Senegal's president looks to win parliamentary majority

Senegal's president looks to win parliamentary majority

DAKAR (AFP): Senegal's President Abdoulaye Wade looked poised on Monday to win a parliamentary majority on early election results, a year after dealing a first blow to socialists entrenched in power for four decades.

The Sopi coalition backing Wade, who won a presidential poll in March last year, was set to take between 45 and 53 percent of the 120 National Assembly seats on unofficial results from Sunday's general election.

Some analysts and newspapers were already saying that Sopi, which means "change" in the Wolof language, and groups political movements around Wade's Senegalese Democratic Party (PDS), had won the "third round of the presidential poll".

For the Socialist Party and other opposition movements, these results appeared to crush their hopes of preventing the 75-year- old economic liberal and longtime opposition leader, of swinging parliament firmly behind him.

The private Sud Quotidien said Sopi had captured 53 percent of votes, against 25 percent for the Alliance of Forces for Progress (AFP) and 16 percent for the former ruling Socialist Party.

"Tidal wave for Sopi," read the headline in Monday's independent Walfadjiri, while Le Soleil daily said: "Wade is confirmed..., Sopi the big winner."

Observers agreed, however, that the victory for the presidential coalition was less an endorsement of the track record of Wade's first year in office than an expression of continuing hope in the promises of change he made on taking office.

Wade has considerable charisma and campaigned tirelessly to gain a majority for his backers, drawing criticism from his rivals for getting involved in the election himself.

The socialists and other opposition parties focussed their campaigns on the president's "amateurism", lack of experience in office and his failure to tackle social issues such as high unemployment, an ailing welfare service and big problems in the educational sector.