The Senegalese President announces the postponement of the presidential elections

Dakar (agencies)

Senegalese President Macky Sall announced yesterday that he had canceled a decree according to which he had set the date for the presidential elections on February 25, after forming a parliamentary committee to investigate two judges who are members of the Constitutional Council.
“I signed a decree on February 3 repealing the decree of November 26, 2023, which set the date of the presidential elections on February 25, 2024,” Sall said in an address to the nation.
His announcement came a few hours before the start of the electoral campaign for the presidential vote.
Earlier, the Senegalese Democratic Party said that it requested the postponement of the presidential elections scheduled for February 25 through a draft law that it submitted to Parliament, citing facts that it claimed harmed the transparency and integrity of the vote.
Postponing the presidential elections would be unprecedented for Senegal, which has witnessed four largely peaceful transfers of power through ballot boxes since independence from France in 1960. The Democratic Party has not proposed a new date for the elections.
In a statement, the Democratic Party spoke of its concerns about the decision-making process in the Constitutional Court, the exclusion of candidates, and other issues that it said derailed the race.
He added that the push to hold elections at a later date “is part of our desire to maintain the integrity and transparency of the process.” It was not immediately clear how Parliament would deal with the proposed draft law.