Senegal's ruling party blocks its own budget as debt talks hang on parliament
Pastef, the party of former prime minister Ousmane Sonko, says it will not pass the revised 2026 budget, leaving a $2.2 billion IMF programme and a debt restructuring waiting on the National Assembly.
Senegal’s Pastef party, which holds a large majority in the National Assembly, has said it will not pass the government’s revised budget, leaving the country’s debt restructuring and a $2.2 billion International Monetary Fund programme waiting on a parliament its own ruling party controls.
As Sunday World reported on 25 October, the party led by former prime minister Ousmane Sonko cited disagreements over certain budget decisions, the financing arrangements chosen and what it called insufficient guarantees given to parliament. The same statement said Pastef remained open to engaging with the government on getting a new budget in place.
The numbers in the amended 2026 bill explain why the argument is sharp. Real GDP growth is cut to 2.7% from roughly 5% in the original budget, and the deficit widens to 7.6% of GDP from 5.4%. Driving much of that deterioration is a tripling of energy subsidies, to 790.3 billion CFA francs, about $1.36 billion, from 250 billion.
Senegal’s debt burden reached 132% of gross domestic product by the end of 2024, according to IMF figures, after the government uncovered billions of dollars in misreported borrowing by the previous administration. That disclosure is what set the current restructuring in motion.
In early September the government reached a staff-level agreement with the IMF for a 36-month Extended Credit Facility worth $2.2 billion, roughly R36 billion at the rate used in the reporting. That programme underpins the entire debt restructuring strategy, and it depends on parliamentary approval of the revised budget. Without that approval, the programme risks delay.
Prime Minister Ahmadou Al Aminou Lo plans to hold a press conference on Sunday to discuss the revised budget, which he has described as intended to implement a revised framework aimed at improving the quality of life of Senegalese people.
For South African readers, the shape of the problem will look familiar. A government discovers that borrowing was understated, creditors reprice the risk, the IMF arrives with a programme conditional on budget discipline, and the political cost lands on subsidies and spending that households notice directly. South Africa’s own fiscal position is not Senegal’s, and the figures are not comparable, but the sequence is one this region has watched before: the gap between what a state owes and what it told its parliament it owed becomes the argument that decides everything else.
What happens next turns on whether Pastef’s public refusal holds once the prime minister sets out the budget on Sunday, and on whether the party’s stated willingness to engage produces a revised bill the National Assembly will pass. Until then, the IMF programme and the restructuring that depends on it wait.
