Sunday was election day in Senegal. Both the president and parliament were to have been elected, but due to a dispute over electoral boundaries, the parliamentary elections have been postponed till 3 June (thanks to Alex for pointing that out in the earlier thread on Lesotho).
I do not really know anything about Senegalese politics, besides what I read at BBC, which notes that the incumbent, Abdoulaye Wade, faces 14 rivals and is unlikely to win the needed majority today. That means a runoff is likely.
I do, however, know something about Senegalese political institutions. Journalists (and even the occasional political scientist) who see a system with both a president and a prime minister often rather sloppily say it is “the French system” (especially when the case in question is a former French colony). In this case they are right. The Senegalese “premier-presidential” system is about as similar structurally to that of France as any you will ever see (with the exception of Burkina Faso).
That means that the president can nominate a prime ministerial candidate, but can appoint only a candidate who can obtain confidence from parliament. Once confirmed, it is the prime minister, more than the president, who has the real executive powers–at least as the powers are outlined in the constitution. As I said, I know almost nothing about actual politics in Senegal.
There is one important twist on the president’s powers, however: He has a veto, which takes three fifths to override. There is nothing like than in France.
(There is no better place than here to note that I am positively an expert on Senegal, compared to what I know about Guinea. Thus I have no idea how significant it is that this other West African former French colony has just seen its prime minister replaced by the president, meeting a key demand of leaders of a general strike, now ended, and days after parliament refused to extent a state of emergency.)
There is no constitutional requirement that Guinea have a prime minister at all. The president has occasionally appointed one, and the constitutional court has held that it’s permissible for him to delegate part of his power (see art. 39), but he’s mostly done without. The fact that the unions forced the president to appoint an independent prime minister, and to cede the power to appoint the rest of the cabinet, is a pretty major development.
What’s almost as remarkable is the event that finally tipped the balance against the president – that the National Assembly, for what might be the first time in history, defied him by refusing to extend martial law. The ruling party deputies are taking a lot of heat from the party leadership for that vote, but unlike the president and the party leaders, they’re facing an election this summer, and realized that they might even lose a rigged vote if the public got angry enough. That may end up happening anyway; at this point, the people are pretty fed up with Conte and his party, and I’m not sure the deputies’ eleventh-hour show of independence will save them.
Seed planted by Jonathan Edelstein — 13 March 2007 @ 02:34