In most countries, a political rally is just that: a show of force, a speech, some slogans, and everyone goes home. What happened in Senegal on November 8 was something more subtle.

When Ousmane Sonko announced, before the event, that there would be “a before November 8, a November 8, and an after November 8,” it sounded like pure rhetoric. In fact it was closer to a line from a contract. He was not only talking to the crowd. He was talking to the president, to the militants, and to history, and he was setting the rules of a game.

To see that, you have to look at the sequence not as gossip about personalities, but as a problem in information and incentives. Once you do that, November 8 starts to look less like a spontaneous explosion and more like a carefully chosen mechanism.

### The secret everyone suspects, but cannot observe

The central uncertainty inside the camp is simple enough to state.

Is President Bassirou Diomaye Faye what we can call a Loyal type, someone who sees his presidency as a mandate to implement the Project that brought PASTEF to power, with the implicit understanding that 2029 belongs to Sonko and the movement?

Or is he an Autonomist type, someone who intends to build his own durable machine, under his own name, with his own alliances, including the old political class the Project had promised to sanction?

Here is the asymmetry. Sonko has seen the private conversations in prison, the detailed negotiations, the early choices in office. It is very plausible that he already knows which type of president he has in front of him. Militants do not. They only see partial signals: who gets appointed, who appears on TV next to whom, which figures are rehabilitated.

So the leader who actually knows the type faces a classic problem: if he simply announces, “trust me, he is not loyal to the Project,” it can always be read as ego or jealousy. The information may be true, but it is not credible.

That is exactly the kind of situation mechanism design was invented for.

### November 8 as a designed test

In the language of game theory, Sonko faces a choice over mechanisms. He can let politics evolve quietly, or he can create a public event that changes how future actions will be interpreted.

Call that second option a clarification mechanism. November 8 is precisely that.

Once he stands in front of hundreds of thousands of people and says there will be a before, a November 8, and an after, he is not just promising drama. He is committing to a particular information structure. He is telling militants to treat anything that happens after that date as a test.

From that point on, the president has a move. Roughly speaking, he can do one of two things.

He can realign with the core of the Project and of PASTEF. In practice that means resisting the temptation to give central political roles to figures from the old regime and avoiding the construction of a separate label, separate party and separate network around the presidency.

Or he can keep moving forward with what looks like the construction of an autonomous political machine. That means letting the “Diomaye Président” logic grow, accepting former BBY barons, giving weight to people whose names are tightly tied to the previous system, in exchange for their networks and clientelist capacity.

A Loyal president does not like this second path. It dirties the Project and damages his standing in the eyes of the base. An Autonomist president likes it, because that is how you build your own force quickly.

So the mechanics are simple. Once November 8 is in place as a focal point, Sonko does not need to accuse anyone directly. He only needs to say, effectively: “This is the date after which you should watch what he does.” If the president continues down the road of old regime alliances, militants themselves will update their beliefs about his type.

For game theorists, this is a screening equilibrium. Sonko already knows the type. November 8 is not for him to learn. It is designed so that different types of president will choose different patterns of behavior afterward and so that militants will know how to interpret those patterns.

### Two militant worlds, two thresholds

Reality, of course, is never as clean as “pure” and “corrupt”. There is not a binary switch between PASTEF and BBY. There is a mix of technocrats, long time allies, recent converts, and veterans of the old regime who suddenly discover their love for the revolution.

A useful way to think about this is to split the militant world into two groups.

The base is the rank and file. They are the ones who marched, who went to prison, who believed in the Project as a moral break with the past. Their emotional allegiance is to Sonko and to the idea of a radical clean up of the state. For them, bringing in old regime actors is not a neutral move. It is felt as a betrayal of the original contract.

The cadres are the people who now occupy ministries, directorates, advisory roles. They are closer to day to day power. Their incentives are more complex. Some are sincere idealists. Some are pure careerists. Many are simply cautious: they prefer not to clearly pick a side between the president and the historical leader until they know how the story ends.

These two worlds do not react to the same signals in the same way.

Imagine that the president chooses an alliance mix that we can summarise as a number between 0 and 1. At 0 you have almost purely technocratic and “clean” allies. At 1 you have a heavy dose of old regime political figures and actors who were clearly part of the previous system. In between you have all the shades of grey that journalists and rumor networks feed on.

Nobody sees the true number. What they see is a noisy signal. One day a name appears in a decree. The next day a minister talks about “opening up” to other political forces. Then an ex BBY heavyweight joins the coalition. People form an impression, but it is imprecise.

What our model says is that each faction has a belief threshold. Below that threshold, they still find it plausible that the president is Loyal to the Project. Above that threshold, they conclude he is not.

Because the base is stricter, its threshold is lower. It needs a very clean environment to keep believing. The cadres have a higher tolerance for ambiguity, or for compromise, depending on how charitable you want to be. They may continue to accept the president as legitimate carrier of the Project even when the base has switched off.

This fits the social reality almost too well. After November 8, as names like Aminata Touré and other historically contested figures circulate, you see exactly that split. A large part of the base feels something fundamental has been violated. Many cadres go quiet, hedge, or talk about strategy and long term vision.

In the language of the model, the president’s choice of alliance mix sends a noisy signal. As that signal drifts upward, the probability that he is Loyal in the eyes of militants falls. The base reaches its cut off earlier. The cadres reach theirs later, if at all.

### Why Sonko does not leave the government

There is another puzzle that makes more sense in this light: why does Sonko insist that he will not leave the government, even as he criticises the direction of the presidency?

From the outside, it would be easy to say: if you think the revolution is being stolen, just resign. But that misunderstands his stated objective.

If his goal were to protect his personal brand, exit would be a natural threat. If his goal is to protect the Project, exit is the worst possible move. Leaving would give the president and his new allies full control of the machinery of the state, with no internal counterweight. It would be the opposite of what he promised militants when he said he would not let the revolution be stolen.

In the model language, this simply means that Sonko has no credible outside option. He cannot threaten to walk away, because that would contradict his own narrative about working for Senegal and not for an individual. That is precisely why he needs mechanisms that operate inside the government, not outside it.

The November 28 speech at the Assembly fits that logic perfectly.

When he says that November 8 was about clarification, he is explaining the mechanism. When he insists that he and the president work together institutionally and that any divergences are political, he is sending a signal to militants: “I am not trying to destabilise the state, I am trying to protect the Project.”

And when he adds that he does not work for Diomaye but for Senegal, under Diomaye’s authority, and that everything will be counted on Diomaye’s mandate, he is doing something quite cold. He is assigning accountability.

Translated into the model: I will stay. I will implement policies in the name of Senegal. But if the alliances chosen around the presidency degrade the Project, history will record that as a property of this mandate and of this president, not as a betrayal from my side.

He is separating institutional obedience from political responsibility.

### Not just Senegal

Viewed through this lens, the Sonko Diomaye sequence is not a local curiosity. It is a textbook instance of a more general problem that appears every time a movement transfers its symbolic capital to a successor.

A leader builds a Project and a base over years. When blocked from running, he or she empowers someone else. That person gains access to the full infrastructure of the state and then faces a choice: remain a steward of the original Project or construct a personal empire out of it.

In these moments, the original leader has only three real options.

He can stay silent and watch the Project be diluted. He can openly attack the successor and be accused of sabotage. Or he can, if he is clever, design situations where the successor’s choices reveal themselves in ways that ordinary supporters can understand and use to update their judgments.

November 8 was not only a rally. It was a public commitment to treat the future as a test. It is no coincidence that in his later explanation Sonko uses the word “clarification”. That is exactly what the mechanism was meant to produce.

For political scientists, this is a rich case study in intra party mechanism design, belief updating and elite signalling. For militants, it is something more direct: an explanation of why they feel there really is a before November 8 and an after, and why the story is now being written less by what is said in speeches and more by who is invited to sit at the table.