A wave of protests sweeps Senegal after it was proposed to delay the elections until the month of December. Finally, the judges of the court have decided to keep the appointment with the polls as soon as possible, even if it cannot be done on the dates initially planned. A fact that has caused the country’s young people turn to protests to defend their democracy.

“In Senegal we have deep-rooted laws“, comments Ousseynou Samb, who defends: “If each president serves the necessary number of terms, it is time to leave and make way for another. “I think that’s democracy.”

In Senegal there is a Constitutional Council in charge of monitoring the good work of the parliament and its president. No one is above him and his decisions, such as accelerating the electoral process. But any wrong step is very dangerous.

“I thank him (the president) for accepting this decision,” he comments, adding: “There have been no cases in which the president backs down in the face of popular pressurebut getting this far has cost them blood, sweat and deaths.” According to Mario Grande, from Amnesty International, this “repression is being so brutal, that we have already “nearly 60 dead and thousands injured”.

A crisis to which Spain is very attentive. “The crisis in Senegal overlaps with the arrival of migrants here in Spain,” comments Dagauh Komenan, from Casa África. This is because in 2023 our country registered a record number of arrivals in the Canary Islands with more than 40,000 migrants and refugees and the majority were from Senegal. Its young people see in our country a possibility of real change and less and less a place of transit to the rest of Europe.