In less than 24 hours leading up to the 5 February parliamentary vote on postponing Senegal’s presidential elections, the hashtag #FreeSenegal shot up the trending charts on X.
It’s a hashtag that is ‘for the most part coupled with the term coup d’état’, reports the website Afrique Connectées, which by midday on Sunday, 4 February, had counted more than 20,000 tweets using it. A day later, there were more than 200,000 – despite the announcement that the mobile internet network had been cut off at the request of the authorities, following the clashes provoked by President Macky Sall’s announcement that the presidential election would be postponed indefinitely.
In a press release, the Senegalese ministry of communication, telecommunications and digital technologies justified the request for suspending mobile data by ‘several hateful and subversive messages relayed on social networks in a context of threats of public order disturbances’.
This resurgence of #FreeSenegal is significant for the authorities. In 2021, it was this hashtag that accompanied the protests against the arrest of opposition politician Ousmane Sonko.
On Sunday, as clashes between protesters and police shook the capital, several prominent figures took to social networks to make it known they had been arrested. Sall’s former prime minister, Aminata Touré, announced that she had been “taken to the gendarmerie” before returning to X six hours later to say she had been arrested “for no serious reason” and to call for action “in defence of democracy”.
Après une arrestation sans raison sérieuse j’ai été libérée.
Merci à tous pour la solidarité et le soutien. Mobilisons-nous tous pour la défense de notre Démocratie!
Non au report de l’élection présidentielle du 25 février 2024!#FreeSenegal
— Aminata TOURE (@aminatatoureklk) February 5, 2024
Clashes
Anta Babacar Ngom, a presidential candidate, also used X to announce that she had been arrested and continued to broadcast images of her supporters clashing with the security forces, apparently from the police station where she was being held. A few hours later, she too announced her release on social networks and called for people to demonstrate.
Some posters have taken to English to drum up international support in the wake of the vote.
Good morning. Press release by Matthew Miller of the United States – State Department, clearly stating the conditions of the National Assembly vote were illegal (opposition removed by force by riot police) & calling for internet restrictions to be lifted #FreeSenegal pic.twitter.com/VFMWS29Yy7
— Certified Sneaker Girl🇸🇳 (@NestaWane) February 7, 2024
Memes and memory lane
On social media, opponents of the postponement are not content to simply relay these calls for action. They have also been making memes in the hope of their message going viral. One photo, clearly generated by artificial intelligence, shows Sall in the uniform of a military coup leader and is proving particularly popular across X, Facebook and WhatsApp.
Many have also used the platforms to post an old clip of Sall from 2012, in which he declares: “Postponing an election is not possible. You can postpone local elections, that’s fine. You can postpone legislative elections, that’s fine. But the president of the Republic cannot extend his term of office. It’s impossible.”
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