Senegal’s budget: the constitutional levers Ousmane Sonko holds against Bassirou Diomaye Faye
Ousmane Sonko is no longer just a former prime minister. As speaker of Senegal’s National Assembly, he now controls the chamber that must approve the 2026 amended finance bill — and the constitution gives him several ways to slow, reshape or sink it.
President Bassirou Diomaye Faye says he is confident that the Pastef majority will pass the 2026 amended finance law. But in the Assembly, Sonko has real levers to delay, rewrite or even bring down the text. The question is what the constitution allows each side to do — and at what cost.
The head of state has no doubt about the outcome. For Faye, Sonko — speaker of the National Assembly and leader of Pastef, which holds a large majority — will have no choice but to join his deputies in approving the amended finance bill in the interest of Senegalese facing a difficult period. That assurance also sounds like a warning to the man who served as his prime minister for two years.
The context has changed profoundly. On 22 May 2026, a presidential decree ended Sonko’s functions at the Primature and those of his government. Ahmadou Al Aminou Lô was appointed prime minister on 25 May 2026, while the Pastef leader took the helm of the National Assembly, replacing El Malick Ndiaye. The 2024 duo has become an institutional face-off, and the 2026 amended finance bill is now its first battleground.
The text does not arrive in a calm climate. After the agreement reached with the International Monetary Fund, which still needs approval from its board, the government prepared the amended finance bill. Sonko publicly demanded clarifications on the content of the agreement and on debt treatment. After weeks of controversy over the transmission of the file, the Assembly confirmed it had regularly received the 2026 amended finance bill, along with the president’s transmission letter and the presentation decree, on Friday 18 September 2026.
The vote: a majority’s first weapon
On paper, nothing obliges deputies to adopt a finance bill. The constitution gives the National Assembly alone the power to vote laws and scrutinise government action. With 130 of 165 seats won in the November 2024 legislative elections, Pastef can reject the text in plenary session without any ally. That is the most direct path, but also the most politically risky: a frontal refusal would make Sonko’s party responsible for a possible public finance blockage in the middle of negotiations with the IMF.
The president cannot count on defections to reverse the trend either. Article 60 of the constitution provides that any deputy who resigns from their party during the legislature is automatically stripped of their mandate. This lock protects Pastef’s group discipline and limits the room for manoeuvre of the Diomaye Président coalition inside the chamber.
Between adoption and rejection, deputies have a third, more subtle path. Article 82 strictly frames their right to amend budget matters: no additional article or amendment to a finance bill is admissible unless it aims to remove or effectively reduce an expenditure, or to create or increase a revenue. In other words, the majority cannot inflate credits, but it can cut spending planned by the government. A way to deeply rewrite the executive’s arbitrations, notably those tied to commitments made with the IMF, without a straight rejection.
The government, however, has a counter. The same Article 82 allows it to request a single vote on all or part of the text, retaining only the amendments it proposed or accepted. This procedure forces deputies to decide as a bloc, bringing them back to the original dilemma: adopt the text as the executive wants or assume its rejection.
Playing for time: a double-edged strategy
The Assembly presidency gives Sonko real influence over the work calendar. But Article 84 sharply reduces the possibility of burying the text: priority inscription of a bill on the agenda is a right once the president or prime minister demands it.
Above all, time works against an obstruction strategy. Article 68 sets the Assembly’s deadline to vote finance bills at sixty days at most. If the text is not definitively voted by that deadline, it is brought into force by decree, taking into account amendments voted by deputies and accepted by the president. With the deposit registered on 18 September, that deadline falls around 17 November 2026. Letting the examination drag on would therefore offer Faye the chance to promulgate his budget without parliament’s approval.
A grey area remains, however. The constitution explicitly provides for a text “not voted” within the deadline, but is silent on the hypothesis of a formal rejection in session. Whether recourse to decree remains open after an explicit negative vote could then be brought before the Constitutional Council, which Article 74 allows one tenth of deputies to seize.
The executive has another tool, already used in December 2024 to adopt the 2025 budget, when Sonko himself led the government. Article 86 allows the prime minister, after deliberation by the Council of Ministers, to engage the government’s responsibility on the vote of a finance bill. The text is then considered adopted, unless a censure motion, filed within twenty-four hours, is passed by an absolute majority of Assembly members.
That is where the Pastef majority regains its full power. A censure motion requires only the signature of one tenth of deputies to be admissible, and 83 votes to pass. Pastef is well above that threshold. If Ahmadou Al Aminou Lô’s government chose this path, Sonko’s deputies could not only fail the budget but also bring down the government. A formidable weapon, but heavy with consequences, since it would open a governmental crisis just weeks before the date from which the head of state regains his power of dissolution.
2 December: the deadline that balances forces
This is the other key element of the power struggle. Article 87 authorises the president to dissolve the National Assembly after consulting the prime minister and the speaker, but bans any dissolution during the first two years of the legislature. Installed on 2 December 2024, the current Assembly is protected until 2 December 2026. Asked about a possible dissolution, Faye himself recalled that this date had not yet been reached.
The calendar thus draws a tight sequence. The sixty-day deadline to vote the amended finance bill expires in mid-November, a few days before the head of state can send deputies back to voters. A prolonged budget blockage would give Faye a strong argument to justify dissolution, while a smooth adoption would deprive the president of that political lever.
In the end, Sonko does have the constitutional means to block or rewrite Faye’s budget — through rejection, reduction amendments or censure. But each option exposes him to a high political cost, against an executive that keeps the Article 68 decree, the Article 86 responsibility engagement and, soon, the Article 87 dissolution in hand. More than a legal question, the examination of the 2026 amended finance bill looks like a full-scale test of the new cohabitation between the palace and the chamber.