Silence Is Complicity: How Xenophobic Populism Erodes Senegal’s and the World’s Red Lines (Cheikh Cherif MBALLO)

The author warns that xenophobic populism, which pits “the people” against elites and turns economic anxiety into hostility toward foreigners, threatens democracies. In Senegal, President Bassirou Diomaye Faye’s dismissal of Prime Minister Ousmane Sonko in May deepened a split within the governing camp; Sonko was later elected president of the National Assembly, creating a second center of power. The piece recalls how silence enabled propaganda before the 1994 Rwandan genocide and also cites the Ku Klux Klan, the European far right’s “remigration” agenda, and the nostalgic presentation of apartheid in South Africa.