Introduction: Party Proliferation and Its Consequences in Senegal and Beyond

State Power and Elite Appropriation of Resources in Post-colonial Senegal: Macky Sall’s Regime as a Salient Example

“…As president, Sall set up his political authority by applying his power retention strategy through the creation of patronage-oriented parties, especially those major party allies that collaborated with him and joined his ruling coalition. That was the case of his APR partisans and members of other parliamentary parties, like the AFP (Alliance des Forces du Progrés "Alliances of the Forces of Progress") and the PS (PartiSocialiste "Socialist Party") that formed the "Benno BokkYakkar" coalition, to which he provided the most visible rewards (Kelly, 2019). He institutionalized the distribution of rewards to those that joined him as a way to provide them with material support and linkages to the state and to ensure future majorities mobilization during elections.…”

“…Aware of that, the opposition denounced the law as it was thinly veiled to bureaucratically handicap them in the 2019 presidential election. The civil society argued that the law erected undue barriers to the freedom of expression and association, regulating political party members to the same onerous requirements to collect elector signatures that independent candidates had to follow to be on the ballot (Kelly, 2019). Galvanized by these contentious debated laws, protesters took to the Dakar streets when the National Assembly, in which Sall's party occupied the majority with 119 seats of 150, voted the law.…”