VZCZCXRO8820
PP RUEHPA
DE RUEHDK #0565/01 0651014
ZNY CCCCC ZZH
P 061014Z MAR 06
FM AMEMBASSY DAKAR
TO RUEHC/SECSTATE WASHDC PRIORITY 4472
INFO RUEHZK/ECOWAS COLLECTIVE

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