There are gestures that, beneath the apparent neutrality of human decency, reveal deep fractures in the moral architecture of a state. When a Prime Minister, supposed to embody the impartiality of the law and the rigor of institutions, allows himself to visit an individual prosecuted for serious offenses, he is not committing a mere breach of protocol. He is betraying the very essence of the Republic. He is betraying the legitimacy of which he is the guardian.

This is not a debate about compassion or the impulses of the heart, but about a fundamental principle: that of the separation between the sphere of private affections and the imperative demands (servitudes) of the public service. As head of government, the Prime Minister is no longer a man free to choose his own impulses: he is a living institution. He is, as the philosopher Spinoza taught, the one who has « ceded his freedom to the city, » to serve only order, rationality, and the rules.

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By visiting an accused person—whatever the apparent motive—the Prime Minister is committing a political act of formidable symbolic significance. He is contradicting the equality of all before the law. He is instilling in public opinion—in the populace—the pernicious idea that some benefit from greater leniency, personal access to power, a privilege of humanity that others, more anonymous, poorer, or less connected, will never obtain. He is sending a devastating message: that partisan loyalty or affinities of another order can suspend the demands of Justice. This is called favouritism. This is called the rupture of the republican pact.

This gesture is reminiscent of the compromises that Rousseau already denounced when he wrote that « the strongest is never strong enough to always be master unless he transforms his strength into law. » Here, the opposite is happening: law is transformed into force, into complacency, into exception. The Prime Minister, guarantor of legality, becomes a tacit accomplice in a tolerated illegality. 

It’s not so much the man who is at fault, but what his actions reveal about the erosion of the normative benchmarks of our democracy. At a time when citizens doubt the integrity of elites, when the divide between the top and the bottom is becoming gaping, such an act fuels civic resentment, widespread distrust, and further delegitimizes the moral authority of the State.

A Prime Minister has no right to act as a friend. It is not his role to console, sympathize, or support a litigant. Far from it. This role falls to lawyers, relatives, and militants, but not to the head of government. The latter must remain cold (it is the German sociologist Max Weber who tells us that a good politician must behave this way), distant, and irreproachable. He must prefer the injustice of impartial silence to the apparent justice of a partial, clannish gesture.

The Republic does not defend itself solely with weapons or speeches. It defends itself with symbols which, Paul Ricœur teaches, give food for thought. It defends itself through deportment and restraint, through respect for form as much as substance. It defends itself above all through the moral firmness of those who claim to serve it.

By betraying this requirement, the Prime Minister not only erred, he failed. He failed—and one has the impression that this will be the case for the next fifty years—to appreciate the scope and symbolism of his office.

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But it would be illusory to focus indignation on the Prime Minister’s action alone, without denouncing with the same ardour the broader, more insidious forfeiture of a Justice system that has become selective, subservient, and capricious. A Justice system that, instead of deciding fairly, wields its sword according to allegiances, modulating its rigor according to the partisan colour of the person being tried. When the same act leads to the brutal imprisonment of some, but arouses official compassion for others, it is the very principle of the rule of law that is crumbling. A Republic where the law ceases to be the same for all is no longer a Republic; it becomes a shadow theatre where arbitrariness – that is to say when the whims of the Prince serve as law – is draped in the toga of Law.

The initial promise of an ethical awakening, brandished as a banner at the beginning of this term, has been marred by an increasingly intolerable reality: that of a justice system that obeys orders, is paid, and has become the instrument of a political power that punishes less deeds than affiliations. The much-heralded virtue has given birth to blatant bias. It has engendered a cynical Republic, where impartiality is feigned while favouring its own and sacrificing others—Assane Diouf and Abdou Nguer, to name just a few outcasts.

There is no sustainable democracy without a respected, independent justice system, blind to friendships and deaf to injunctions, even those from the executive. Yet, by trampling on this sacred requirement, the current power is paving the way not to authority, but to abuse; not to stability, but to general conflagration. This is how democracies die: not with a crash, but in the shameful and guilty silence of renunciation. By persisting in this downward spiral, we are creating much more than a simple institutional malaise: we are sowing the seeds of a silent revolt, and consolidating the foundations of a profound rejection. For no people can endure indefinitely witnessing an injustice erected as a method of government. Charles Bukowski, a writer dear to me, wrote that « a man always ends up no longer able to bear suffering. »

When the scales of justice systematically tip in favour of power, when the most basic principles are trampled on in the name of immediate interests, it is citizen trust itself that disintegrates. And in this moral vacuum left by the elites, popular anger proliferates, the forms of which no one will be able to predict or contain in the future. Distrust then becomes the survival reflex of a population that no longer recognizes itself in its institutions, that sees in every judicial decision not an expression of the law, but a performance by a biased power. This constant suspicion, this sense of lived injustice, fuels resentment and fractures the republican bond. Far from calming, the duplicity of the elites radicalizes. Far from uniting, the two-tiered justice system divides, excludes, marginalizes, and dehumanizes. Thus, is born the temptation of rupture: one that pushes people to disobey, to protest, to reject en masse a system that they no longer perceive as protective but as oppressive. The Republic, betrayed in its principles, finds itself threatened in its foundations. And it is those who betray it, while claiming to defend it, who will tomorrow bear the brunt of the chaos that they themselves have unleashed.

The Prime Minister not only has the clear ambition to betray the spirit of the Republic, he also wants, like a good misguided Pan-Africanist, to deconstruct the Senegalese image of grandeur and a land where freedoms flourish. By visiting Burkina Faso, he loudly proclaims, not without anachronism, his tragic fascination with the AES countries. It is a disgrace when a democracy like ours participates in the legitimization of these military powers whose only legitimacy emanates from bayonets.

By Baba DIENG