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Macky Sall, the president of Senegal since 2012, has had a closer view than anyone of the plague of coups in Africa since 2020 and the efforts to reverse them. Two of the first coups were in Mali, Senegal’s biggest trading partner. Then came one in another neighbor, Guinea. A failed attempt in next-door Guinea-Bissau followed (see map). Mr Sall was chair of the African Union when putschists struck in Burkina Faso for the second time within 2022. And he has played a leading role in the response of the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS), the regional bloc, to every coup, including one in Niger in July. It is worrying, then, that when asked what can be done to deter coups or return countries to democracy he is despondent. “It is difficult, I don’t know,” he says. “Sometimes we get lost.”
The regional bloc once had a passable record of deterring and reversing coups. Led by Mr Sall’s Senegal, it sent troops to The Gambia in 2017 to force that country’s dictator to step down after he lost an election. Yet now, says Mr. Sall, “the effectiveness of the organization, truly, has been found wanting.” The bloc “lacks the capacity to deal with the problems that arise in the region”, he laments. “It is really losing its leadership role.” ECOWAS had threatened to use force in Niger to reinstate the ousted president, Mohamed Bazoum, but the threat proved hollow. “There are several reasons for why…when we said we would intervene, we did not intervene,” he says, concluding “We could not.” He partly blames the influence of countries including America, which has drone bases in Niger and which pressed for a peaceful resolution. (Its diplomacy has borne little fruit. Mr. Bazoum is still held hostage.)
Yet the problems go deeper than that ECOWAS. “Is democracy as we want to do it really suitable?” he asks in relation to the Sahel. Real power in this region is often not wielded by elected officials, and a focus on polls has not led to stability. In Mali, after an insurgency and a coup in 2012, Mr. Sall and the bloc pushed for rapid elections. After a popular revolution in Burkina Faso in 2014 followed by a short-lived coup in 2015, they did the same. Yet the winners of these elections were both eventually overthrown by coups in 2020 and 2022. In Chad, the last Western ally in the Sahel, Mahamat Déby took power unconstitutionally after his father, the president, was killed on the battlefield in 2021. The country is meant to vote next year, but Mr. Sall frets that in focusing on this “we risk missing the point.”
One big reason for coups in the Sahel has been the relentless rise of jihadists linked to al-Qaeda and Islamic State. In the first nine months of this year, more than 10,000 people died in the conflict in Burkina Faso, Mali and Niger. Jihadists are already spreading into Benin and Togo. Alarmed, Mr. Sall wants to see the UN play a bigger role. If the problem of terrorism is not dealt with, “all of West Africa, all of Africa in general, is going to pay a high price,” he says.
Senegal itself, usually a bastion of stability, will be a crucial test case of democracy’s resilience when it holds presidential elections in February. Mr Sall warns of a “syndrome of chaos that is threatening our country”. Yet this stems from a damaging political fight between Mr. Sall and an opposition leader, Ousmane Sonko, over the rules of the game—and who gets to play it.
The fight centers around the question of whether Senegal’s government is trying to tilt the election by using the courts to keep Mr. Sonko off the ballot. It started more than two years ago when the authorities laid a rape charge against Mr. Sonko, a populist firebrand who railed against corruption. Mr. Sonko’s supporters claimed that this was a government plot, noting how two of Mr. Sall’s main rivals in the presidential election of 2019…