Senegal: President Fay appoints Ousmane Sonko, a key opposition figure, as prime minister

Key figure in the opposition to the government. Senegal’s new president, Bassiro Diomaye Faye, named Ousmane Sonko, the fiercest political opponent of his predecessor Macky Sall, as prime minister on Tuesday night. He also promised “systemic change”, sovereignty and pacification, becoming Senegal’s fifth president by presidential decree.

“I appreciate the importance of the trust he (President Fay) has placed in me,” Ousmane Sonko, 49, said on public television RTS. It was he who proposed the candidacy of Bassir Diomaia Faye after his candidacy was declared invalid and imprisoned. Anti-system and popular among youth, Ousmane Sonko has always denounced the conspiracy after he was sentenced to two years in prison in a rape case. On Tuesday evening, he announced the formation of a new government “in the coming hours.”

Hours earlier, new President Fay, a 44-year-old leftist Pan-Africanist, took the oath of office in front of hundreds of Senegalese officials and several heads of state and African leaders at the Exhibition Center in the new town of Diamniadio, near Dakar.

He then returned to the capital, horse guards clearing the way for his procession of cars between hundreds of Dakar residents who had come to greet him along the roads leading to the gates of the presidential palace. It was there that his predecessor Macky Sall, after brief and cordial greetings, symbolically handed him the key to the presidential residence before passing through the gate in the opposite direction.

“A deep commitment to systemic change”

Bassirou Diomaye Fay, who had never been elected before, became the West African country’s youngest president since independence in 1960 on March 24, less than three weeks after being released from prison. After three years of tension and a final electoral crisis in 2024, his resounding victory with 54.28% of the vote “is almost a miracle,” Constitutional Council President Mamadou Badio Camara said before taking the oath of office.

He succeeds for five years under Macky Sall, 62, who led the country for 12 years and maintained strong relations with the West and France while diversifying partnerships. The past three years have been marked by unrest, leading to dozens of deaths and hundreds of arrests.

In a brief speech, the new president said he “recognizes” that his big victory in the first round of the presidential election reflects a “deep commitment to systemic change.” “Senegal, under my leadership, will be a country of hope, a peaceful country with an independent justice system and a strengthened democracy,” he said.

The senior tax administration official, who has quietly risen through the ranks in the shadow of Ousmane Sonko, has named lowering the cost of living, fighting corruption and national reconciliation as his priorities. His program states an intention to exit the CFA franc, renegotiate or renegotiate oil and gas contracts with foreign companies due to begin this year, as well as mining and fishing agreements.