Dakar, Senegal — President Bassirou Diomaye Faye on Friday ended the functions of Prime Minister Ousmane Sonko, a move that immediately dissolved the government and brought a sharp break in the ruling tandem that has led Senegal since April 2024.
The decision was formalized in decree number 2026-1128, signed on Friday 22 May 2026 and citing articles 42, 43, 53 and 56 of the Senegalese Constitution. It removed Sonko, 51, from the post Faye had given him after winning the presidency as the candidate Sonko had backed when he himself was barred from the 2024 presidential election.
Sonko’s removal lands at the end of a relationship that had already shown strain. Faye and Sonko came to power together after the April 2024 alternance, but tensions rose between the two men after they took office, according to the facts provided. Sonko was the founder of PASTEF, and his path to the presidency was blocked in 2024 by a defamation conviction that cost him his civic rights. Faye then appointed him prime minister once in office, binding the two men in a governing partnership that now appears to have been severed.
The dissolution of the government gives the move more weight than a simple personnel change. It does not just remove one prime minister; it resets the entire executive team in a country where the president and the man he once elevated had become the defining political pair. The sources say the government was dissolved immediately after Sonko was dismissed, underscoring how quickly the rupture moved from internal tension to formal break.
The contrast between the official decree and Sonko’s own response was striking. On Friday evening, he posted on Facebook: “Alhamdoulillah. Ce soir, je dormirai le cœur léger à la cité Keur Gorgui.” The message suggested calm at a moment when his political future, and the shape of the government he helped bring to power, had just changed in an instant.
What happens next is now the central question for Senegal’s leadership: how Faye rebuilds his government after dissolving it, and what this split means for the alliance that carried both men from opposition into the executive in April 2024.
