When Power Erases the Memory of Its Own Birth (Sonko vs. Diomaye)

Keeping one's promise means maintaining oneself where the temptation would be to evade. Diomaye has evaded. Not in the face of his adversaries, but in the face of himself.

The Workers of Oblivion: There are figures that sum up an era. 130 against zero is one of them. One hundred and thirty Pastef deputies out of one hundred and sixty-five, an overwhelming, historic parliamentary majority, unprecedented in the modern political history of Senegal. And yet zero ministers from that same movement in the government just formed by President Bassirou Diomaye Faye. Zero. The number does not lie. It does not plead. It states with the implacable coldness of facts that need no comment to be scandalous.

Political scientists will see a tactical reshuffle. Activists will see a betrayal. Paul Ricœur, for his part, would read something even more serious: a man at odds with himself.

Any complex political situation—and the one we are experiencing is such—carries within it several simultaneously legitimate readings. This is one of the fundamental teachings of hermeneutic philosophy, which makes it an irreplaceable tool in the face of power ruptures.

First reading, that of the demos.

One hundred and thirty deputies out of one hundred and sixty-five. The Senegalese people have spoken with rare, almost intimidating clarity. They have entrusted Pastef with a parliamentary majority that, in any living democracy, normally translates into government presence. It is the elementary grammar of representation, which ensures that universal suffrage is not a ceremony but a foundational act whose consequences bind everyone, including the one who presides over the destiny of the Nation.

Not taking this into account means governing above the people. It means turning the election into folklore.

Second reading, that of the kratos.

The President of the Republic, within the Senegalese constitutional framework, has a sovereign prerogative: to appoint the Prime Minister and form the government. This prerogative is not granted to him by Pastef; it is conferred by the Constitution, in the name of another legitimacy, also derived from universal suffrage. Diomaye Faye was elected President of the Republic, and he acts as such.

He can argue, not without some appearance of right, that he embodies a national will that transcends the boundaries of a party, even if it is the parliamentary majority.

Both readings are real. Both readings are defensible. And it is precisely their coexistence that produces the tension we observe—not a simple political quarrel, but a conflict of legitimacies, in the full philosophical sense of the term.

This type of conflict is not resolved by force; it is overcome by interpretation. By the ability to hold both readings together without crushing one in favor of the other.

Yet that is exactly what Diomaye Faye did not do.

He did not seek synthesis. He chose to ignore the first reading in favor of the second. And in doing so, he opened a wound that the Constitution alone cannot heal.

In Oneself as Another, Ricœur makes a distinction that illuminates our situation with almost surgical precision. He distinguishes two fundamental forms of personal identity, and by extension, political identity.

First, the idem—what a man is in a stable, permanent, substantial way. The substance of what he has been, the sum of what has built him. For Bassirou Diomaye Faye, the idem is inseparable from Pastef. He is its product—political, activist, existential. It is Pastef that carried him, defended him when he was in prison, made him a candidate and then a president. His political identity does not belong to him alone. It results from a collective construction, hard-won through shared sacrifices.

Then the ipse—what a man is in the promise, in the commitment kept over time. The ability to remain faithful to what one has promised to be, even when circumstances change, even when power transforms, even when the temptation to redefine oneself becomes irresistible. This is what the philosopher calls self-constancy, the highest and most demanding form of identity.

So what happened the day Diomaye Faye formed a government without any member of Pastef?

He simultaneously broke with his idem and his ipse.

With his idem, by erasing from the executive the movement that made him. By governing as if Pastef were merely an electoral vehicle, now useless, one gets off once the destination is reached.

With his ipse, by betraying the narrative promise of what he was supposed to embody. For he had not only promised public policies; he had promised a rupture, a refoundation, a collective project carried by a movement. That promise was inscribed in the imagination of millions of Senegalese who voted for Pastef believing they were voting for themselves.

This is narrative perjury—not the ordinary lie of a politician reneging on programmatic commitments. But the rupture of a man with the character he had pledged to be. The dissolution of the self in the very exercise of power meant to fulfill that self.

Keeping one's promise means maintaining oneself where the temptation would be to evade. Diomaye Faye has evaded. Not in the face of his adversaries, but in the face of himself.

And that is infinitely more serious.

We must distinguish natural forgetting—the kind that inevitably occurs in the ordinary course of time—from manipulated forgetting, the kind that is organized, instrumentalized, and elevated into policy. This second forgetting is not a failure of memory. It is a violence done to it.

The government that President Diomaye Faye has just formed is, in this sense, an enterprise of organized forgetting.

Not only because it excludes Pastef—the movement that made the alternation possible—but because it welcomes into its ranks a singular cohort of men and women well known in Senegal's recent political history. Those who yesterday fought what they serve today. Those whose conviction lasted exactly as long as their exclusion from power. Those who have made their own renunciation a calling card, and their selective amnesia a qualification.

The Workers of Oblivion: For this is precisely their function in the apparatus we observe. Each defector integrated into the government is a chapter torn from the book of collective memory, a way of telling the Senegalese people that what they lived through, what they fought against, what some of their own suffered and died for, can be erased, revised, turned inside out like a garment.

Manipulated forgetting is always at the service of a substitute narrative. One does not erase for the pleasure of erasing; one erases in order to rewrite. The question that then imposes itself is this: what narrative is Diomaye Faye writing in place of the one the people entrusted to him?

A narrative where the victors of the alternation no longer have a place in the exercise of the power they conquered. A narrative where those who lived through the years of resistance—imprisonments, humiliations, bereavements—are thanked by their own erasure. A narrative where the defector is worth more than the activist, because the defector does not burden power with his memory.

This is wounded memory in all its brutality—not the memory that naturally suffers from the passage of time, but the one deliberately wounded, out of calculation, convenience, or fear of what it recalls.

And a wounded memory does not disappear. It transforms. It becomes a demand, then anger, then political force. The history of peoples is full of wounded memories that eventually returned, often with a violence proportional to the intensity of the forgetting imposed on them.

Pastef, its activists, its martyrs, its one hundred and thirty deputies have a memory. And that memory has just been wounded.

Great philosophy does not like definitive conclusions. It distrusts thinkers who close what they have opened, who offer certainty where the human condition offers only vertigo. It is in this spirit that we conclude.

Not to absolve. Not to condemn. But to ask, with all the gravity the situation demands, the question that Ricœur himself would have asked.

What becomes of a politician who breaks with the narrative of what he was? What becomes of a power that cuts itself off from the memory that gave it birth, that governs without those who made government possible, that recruits its workers from among those who fought what it is supposed to embody?

Narrative identity is not an acquisition; it is a permanent conquest, fragile, threatened from within as much as from without. A man, a movement, a Nation remain themselves only on condition of holding the thread of their own history, of not letting it go under the pressure of power, convenience, or the temptation to reinvent themselves without memory.

Bassirou Diomaye Faye has let go of that thread.

Today he governs in a strange space—that of a power formally legitimate and narratively orphaned. Legitimate because constitutional. Orphaned because cut off from the history that gave it meaning beyond the mere management of state affairs.

And facing him, in the National Assembly, with his one hundred and thirty deputies, his voice, his intact memory, and his overwhelming popular legitimacy, Ousmane Sonko waits. Not as an ordinary adversary. But as the guardian of the original narrative. As the one who can say, at any moment, we were there before, we will be there after.

In Greek tragedy, he who forgets where he comes from always ends up returning there, but in pain.

The question therefore remains entirely open: how far can one govern against oneself before no longer recognizing oneself?

The answer belongs to history. It belongs to the Senegalese people. It belongs, perhaps, to Bassirou Diomaye Faye himself, if he still has the time, and the courage, to reread himself.