By African Meridian | Media
Senegal’s Constitutional Council has invalidated the sweeping constitutional reform adopted only a week earlier by the National Assembly, ruling that the text, which revised the balance of powers between the executive and parliament, is « contrary to the Constitution. » The decision, delivered Thursday, is the most dramatic turn yet in the escalating institutional conflict between President Bassirou Diomaye Faye and the National Assembly led by Ousmane Sonko, the two men who rose to power together and now stand on opposite sides of a constitutional battlefield.
The invalidated law had been passed by a large majority in a parliament dominated by Pastef, the sovereignist party that swept Senegal’s 2024 elections and remains firmly under Sonko’s control following his overwhelming re-election as party leader in June. The text’s substance explained both its support and its danger: it strengthened the powers of the National Assembly, now presided over by Sonko, and of the prime minister, while correspondingly restricting the prerogatives of President Faye. In effect, the reform would have redrawn Senegal’s presidential system in parliament’s favor and, critics charged, redrawn it around one man’s new address.
It was Faye himself who brought the text down. In a move without precedent in the history of the Faye-Sonko tandem, the president formally referred the law to the Constitutional Council on July 8, asking the country’s highest constitutional authority to review a text produced by his own political family. The Council’s judges, the « sages » as Senegalese call them, needed only a day to answer. Their ruling stops the reform before it could proceed to the referendum stage that the Assembly had envisioned when it adopted the project in late June.
To understand the depth of the current rupture, one must return to the extraordinary circumstances of the tandem’s debut. Ousmane Sonko was the insurgent of Senegalese politics: a former tax inspector who built Pastef from nothing into a mass movement by naming what an entire generation felt, that the country’s wealth and institutions had been captured by a recycled political class in comfortable arrangement with foreign interests. His anti-establishment, sovereignist message electrified the young in a country where most of the population is under twenty-five, and it made him the principal target of the state he was contesting. From 2021 onward, Sonko was pursued through a succession of legal cases that his supporters denounced as political liquidation. Each prosecution triggered protest and deadly unrest; each conviction narrowed his path to the presidency, and ultimately barred him from the 2024 ballot entirely.
It was in that emergency that Bassirou Diomaye Faye was summoned from the shadows. A discreet Pastef co-founder and fellow tax inspector, Faye was himself in prison, jailed over a social media post, when Sonko designated him as the movement’s substitute candidate. The campaign that followed had no precedent anywhere: a candidate campaigning from a cell, a slogan insisting the two men were one (« Sonko mooy Diomaye, Diomaye mooy Sonko »), and a political system in open crisis after President Macky Sall’s attempt to postpone the election was struck down, in a foreshadowing now rich with irony, by the same Constitutional Council. Released ten days before the vote under an amnesty law, Faye won the presidency in the first round in March 2024. He appointed Sonko prime minister within days. The mentor would govern; the protégé would preside. Legislative elections that November completed the conquest, handing Pastef a crushing parliamentary majority.
The separation, when it came, was not a single explosion but a hardening, and it followed the oldest logic in politics: power cannot remain interchangeable. Faye grew into the presidency, cultivating his own authority, his own international standing, and his own reading of the mandate. Sonko, the movement’s founder and its emotional center, chafed at an arrangement in which the man he had made now outranked him constitutionally. Frictions over appointments, over control of the reform agenda, and over who truly spoke for the « projet » that voters had endorsed accumulated through 2025 and broke into the open in 2026. By late May, the divergences between the two were being described publicly as irreconcilable. Sonko’s landslide re-election at the head of Pastef in early June settled the question of the party: it belongs to him. Faye’s answer was institutional, a presidency defended with every constitutional instrument available.
The invalidated reform was the collision of those two claims. Sonko’s camp moved the contest onto constitutional terrain, seeking to shift the state’s center of gravity from the palace toward the Assembly he now leads and the prime minister’s office his loyalists control. Faye’s referral to the Council, and Thursday’s ruling, have redrawn the line in the other direction. What began as a quarrel inside a family is now a formal conflict between the institutions of the republic, each headed by one half of the former tandem.
The Constitutional Council’s decision is final and binding, and it carries significance well beyond the immediate quarrel. For an institution that Senegalese opposition movements, Pastef foremost among them, once accused of serving incumbent presidents, the ruling is a demonstration of independence layered with irony: the Council has this time acted against a parliamentary supermajority, at the request of a president, to block a reform produced by the very movement that once denounced constitutional manipulation as the country’s chief democratic disease. Whatever one’s sympathies, the sequence unfolded entirely within the institutions: parliament legislated, the president referred, the Council ruled.
That, however, is where reassurance ends. Sonko’s majority remains intact and impatient; a revised text, a direct appeal to referendum, or an escalation aimed at the presidency itself all remain plausible next moves. Faye emerges constitutionally strengthened but politically isolated from the party that made him. Senegal now faces the peculiar condition of cohabitation within a single party, a president and an assembly leader drawn from the same movement, governing against each other.
The stakes extend past Senegal’s borders. In a West Africa scarred by coups and constitutional manipulation, Senegal remains the state whose crises end in courtrooms and ballot boxes rather than barracks. The Faye-Sonko confrontation is testing that exceptionalism as it has rarely been tested. Thursday’s ruling kept the contest inside the constitution. Whether it stays there is now the question on which Senegalese democracy, and the region watching it, turns.