the Author
Abdou Khadre Diop is an Associate Professor, Senegalese constitutional lawyer and political analyst working on constitutional reform and electoral governance in West Africa. He is the President of the Senegalese Association of Constitutional Law (ASDC) and Vice President of the African Network of Constitutional Lawyers (ANCL).
Suggested Citation
Abdou Khadre Diop, 'Senegal's Constitutional Reform Amid a Political Divide at the Summit of the Executive', ConstitutionNet, International IDEA, 8 June 2026, https://constitutionnet.org/news/voices/senegals-constitutional-reform-amid-political-divide-summit-executive