History will remember President Abdoulaye Wade, among others, for the great law on parity. From President Macky Sall, I will remember several things, two of which seem important to me: the law on sponsorship which modernizes our democracy and the decree dissolving the Pastef party, which removes the fascist institutional spine of electoral competition. Apart from the Mfdc, during its last forty years, the greatest threat to civil peace, democracy and freedom in Senegal was represented by a party which decided to divide the Senegalese according to ethnic, moral and even religious criteria, to widen the fractures in the national body and to promote civil war.

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In politics, it is a competition of answers to the questions that citizens ask themselves. The debate is consubstantial with political matters and must remain within the framework of the law and civility. Except that we cannot ask fascists to comply with the laws of the Republic. Because everywhere, their ultimate objective is to ensure that the Republic, which guarantees justice, freedoms and equality, collapses to give free rein to the most savage violence. By looking at this party since 2018, since the declaration of its leader, who called for the return of the death penalty and the application of torture in police stations, I had detected its fascist DNA, its violent methods, its speech tied to hatred and its imagination coming from the separatist and Islamist worlds which combine to create a dangerous cocktail for the rule of law. The dissolved party, through its methods, reminds those interested in the history of fascist ideas of the squadristi, the famous “black shirt” militia in the 1920s, who installed Mussolini in power thanks to the March on Rome of 1922. The Freedom Caravan of June 2023, between Ziguinchor and Dakar, was a perpetuation, certainly involuntary, of this fascist tradition.

When it still existed, Pastef was distinguished by its hatred of plural democracy, its intolerance to debate and by the factious attitude of its leaders who never hesitate to invoke the figure of the religious martyr in accordance with totalitarian ideology that many of its executives promote; those from small Salafist or Brotherhood groups incubated at the university and who in Pastef conceived political activity as relating to Islamist proselytism. In Pastef, hatred of institutions went as far as the attack on public buildings and even the desecration of the National Assembly on September 12, 2022. The authors of these crimes, who call themselves “Patriots” fuelled by conspiracy, heated by a powerful propaganda machine and manipulated by unscrupulous leaders who have made large-scale lying a second political nature reminded me of the “Proud Boys”, a small pro-Trump fascist group, whose members invaded the Capitol in January 2021.  Dissolving Pastef means putting an end to the desecration of republican institutions, allowing democratic breathing space and bringing public debate back to the rhythm of the confrontation of ideas and not to morbid competition. Senegal cannot tolerate a movement that calls itself political when it is only an insurrectional apparatus whose lexical field never escapes death, sedition and hatred.

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This dissolved party had normalized insult and factional violence in our public space, imported the practices of religious extremism and constantly resorted to discourse and incessant calls for insurrection. Intellectuals, journalists, politicians, religious and customary authorities, simple citizens, no one was spared the fury of the pack which used the internet, in particular to commit its sinister crimes.

This party did not stop there: it carried out its threats through violent actions that caused loss of human life and destruction of public and private property in March 2021 and June 2023. As a reminder, Alioune Tine, sympathizer of the dissolved party or ordinary rentier, had announced its colours by threatening our country with “civil war” in the event of a trial on the Sweet Beauty affair. The vice-president of the Yewwi group in parliament called in February 2023 for “war” against the State of Senegal.

A party that normalizes the use of Molotov cocktails against state symbols, vital infrastructure such as means of transport, water and electricity plants and civilian populations whose only wrong is to get on a bus to join their families, cannot exist in a democracy. In the school of this party, the first training module for activists is probably insults to generals, magistrates and authorities responsible for public force. Because we have chosen democracy which has given birth to two peaceful alternations, we cannot accept that politics becomes the reign of gratuitous verbal and physical violence.  We cannot accept that infamy is accepted as a norm in political practice.

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Academics, media people, lawyers and other public criers, some of them respectable, castigated the decree dissolving Pastef and called for its withdrawal in the name of “constitutional order and plurality”. Did they not follow the repeated calls for insurrection, the call for the murder of the head of state, the threats to judges and the insults to the Army? Have they forgotten the refusals to appear in court which were all supported by this party? Have they not seen the images of the vehicle of a political leader rushing towards the gendarmes responsible for security in Mbacké? I invite these democrats in slippers, small-time petitioners, to an exercise: watch or rewatch the video of the Keur Massar meeting of the dissolved party on January 22.

The warlike speeches, the sacrificial invocations, the public insults, the use of the register of jihad, the festival of offenses against republican institutions during this demonstration are chilling. How could this uninhibited fascism, which manifests itself in a visceral hatred of Senegal, prosper at the heart of our democracy? How can we explain this attraction of some of our most brilliant compatriots, who call themselves democrats, progressives and some republicans, for fascism whose totalitarian project, in addition to its misogynistic, extremist and ethnic aspects, is the collapse of the Republic?

The most serious: no one among the petitioners denounced the June 1 press release of the dissolved party as well as its appeal of June 2 which asked the Army to explicitly perpetrate a coup d’état. By being the only political organization to publish such appeals, which were followed by insurrectional demonstrations causing several deaths, the party left no choice to the State of Senegal, which was obliged to dissolve itself in order to be in accordance with the Constitution.

My friend Massamba Diouf recalls this eloquently in a column on Seneweb on August 9: “The lessons of the history of our young State are, in this regard, the following: in this country we do not take power through partisan force against the institutional order and the separation of powers; we do not force the result of an election by assassinating judges; we do not gain power through the strategy of mistrust and terror. Adhering to constitutional principles, respecting the laws of the Republic, agreeing to submit to justice, winning elections, these are still today and, we hope, forever the only ways to reach the head of Senegal. And that’s good news.”

In France, faced with the threat of the fascist leagues, which organized the march on February 6, 1934 against democracy and republican institutions which caused around twenty deaths, the authorities reacted. In 1936, the government of Léon Blum proceeded by decree to dissolve the fascist leagues which constituted in this country, as was the case with Pastef in Senegal, a threat to democracy and the rule of law.

Dissensus, within the framework of the laws, is the lifeblood of democracy. It is following the confrontation of ideas that the people decide at the ballot box. A party that refuses to conform to our democratic tradition and the organization of Senegalese political society has no place in our public space whatever its number of elected officials or activists and whatever the length of its support arch. Since 2021, we now know who we cannot count on among our thinkers and public leaders when the Republic is threatened.  This commits us, Republicans, Democrats and patriots, to building strong consensus around the Republic.

Our next big challenge is to bring these masses seduced by demagogic discourse back into the fold of the Republic. The parties which comply with our laws, the intellectuals included or not, all the democrats and republicans concerned about Senegal must be at the heart of the work of producing ideas and dreams in order to invent a new imagination of social progress which guarantees the anchoring of this beautiful idea that is the Republic at the heart of the political and social landscape.

By Hamidou ANNE / hamidou.anne@lequotidien.sn

  • Translation by Ndey T. SOSSEH / Serigne S. DIAGNE