Taking part in the “Night of Law” in France, at the invitation of Laurent Fabius, President of the French Constitutional Council, Mamadou Badio Camara looked back at the behind-the-scenes management of the file for Macky Sall’s third term submitted to the “seven wise men”. Answering questions from a journalist on a discussion panel between “legal professionals, particularly those who provide the public service of justice on a daily basis”, according to the description on the website of the French Ministry of Justice, the President of the Senegalese Constitutional Council acknowledged having been under a lot of pressure at the time.
“There was a lot of tension, there was a lot of pressure”, he confided. Mr. Camara admits that “it’s perhaps a bit normal, since it’s a presidential election”.
This “wise man” recalled that “the stakes are very high and politicians can be fierce in the face of anything that contradicts or thwarts their project, but we have made the effort to exercise our profession in the manner most consistent with the Constitution and the electoral laws of Senegal.”
According to him, the Constitutional Council was seized, while the question submitted had been settled since 2016. “The [constitutional] provision seems clear,” Badio Camara states. “There was a first term in 2012 and a second term in 2019. A priori, it was over. Except that his supporters raised the idea, as he is an indispensable man, that he had to stay.”
The president of the Constitutional Council adds that Macky Sall “had settled the problem, when a few months before the election, he solemnly declared to the Senegalese Nation that he would not be a candidate in the 2024 presidential election and that he was not seeking a third term.”
Badio Camara reveals that “the opinion was given very quickly on the impossibility of running for a third term, given the constitutional provision that regulates the problem and the fact that the president had just exercised two consecutive terms.”
The rest is history.
