(Bloomberg) -- President Bassirou Diomaye Faye is expected to call fresh parliamentary elections in a bid to secure a majority and push through reforms after winning power earlier this year.
Africa’s youngest elected leader called an extraordinary session of parliament for Thursday and sacked the heads of two key councils after lawmakers voted against dissolving the two entities. He says he wants to scrap them to root out graft and address excessive public spending, with the move expected to save 15 billion CFA francs ($25 million) a year.
Faye can bring parliament to a close from Sept. 12 and new elections must be held within 90 days. This would likely prolong wrangling between the president and those aligned to his predecessor Macky Sall and delay work on the 2025 budget, Eurasia Group said in an emailed note.
The electoral campaign “will prolong uncertainty and distract from governance over the rest of the year,” the risk adviser’s analysts wrote.
Senegal’s dollar bonds maturing in 2048, 2032 and 2033 were the worst performers Thursday in a Bloomberg index on sovereign debt from emerging and frontier markets.
Faye, 44, won March’s presidential election only days after he was freed from prison, and has pledged to overhaul government institutions, tackle corruption and address rising living costs. His landslide victory against ruling party candidate Amadou Ba was based in part on the frustration of Senegalese youth over a lack of jobs and poor governance in one of the world’s fastest-growing economies.
About a fifth of the working-age population is unemployed and more than a third of the nation’s 18 million inhabitants live in poverty, according to official data.
Prime Minister Ousmane Sonko, in a video shared by news site Seneweb on Wednesday, addressed lawmakers threatening him with a motion of no confidence, saying “on the 12th these people will have other things to do than being members of the National Assembly.”
--With assistance from Colleen Goko.
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