Senegal’s 2024 election: 79 candidates, including jailed Sonko, file to run for presidency

A total of 79 individuals, including the jailed opposition leader Ousmane Sonko, are reported to have filed their candidacy for the February 2024 presidential election in Senegal before the Tuesday (26 December) deadline amid allegations that the Senegalese authorities have been intensifying repression ahead of the vote.
When Macky Sall, President of Senegal since 2012, announced in July that he would not run for another term, he appointed Amadou Ba to represent the majority. Aside Ba, a member of the ruling coalition and Senegal’s current prime minister, the applications to run in the February 2024 presidential election include those of the main favorites: Sonko, former Dakar mayor Khalifa Sall, Karim Wade (son of former president Abdoulaye Wade) and Idrissa Seck, who came second in the 2019 presidential election. Sonko’s back-up Bassirou Diomaye Faye has also filed to run but Senegal’s electoral commission did not provide Faye, who is currently also in prison, with the necessary documents to be submitted. His lawyers then said they would file anyway, hoping the justice system would be more receptive.
The 49-year-old Sonko, who has been in prison since late July on various charges, including calling for insurrection conspiracy with terrorist groups and endangering state security, denounces these cases in which he has been implicated as plots to keep him out of the presidential election. In mid-December, a judge ordered that he be re-installed on the list of candidates, confirming a lower court order that had been overturned on first appeal. This comes amidst recurrent reports about intensifying repression in Senegal ahead of the 2024 presidential election. Leading human rights organization Amnesty International in March accused the Senegalese authorities of trying to systematically weaken human rights protection in the country by restricting civic space, banning protests and detaining a journalist and opposition figures.