News
Senegal: President Wade and Macky Sall face off in 2nd round vote
However, those gains have not trickled down to most Senegalese voters, who have battled against rising costs of living, unemployment and frequent power cuts.
Violent protests leading up to the election this year have left at least six people dead, and analysts have warned of further unrest if Wade wins Sunday’s vote.
Senegal, one of the region’s most mature democracies, is a rare place in sub-Saharan Africa where voters could successfully oust a longtime incumbent at the ballot box Sunday.
By comparison, mutinous soldiers in neighboring Mali launched a coup in recent days that has forced President Amadou Toumani Toure into hiding after a decade in power. In Ivory Coast, longtime incumbent Laurent Gbagbo refused to concede defeat, bringing the country to the brink of civil war.
In Senegal, Sunday’s race is being portrayed as a choice between the incumbent elder or the younger Sall, who was born after Senegal won its independence from France. “In the name of the father or the son,” read the headline on the front page of Le Quotidien.
Sall, 50, is a geologist by training who worked for years under Wade, even leading his 2007 campaign. The two, though, had a subsequent fallout and now Wade has taken to describing Sall as an apprentice who has not yet taken in “the lessons of his mentor.”
“Senegal needs someone who will do more than me. We don’t want people who improvise, lacking in personality,” Wade said during a recent campaign stop in the city of Thies, the state-run Le Soleil newspaper reported.
