by Janet Biehl
In January 2014, in a desire for political renewal, several young Senegalese civil servants and other backgrounds formed a committee to create African Patriots of Senegal for Work, Ethics and Fraternity (Patriotes africains du Sénégal pour le travail, l'éthique et la fraternité), known as PASTEF (also called Patriots of Senegal (Patriotes du Sénégal). They were political novices who detested political parties, yet all had extra parliamentary political experience, in combats de jeunesse at the university and at work, in trade union activity and public functions. “Ils ont livré avec amour et enthousiasme des batailles qui se sont soldées par des succès éclatants,” according to PASTEF’s self-description. They referred to PASTEF, not as a party, but a “dynamic.”
The leading figure was Ousmane Sonko, a native of Thiès who worked for 15 years as a tax official in Pikine. In 2016, he exposed the use of offshore tax havens, including a mineral sands processing plant used by a Canadian company to avoid paying taxes. As a result of this whistleblowing, Sonko lost his job as a tax official. In 2018 he published a nonfiction book laying out his findings, Petrole e gaz au Senegal: Chronique d’une spoliation.
For the 2017 legislative elections, Sonko headed the multiparty coalition People's Alternative, of which PASTEF was a member. Sonko was elected deputy for the department of Dakar. In 2018 Sonko’s book Solutions: Propositions pour un Sénégal nouveau was published, with an optimistic “Yes we can” message.
In 2019, the party mounted its first presidential campaign, challenging the sitting president of the republic, Macky Sall. Sall was re-elected with 58% of the vote. But in a country where people under 20 represent 55% of the population, Sonko’s relative youth, as well as his passion, resonated. He won almost 16 percent and came in third--a good result for a first outing.
In September 2021 Sonko formalized the creation of a new opposition alliance, Yewwi Askan Wi ("Liberate the people" in Wolof), that included other political formations such as the Party for Unity and Rally and Manko Taxawu Sénégal. In 2022 the coalition contested the local elections, winning in several major cities including Dakar and Thiès, and later that year the National Assembly elections, gaining 56 seats and becoming the second biggest coalition in the assembly. Sonko was elected mayor of Ziguinchor, in Casamance, confirming his popularity.
On May 31, 2023, Sonko was arrested for "corrupting youth” and was sentenced to two years in prison; the sentence prevented him from standing as the PASTEF candidate in the 2024 presidential election, which was doubtless its purpose. Sonko's arrest and sentencing triggered protests throughout Senegal.
Fears then rose that Sall would try to bypass Senegal's limit of two presidential terms and run for a third term in the 2024 election. But after much delay, on July 3, Sall said that he would not run in 2024.
On July 31, the Ministry of Interior and Public Security banned PASTEF for "frequently calling on its supporters to insurrectional movements, which has led to serious consequences, including loss of life, many wounded, as well as acts of looting of public and private property," that is, for rallying its supporters during recent protests. Protests broke out in Dakar and Ziguinchor; two people were reported to have died during protests in Ziguinchor.
In May 2023 Sonko withdrew into his stronghold in Casamance. Youth cordoned off the district by erecting barricades against the police forces. Sonko then joined a Caravan of Freedom heading to Dakar but it was stopped in Bignona. Casamance erupted into violence.
Meanwhile Sonko’s imprisoned colleague Bassirou Diomaye Faye launched his own presidential campaign from Casamance.
On June 2, PASTEF-Patriots Party urged the populace to resist until President Sall resigned. Protests in Dakar's Ouakam and Ngor districts became violent, overwhelming the local police. Nine people died. At Cheikh Anta Diop University, protesters set buses on fire and police fired tear gas and made arbitrary arrests. and looting occurred. In response to the violence, the government deployed the Senegalese Army. The government and the opposition blamed each other for the violence.
By June 3, 15 people had died, including two security officers. By June 4, according to the interior minister, about 500 people had been arrested. June 4 saw less violence, but daytime clashes continued into the evening. Protesters in residential neighborhoods threw rocks at police, barricaded roads and burned tires, while police fired tear gas at the protesters.
The new year would see a presidential election on March 24, 2024. On January 4 Sonko was declared ineligible following his conviction. But the constitutional council validated Bassirou Diomaye Faye’s candidacy.
In February, the election was postponed to December, leading to clashes between protestors and police. The postponement was later declared unlawful by the Constitutional Court and rescinded.
On March 14, ten days before the presidential election, Bassirou Diomaye Faye and Ousmane Sonko were freed from prison. They campaigned together, raising crowds from Dakar to Ziguinchor, from Sine Saloum to Sainte-Louis. Victory was in the air.
On March 16, in Bignona, two days after being released from prison, an old man approached Faye with a broom: “The population of Diégoune have prayed for you and asked me to hand you this broom for you to sweep away Senegal.” The broom became a symbol, in the run-up to the election. Faye held it up everywhere.
On March 24 Faye was elected president of the Republic of Senegal. The victory shocked observers, most of whom hadn’t known the name of the PASTEF candidate a few days earlier. For the first time in Senegalese history, an opposition candidate won a presidential election in the first round. Faye became Senegal’s youngest president ever. He was sworn in on April 2 and appointed Ousmane Sonko as prime minister. The dissolution of PASTEF was repealed.
Eric Agnero comments:
With the new government in place, Dakar quickly reviewed the French military presence. Senior officials argued that permanent foreign bases do not fit with the sovereignty agenda that had rallied the youth and the civil society vote between 2021 and 2024. Just months into this new presidential term, Senegal signaled a shift from garrisoned troops to “cooperation without basing”: training, intelligence sharing, maritime security, on terms defined by national priorities.Public statements from the presidency and the prime minister’s office framed the move as a “normalization” rather than a rupture: partners remain partners, but the era of open‑ended basing would give way to time‑bound, mission‑specific cooperation. The practical effect was a drawdown of French personnel and the hand‑back of facilities historically used by French forces in Dakar, a symbolic end to a visible pillar of Françafrique.
For many Senegalese, especially the young activists who had driven the protest cycles, this was more than logistics. It marked a sovereignty milestone, a concrete deliverable on campaign rhetoric. Regionally, it placed Senegal within a broader West African “sovereignty turn,” as states recalibrated security ties after years of turbulence in the Sahel. Strategically, it also freed Dakar to diversify its partnerships while maintaining open cooperation channels with France and other allies.
With the United States, Senegal has maintained steady ties since independence in 1960. Dakar serves as a regional hub for development, health, and security cooperation, without a permanent U.S. garrison. Access agreements enable time-bound training, humanitarian response, and joint operations by mutual consent. In public health, Senegal has repeatedly hosted U.S. surge operations, notably during the 2014 Ebola crisis, while the President’s Malaria Initiative supports ongoing prevention and treatment. This mission-in, mission-out model fits the government’s sovereignty-first approach.
On maritime and regional security, Senegal co-leads or hosts Gulf of Guinea exercises such as Obangame Express and integrates targeted visit, board, search, and seizure (VBSS) training to strengthen coastal surveillance, counter illicit trafficking, and professionalize forces without basing. At the state level, the Vermont National Guard–Senegal State Partnership (since 2008) offers a low-footprint channel for medical readiness, engineering, aviation, NCO development, and civil-military preparedness; activities are short, host-nation led, and leave no permanent footprint. Economically, Millennium Challenge Corporation compacts have backed irrigated agriculture and power transmission, distribution, and sector governance, while U.S. development finance and trade tools support entrepreneurship, fisheries value chains, and digital connectivity, with transparency and local content to fuel youth-driven growth.
To some observers, this nonradical yet firm posture appears pragmatic in a region where states are torn between the West, Russia, and China. Rather than trading one tutelage for another, Dakar is seeking strategic autonomy: diversifying partners, maintaining consent‑based and time‑bound cooperation, rejecting permanent basing, and tying every engagement to domestic priorities. The aim is not to pick camps, but to sequence interests, maritime security, and public health, where cooperation adds value, energy, and infrastructure on transparent terms, and a diplomatic stance preserves room to maneuver in a multipolar environment. In this sense, the youth mandate becomes an assertive nonalignment that judges partners by outcomes, not flags.
However, this equilibrium with Western partners will depend on how tensions develop between the West and neighboring governments that have drifted toward Moscow, as well as Dakar’s ability to ring‑fence its cooperation from bloc politics. It will also depend on partners respecting Senegal’s red lines on non‑basing, on ECOWAS’s capacity to manage regional crises, and on concrete deliverables at home, including transparent contracts, local content in energy and infrastructure, maritime security gains, and job opportunities for youth. If any side treats Senegal as a proxy, the balance will fray.
From its start as a “dynamic” rather than a party, PASTEF framed politics as ethical service: work, integrity, fraternity. A decade later, Faye’s first‑round victory and the broom brandished from Bignona to Dakar turned that ethic into a program: sovereignty with accountability. The same youth who organized campus unions and neighborhood collectives now used the ballot to demand clean public finance, fair resource governance, and partnerships chosen on Senegal’s terms. Recasting the defense relationship with France and structuring U.S. ties on a cooperation‑without‑basing model wasn’t an anti‑Western reflex, but the concrete delivery of a mandate repeatedly voiced in the streets since 2021: end open‑ended tutelage, maintain cooperation, and align it with constitutional legitimacy and social needs.
Whether this becomes a durable break with Françafrique will depend on follow‑through, audits and prosecutions where warranted, transparent contracts in hydrocarbons and fishing, local‑content rules that actually bite, reforms in education and industry that create jobs for the under‑25 majority, and security cooperation that protects rights as well as borders. The youth vote did not just sanction the past; it vigorously expressed its longing for a sovereign, democratic modernity. The task now is to sweep, in the complete sense of the broom, without simply replacing one dependency with another.
The authors visited Senegal in August 2025.
Cover photo by Abdou Karim Ndoye.
