Faye-Sonko Fallout:Senegal’s President to Launch New Party

Senegalese President, Bassirou Diomaye Faye, is preparing to launch his own political party, according to a coalition supporting the president, deepening a rift with former Prime Minister, Ousmane Sonko, that has consumed the country’s politics for months. The coalition said in a statement issued late on Friday, July 3 that Faye had instructed senior adviser Aminata Touré to lead a task force responsible for creating the new political movement.

To understand how the two men arrived here, it helps to go back to the origins of their partnership. Faye and Sonko have traditionally been strong allies, sharing a history as tax inspectors who became political activists together. Sonko backed Faye in the 2024 election after being barred from running himself due to a defamation conviction, and both men were jailed ahead of that election before being released just ten days before the rescheduled vote, which Faye won with 54% support. 

The arrangement that followed was built on a delicate understanding that Faye would occupy the presidency while Sonko remained the movement’s dominant political strategist, effectively running parallel administrations atop a 40 billion Dollar economy. The rallying cry of their 2024 campaign, “Diomaye mooy Sonko,” meaning Diomaye is Sonko, became a symbol of that unity.

The alliance began fraying well before this year. In July 2025, Sonko denounced a lack of authority in the Senegalese state, a comment widely understood as aimed at Faye. By early 2026, public spats had intensified over coalition control and personal influence, with Faye warning of party “collapse” due to what he saw as excessive personalisation around Sonko.

Tensions boiled over in November 2025, when Faye unilaterally removed a key Sonko ally, Aïssatou Mbodj, as head of the coalition that had secured his 2024 victory, replacing her with his own campaign coordinator, Aminata Touré, the same adviser now tasked with building his new party. Sonko’s PASTEF party responded by issuing a statement rejecting the president’s authority to make the change. 

The underlying dispute was as much economic as personal. The two men disagreed sharply over how to handle public debt that the IMF estimated had reached 132% of GDP at the end of 2024, after the government discovered undisclosed debts worth around 13 billion Dollars. The revelation prompted the IMF to suspend a 1.8 billion Dollar loan facility, and while Sonko rejected a formal IMF restructuring program, Faye signaled a more flexible approach toward the fund. 

Matters came to a head on May 22, when Faye sacked Sonko as prime minister and dissolved the entire government, ending months of tension in the debt-laden nation. The dismissal came hours after Sonko condemned what he called a tyrannical West trying to impose homosexuality on the world, following passage of a toughened anti-LGBTQ law, though the deeper causes ran back months. Faye had earlier criticized Sonko’s “excessive personalisation” within the ruling party, and declared in a televised interview that Sonko remained prime minister only as long as he held the president’s confidence. 

Sonko, for his part, accused Faye of a “failure of leadership” for not backing him against critics. After his firing, Sonko posted on Facebook that he would sleep soundly that night, and hundreds of supporters gathered outside his home in Dakar’s Keur Gorgui neighborhood to cheer him on.

Sonko did not stay sidelined for long. Two days after his dismissal, parliamentary speaker El Malick Ndiaye resigned, saying the decision was guided by his sense of institutions and the national interest, a move that cleared the way for Sonko to seek the post himself. On May 26, lawmakers reinstated Sonko to parliament and then elected him speaker of the National Assembly, with Sonko securing 132 of 133 votes cast after the opposition boycotted the ballot.

The opposition’s leader, Aissata Tall Sall, denounced the move as an “institutional coup,” arguing Sonko should have resigned as prime minister before returning to parliament. Days later, PASTEF held its first-ever party congress on June 6, where members overwhelmingly confirmed Sonko as party leader, positioning him as its likely presidential standard-bearer for 2029; he declared afterward that Senegal was “going to shake.”

Sonko has pushed constitutional changes that speak directly to his rivalry with Faye. Lawmakers approved amendments last week that include a provision barring a sitting president from simultaneously leading a political party, a measure widely read as targeting Faye.

Rather than sign the reforms into law, Faye has chosen to send them to a national referendum, with no date yet announced. That vote, alongside 2027 local elections, is now expected to be the first real test of greater public support between Faye and Sonko, at a moment when Sonko’s PASTEF supermajority could complicate any IMF agreement Senegal badly needs, with two Eurobond repayments due in June and July.