The Missing Link in Electoral Democracy in Francophone Africa

In Francophone Africa, since the early 1990s, the time of a hushed Constitution, placed at the service of political leaders sheltered from indiscreet observation, analysis and criticism, is now over. Thus, the excesses of political practices have called for new paradigms. In Francophone Africa, the major challenge remains to create a happy symbiosis between the political phenomena in progress and the ideology of constitutionalism, by evacuating all the related paradoxes. Today, it requires thinking about new mechanisms and technical tools that make it possible to capture socio-political developments with a view to adapting the constitutional phenomenon to the new realities of African societies. It therefore consists of renewing concepts and reexamining approaches relating to the modes of accession to political power, the arrangement and balance of power. Indeed, the ideology of constitutionalism constitutes an indispensable key to reading and analysing the postulate established for the creation of a new structural and institutional framework adapted to the contexts.