On Saturday 3 February, the President of the Republic of Senegal, Macky Sall, decided to postpone the presidential election initially scheduled for 25 February. The Senegalese Head of State announced this decision in a televised address.
This sudden turn of events comes just a few hours before the start of election campaign, scheduled for midnight on Saturday, for which 20 candidates have been validated by the Constitutional Council.
It could be recalled, everything started with Karim Wade’s exclusion from the ballot because of his dual Senegalese and French nationality according to the Constitutional Council.
He denounced the decision as “scandalous” and “a new judicial plot”, before his party initiated the process in the National Assembly that led to the setting up of the parliamentary committee of enquiry.
The PDS announced in a press release that it had tabled “a bill on the postponement” of the 25 February presidential election in the National Assembly on Friday.
“Our parliamentary initiative is motivated by the many incidents and protests that have distorted the electoral process, highlighting serious malfunctions” and “even more so with the elimination of candidates”, said in the statement the Senegalese Democratic Party (PDS), which leads a parliamentary group of 27 deputies out of 165 in the National Assembly.
Source: Seneweb.
