President Bassirou Diomaye Faye insists the Pastef majority will approve the 2026 revised finance law. Yet inside the National Assembly, Ousmane Sonko holds genuine tools to slow, reshape, or even bring down the bill. The real question is what the Constitution allows each side to do — and at what cost.

The head of state has no doubt about the outcome. For Bassirou Diomaye Faye, Ousmane Sonko — speaker of the National Assembly and Pastef leader, whose party commands a vast majority in the chamber — will have no choice but to join his deputies in validating the revised finance law in the interest of Senegalese citizens facing hard times. That assurance also sounds like a warning to the man who served as his prime minister for two years.

The context has changed profoundly. On 22 May 2026, a presidential decree ended Ousmane Sonko’s duties at the Primature and those of his government. Ahmadou Al Aminou Lô was appointed prime minister on 25 May 2026, while the Pastef leader took the helm of the National Assembly, replacing El Malick Ndiaye. The 2024 duo has become an institutional face-off, and the 2026 revised finance law is now its first battleground.

The text does not arrive in a calm climate. After the agreement reached with the International Monetary Fund, which still needs approval from its board, the government prepared this revised finance bill. Ousmane Sonko has publicly demanded clarifications on the content of the agreement and on how the debt is being handled. After weeks of controversy over the transmission of the file, the Assembly confirmed it had duly received the 2026 revised finance bill, along with the president’s transmittal letter and the presentation decree, on Friday 18 September 2026.

First weapon: a crushing majority at the ballot

On paper, nothing forces deputies to adopt a finance bill. The Constitution gives the National Assembly alone the power to vote laws and scrutinize government action. With 130 of 165 seats won in the November 2024 legislative elections, Pastef can reject the text in plenary session without needing a single ally. It is the most direct route, but also the most politically risky: a frontal refusal would make Sonko’s party bear responsibility for a potential public finance blockage in the middle of negotiations with the IMF.

The head of state cannot count on defections to reverse the trend either. Article 60 of the Constitution provides that any deputy who resigns from their party during the legislature is automatically stripped of their mandate. This lock protects Pastef’s group discipline and limits the room for manoeuvre of the Diomaye Président coalition inside the chamber.

Between adoption and rejection, deputies have a third, subtler path. Article 82 strictly frames their right of amendment on budgetary matters: no additional article or amendment to a finance bill is admissible unless it aims to delete or effectively reduce an expenditure, or to create or increase a revenue. In other words, the majority cannot inflate credits, but it can cut into the spending planned by the government. A way to deeply rewrite the executive’s arbitrations, especially those tied to commitments made with the IMF, without resorting to outright rejection.

The government, however, has a counter. The same Article 82 allows it to request a single vote on all or part of the text, retaining only the amendments it has proposed or accepted. This procedure forces deputies to decide as a bloc, bringing them back to the original dilemma: adopt the text as the executive wants it, or accept its rejection.

Playing for time: a double-edged strategy

The speakership gives Ousmane Sonko real influence over the work calendar. But Article 84 sharply reduces the possibility of burying the text: priority inclusion of a bill on the agenda is a right as soon as the President of the Republic or the prime minister requests it.

Above all, time works against an obstruction strategy. Article 68 sets a maximum of sixty days for the Assembly to vote finance bills. If the text is not definitively voted by the end of that period, it is brought into force by decree, taking into account amendments voted by deputies and accepted by the President of the Republic. Since the bill was filed on 18 September, that deadline falls around 17 November 2026. Letting the examination drag on would therefore hand Diomaye Faye the possibility of promulgating his budget without parliamentary approval.

A grey area remains, however. The Constitution explicitly provides for a text “not voted” within the deadlines, but is silent on the hypothesis of a formal rejection in session. Whether recourse to decree remains open after an explicit negative vote could then be brought before the Constitutional Council, which Article 74 allows one-tenth of deputies to refer.

The executive has another tool, already used in December 2024 to adopt the 2025 budget, when Ousmane Sonko himself was leading the government. Article 86 allows the prime minister, after deliberation by the Council of Ministers, to engage the government’s responsibility on the vote of a finance bill. The text is then considered adopted, unless a censure motion, filed within twenty-four hours, is passed by an absolute majority of Assembly members.

This is where the Pastef majority recovers all its power. A censure motion requires only the signature of one-tenth of deputies to be admissible, and 83 votes to be adopted. Pastef easily holds that threshold. If Ahmadou Al Aminou Lô’s government chose this path, Sonko’s deputies could not only sink the budget but also topple the government. A formidable weapon, but heavy with consequences, since it would open a government crisis just weeks before the date from which the head of state regains his power of dissolution.

2 December: the deadline that defines the balance of forces

This is the other key element of the power struggle. Article 87 authorizes the President of the Republic to dissolve the National Assembly after consulting the prime minister and the speaker, but forbids any dissolution during the first two years of the legislature. Installed on 2 December 2024, the current Assembly is protected until 2 December 2026. Asked about a possible dissolution, Bassirou Diomaye Faye himself recalled that this date had not yet been reached.

The calendar thus draws a tight sequence. The sixty-day deadline to vote the revised finance law expires in mid-November, a few days before the head of state can send deputies back to voters. A prolonged budget blockage would give Diomaye Faye a strong argument to justify dissolution, while a smooth adoption would deprive the president of that political lever.

In the end, Ousmane Sonko does have the constitutional means to block or rewrite Bassirou Diomaye Faye’s budget — through rejection, through reduction amendments, or through censure. But each of these options exposes him to a high political cost, against an executive that still holds the Article 68 decree, the Article 86 engagement of responsibility and, soon, the Article 87 dissolution. More than a legal question, the examination of the 2026 revised finance law is shaping up as a full-scale test of the new cohabitation between the Palace and the chamber.