QPOLITICS 2006: THE YEAR OF "ANYTHING CAN HAPPEN!"

C O N F I D E N T I A L SECTION 01 OF 02 DAKAR 000565

SIPDIS

SIPDIS

E.O. 12958: DECL: 03/06/11
TAGS: PGOV, PINR, SG
SUBJECT:QPOLITICS 2006: THE YEAR OF "ANYTHING CAN
HAPPEN!"

REF: A) DAKAR 0316; B) 05 DAKAR 2311

CLASSIFIED BY POLITICAL COUNSELOR ROY L. WHITAKER, FOR
REASONS 1.5 (B) AND (D).

SUMMARY
--------------
1. (C) Senegalese predict "anything can happen" in the
run-up to parliamentary and presidential elections. Some
even believe the February 2007 election date may be reset
for constitutional, logistic or other reasons. President
Wade may establish a vice-presidency and Senate -- new
senior jobs to offer disgruntled loyalists or potential
allies. Neither Wade nor ex-PM Seck seem to have figured
out an advantageous way to resolve their dispute, and
Seck is hearing conflicting advice on whether to work
with Wade or challenge him. The opposition remains
fractured, leaderless and unimaginative. Some light-
heavyweight political and religious leaders want to
create a "third force." END SUMMARY.

THE POLITICS OF MALLEABLE INSTITUTIONS
--------------
2. (C) Wade critics complain that he has "personalized
politics ... and places his own political interests above
republican institutions." Be that as it may, he does
like to keep opponents off-balance and his majority in
parliament enables him to do so. He called for
postponing National Assembly elections by a year to
coincide with scheduled 2007 presidential election. Yet,
as the president of the national election commission
(CENA) has told the Charge, Wade has not obtained
parliamentary approval to do so, leaving doubt about his
intentions. The most cynical Wade haters think that,
having persuaded people he has authority to extend
Parliament's mandate, Wade may seize any pretext that
arises (a national crisis of some sort, the financial
burden of an election, etc.) to extend his own.

3. (C) Feeding public suspicion is the sorry state of
preparations for the new electoral system. 2.4 million
potential voters have registered to date, with slightly
more women than men. The new deadline for registering is
May 31. While the CENA seems relatively optimistic,
opposition leaders predict it will soon be logistically
impossible to register all voters before the campaign.
There are complaints in the provinces of inadequate
staff, inefficient location of registration offices,
electricity brown-outs in peak hours, and an alleged
tendency to provide more facilities to pro-Wade areas.
If voters are not registered in time, critics fear, there
would be three bad options: proceed although the voters
rolls may not fairly represent all voters; revert to the
old electoral system with all the confusion that would
bring; or, postpone elections.

4. (C) We have heard speculation for months that Wade
would recreate a Senate to provide him senior-level
patronage jobs to parcel out, either to long-term PDS
loyalists or to opposition leaders willing to turn their
coats. A Vice-Presidency offers an even more tantalizing
set of options: Wade could name his VP and thereby
anoint a successor; he could break the opposition's back
by offering the job to its co-leader, Moustapha Niasse;
or he could even design it as a bucket-of-warm-spit
position with which to lure Seck's campaign support but
in which to exile Seck later. PM Macky Sall recently
pressed the Charge with questions about how the U.S.
vice-presidency and Senate are set up and function.

THE PRIME MINISTER'S STRAYING GOATS
--------------
5. (C) Macky Sall declared February 26 in Matam that
the PDS is an enclosure of goats (un enclos de chevres),
and that you are either in the goat-pen or outside it.
Sall is traveling to provincial cities to work with PDS
local leaders on selecting parliamentary candidates. In
numerous instances, there is clearly a need to knock
heads and enforce discipline, but we are hearing that
Sall lacks the forcefulness or clout to do so
effectively. He has no real power to sanction the
uncooperative; Seck's sympathizers in the party resent
him; and unless and until the new Senate is created, he
has nothing to offer longtime Wade loyalists or ex-
Socialist turncoats and local clans who are competing for
the limited available spoils. Time and again, we hear
that only Wade keeps the PDS from disintegrating into
personality-centered and self-interested factions with
nothing in common save the search for power.

THE OPPOSITION'S FRENZIED TORPOR
--------------

DAKAR 00000565 002 OF 002


6. (C) The opposition lacks a leader to overcome its
lack of common goals or organizational inefficiency.
While loud and furious about Wade's alleged electoral
manipulations and contempt for republican institutions,
the opposition often appears immobile. Most believe Wade
will drop the current two-round election for a "first-
past-the-post" single round, for example, but each
opposition party, and a rebel Socialist faction, is
intent on running a candidate for president. The key
relationship in the opposition is between the Socialists
and Moustapha Niasse and there has been talk of one
becoming president and the other Prime Minister if they
win. Yet they have not shaken hands on the deal. Nor
have the ex-Marxist Democratic League and PIT been fully
integrated.

A THIRD FORCE
--------------
7. (C) Two days after release from prison (Ref A),
Idrissa Seck had dinner with those who had visited him in
prison. In addition to the Lebanese-Senegalese ecologist
party leader Ali Haydar and former Wade confidant Jean
Paul Diaz, his guests were the young political activist
Talla Sylla and Serigne Mamoune Niasse, head of a small
political party and a leading marabout in the Kaolack
branch of the Tidjane Brotherhood. Sylla and Niasse
offered Seck similar advice.

8. (C) Sylla told us he urged Seck to challenge Wade
now for the presidency, and to circumvent the hapless
opposition's unappealing bosses with a new alliance.
Seck's de facto prime ministerial running mate would be
Mamadou Lamine Loum, who headed the last Socialist
government in 1998-2000 (Ref B). In the parliamentary
election, Sylla would head the new alliance's candidate
list.

9. (C) In a later conversation, Mamoune Niasse told us
he wants to form a "third pole" alternative to the PDS
and opposition. This new force would at first work as a
national mediator to "redress" the country's problems.
If this did not succeed, though, then the third force
would attempt to win the presidency and parliament.
Niasse's chief of protocol was earlier chief of protocol
to Prime Ministers Seck and Loum.

COMMENT
--------------
10. (SBU) Wade's friends and hangers-on seem rather
amused that he has successfully created so much confusion
in the ranks of the opposition. His critics are
exasperated, though, and the Senegalese-in-the-street is
puzzled by what one professor and labor leader described
to us as "unprecedented political and institutional
uncertainty and instability."

11. (C) We cannot really judge if the current
incertitude is unprecedented, but we are intrigued by a
related argument. This is that politics in Senegal used
to be linear, with events proceeding in logical and
predictable patterns. Wade, however, has supposedly
changed the way politics works, with emphasis on personal
rather than institutional leadership; greater
identification of the ruling party with the state; and a
greater willingness to adapt rules, including electoral
law or the penal code, to exigencies identified or
defined by the President.

12. (C) As we have noted before, the President's April
4 Independence Day speech will give him the opportunity
to clarify the electoral calendar. He may even do so
before then. There will still be considerable political
flux, however, as internal PDS factions battle it out;
ex-PM Seck decides to challenge Wade, stay on the
sidelines or run for Parliament; the opposition sinks
deeper or emerges from its muddle; and young leaders
dissatisfied with both Wade and the opposition seek ways
to create a third political force.
Jackson