Postcards from Dakar: Local Elections

March 22nd was local election day in Senegal. I don’t feel like I ever got complete answers to my questions about what was going on and how the elections worked, but I figured some things out. The elections were for positions like mayor and city council kind of people, I think. In presidential elections, you vote for candidates, but in local elections, you vote for parties/coalitions and get the whole ticket of which ever party wins. During the campaigning, posters went up on all the billboards and basically every stationary fixture with the names and faces of all the parties and some of what they were promising to do. There would be neighborhood rallies and something like parades, lead by pickup trucks full of people and speaker systems that would play music or shout things in Wolof that may have been encouragements to go vote, explanation of the party’s platform, or denunciations of the other parties. It was also very common to see posters defaced and political graffiti go up over night.

I asked all my voting-aged siblings if they were going to vote and if they did, who were they going to vote for, but they all said that they probably weren’t going to vote and didn’t know much about who was running and why. Danny said he might vote for the sake of voting against the President’s coalition, which was in the majority (of what, I don’t really know) and not really because he felt strongly about any of the other parties.

The weekend of the elections came, and we were all warned not to go out on Sunday because of the possibility of violent demonstrations. Also, no one in all of Senegal was allowed to travel between two cities that day because it could be potentially dangerous. Things don’t usually get out of hand during elections in Senegal, but as Danny said, “In Africa, you never know.”

Nothing bad happened, and as it turned out, my host mom, Anita, and Moussouba all voted! Why did they tell me they weren’t going to when they actually were? I would have liked to have gone with them. They were all proud of it too. They showed me their little fingers that had been dipped in bright pink into to show that they had voted, and told me “J’ai voté!” with big smiles on their faces. Well, good for them, I guess. Danny, who was the only one who had expressed the possibility of voting, hadn’t voted at all. He said he’d lost his voter ID card (which is a card that looks practically identical to the other ID card that everyone has to have here).

The results of the election were apparently a huge upset for the President, Abdoulaye Wade (who’s in his 80s), and the Sopi coalition in power. In Dakar and other big towns like Saint-Louis and Louga, an opposition party called Bennoo Siggil Senegaal got voted into power. People here are saying that that’s a good thing, because it means that there will be a more equitable sharing of power in the government now, and because it sends a message to the President that the Senegalese people aren’t pleased with how he’s handing things. It also reduced the chances that his son, Karim, will succeed him as president in 2012.