By ADAM NOSSITER
DAKAR, Senegal — A volatile test for this small West African nation’s established democracy unfolded Sunday as voters decided whether the country’s elderly president should be permitted to stay in power.
A woman cast her ballot in Dakar on Sunday.
President Abdoulaye Wade, reported to be 85 but probably older, is seeking a third term in presidential elections in spite of a constitutional limit of two. His decision to press for continued power, sanctified by hand-picked lawyers and judges, has created an uproar in a peaceful country used to looking askance at African neighbors where democratic rules are regularly flouted.
After weeks of sporadic protests downtown, rock-throwing at police and tear-gas volleys in response, voters filled the sandy courtyards of dilapidated school buildings and other polling places Sunday to choose between Mr. Wade, a French-trained lawyer and five-decade veteran of his country’s voluble politics, or one of a field 13 opponents, including three of his six former prime ministers. Mr. Wade himself was loudly booed as he went to vote Sunday in his home precinct in the capital.
At one polling place, a school in the working-class Dakar neighborhood of Ouakam, the mood was largely against the president, who has been in power since 2000. Repeatedly, people expressed anger that Mr. Wade was showing disrespect for the law and Senegal’s tradition of free democracy, strongly anchored here in a country that has never seen a military coup d’état.
And long queues of citizens — much longer than normal, some said — snaked around the low, tan-colored school building to vote under palm trees in brilliant sunshine. Many were young, a group especially disenchanted with the elderly Mr. Wade and hard-hit by the country’s unemployment crisis, with a rate of over 50 percent.
“The country is in danger. We’ve got a president who doesn’t have the right to three terms,” said Mamadou Gueye, a 35-year-old tobacco-company executive.
Mansour Diop, a 41-year-old hospital administrator, said: “We’ve got a president who wants a third term, which is totally against the constitution. It’s not allowed. He tried to force things, and now, see what this has brought.”
Mr Diop added, “I don’t even consider him a candidate.”
There will be a second voting round in March if none of the candidates wins more than 50 percent. Results from the first round are expected later in the week.
Mr. Wade has built roads and highways during his years in power, but his government has also been accused of corruption, an issue that has been raised repeated in American diplomatic cables about Senegal that have been released by Wikileaks. He is also accused of squandering scarce resources in an impoverished, aid-dependent country.
A giant 180-foot high, $27 million Soviet-realism style statue to the “African Renaissance,” erected by Mr. Wade towering over Ouakam, has emerged as a symbol of the president’s misplaced priorities in a country where the poverty rate is well over 50 percent.
“He likes power because he loves the privileges,” said a principal opponent, Macky Sall, one of Mr. Wade’s former prime ministers, in an interview here. “The cars, the planes, the money.”
Senegal’s place on the United Nations Human Development Index has hardly changed under his mandate, and it still must import more than half its rice, the national staple, despite loudly trumpeted but largely unrealized plans to transform the faltering agricultural sector, a major employer for this country of 12.5 million people.
Mr. Wade’s determination to run for a third term has been openly criticized by the country’s principal aid donors, France and the United States, with both countries suggesting in the weeks leading up to the election that he should reconsider. “For us it is somewhat regrettable,” a top State Department official, William Fitzgerald, told French radio in January, commenting on Mr. Wade’s candidacy.
These strictures from abroad have infuriated the prickly Mr. Wade, one of the last of his founding generation of African nationalists. “I am not docile,” Mr. Wade told the French newspaper Journal du Dimanche this weekend. “Like Senghor, I would reply, ‘I am not a Negro house-boy,’ ” he said, referring to the country’s revered founding president, the poet Leopold Sedar Senghor.
Meanwhile, there are fears that the unrest — small-scale so far, with a well-trained police force largely showing restraint — might spill over into something uglier if Mr. Wade is declared the winner.
“If Wade says he has won, I’m afraid it will be like the Ivory Coast,” said one voter Sunday, Alassane Ndiaye, a wood-worker, 34, referring to the recent civil war in that country spurred by the president’s refusal to give up power after losing an election. “It will bring chaos.”
Published: February 26, 2012
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