Senegal’s ruling Pastef party has rejected the government’s revised 2026 budget in parliamentary committee and says it will not pass the bill in its current form, reinforcing doubts over how quickly the country can push ahead with its debt restructuring, Reuters reported. Pastef holds 130 of the National Assembly’s 165 seats, so its position makes failure at Tuesday’s floor vote the likely outcome unless the text changes.
The party, led by Ousmane Sonko, objected to certain budgetary decisions, the chosen financing arrangements and the insufficient guarantees provided to parliament. It said parliament is not a mere rubber stamp body, while adding that it does not reject the necessity of revising the budget and remains willing to work with the government on a new text. One committee member, Cheikh Tidiane Youm of the PUR party, said publicly that he was the only deputy to vote for the bill in committee.
The dispute is a rift inside the governing camp. It pits President Bassirou Diomaye Faye’s government against the party of Sonko, the former prime minister Faye dismissed in May, and it has an opposition coalition already describing it as a war between former allies at the expense of the national interest. Prime Minister Ahmadou Al Aminou Lo held a news conference on Sunday to defend the revised framework.
The fiscal stakes are large. IMF figures put Senegal’s public debt at about 132 percent of GDP at the end of 2024, after the government discovered billions of dollars of borrowing that the previous administration had misreported. In early September the government reached a staff level agreement with the IMF on a 2.2 billion dollar, 36 month Extended Credit Facility to support reforms and a wider debt restructuring under an enhanced G20 Common Framework mechanism. The amended budget weakens the outlook the programme was built on: it lowers projected real GDP growth to 2.7 percent, from roughly 5 percent in the initial budget, and raises the expected deficit to 7.6 percent of GDP from 5.4 percent, on higher energy subsidies. Without parliamentary approval of a credible revised budget, the IMF programme and the restructuring timetable slip, in a frontier credit where timing is the story.