Senegal

Senegal is a francophone West African country of around 18.5–19 million people, with its capital at Dakar and the CFA franc (XOF, pegged to the euro) as its currency. The defining political development of the review period was the presidential election of 24 March 2024, in which Bassirou Diomaye Faye, backed by Ousmane Sonko’s PASTEF movement and the Diomaye Président coalition, won on the first round with 54.28 percent of the vote. Inaugurated on 2 April 2024, Faye appointed Sonko Prime Minister and within six months replaced the leadership of all three tracked state-media institutions: Pape Alé Niang at RTS (24 April 2024), Lamine Niang at SSPP/Le Soleil (15 May 2024), and Momar Diongue at APS (2 October 2024), with Sadikh Top appointed Chair of APS’s Board on 23 October 2024. After months of tensions over IMF programme negotiations and economic strategy, Faye dismissed Sonko on 22 May 2026 and appointed economist Ahmadou Al Aminou Lo as Prime Minister on 25 May 2026; Sonko was then elected Speaker of the National Assembly on 26 May 2026 with 132 of 133 votes, preserving a powerful second pole within the governing camp. The supervising ministry, restructured during the Faye/Sonko government as the Ministère de la Communication, des Télécommunications et du Numérique (MCTN), was headed by Minister Alioune Sall; his status in the Lo government should be confirmed against the final cabinet list before publication.

The regulatory environment was significantly reshaped. The CNRM media-regulation reform, adopted on 3 March 2026, is intended to replace the audiovisual-focused CNRA (Law n° 2006-04 of 4 January 2006) with a broader regulator covering print, online media, digital platforms, foreign media accessible in Senegal, disinformation and AI-generated content. The Constitutional Council partially censured the law on 7 April 2026, striking down provisions allowing the regulator to order the closure of media outlets, and placing strict interpretive safeguards, including judicial control, around enforcement measures such as recourse to the force publique. In December 2025, the Supreme Court annulled two ministerial orders that had created a media-registration platform and validation commission, invalidating sanctions imposed on outlets under that system. Senegal ranked 78th of 180 in the 2026 RSF Press Freedom Index (score 58.11, “problematic” band, down from 74th in 2025); RSF noted that public funding for the media was insufficient and that much of it went to public broadcasters and public-sector media, while private outlets continued to face severe economic pressure. The Conseil des diffuseurs et éditeurs de presse du Sénégal (CDEPS) publicly contested the Faye administration’s media policy throughout 2025, including the allocation of the Fonds d’appui et de développement de la presse (FADP).

Three state media outlets are tracked in the SMM dataset. RTS (State-Controlled) is the national public broadcaster, a société nationale under Law n° 92-02 of 6 January 1992, sustained by state subsidy, advertising and dedicated public-audiovisual revenue.

SSPP/Le Soleil (Captured Public/State-Managed) is the public-majority société anonyme (since April 1983) publisher of the national daily Le Soleil (founded by President Senghor in 1970; predecessor Paris-Dakar 1933); management reported turnover rising from XOF 699m in 2023 to XOF 1.152bn in 2024 (a 65 percent increase, management-reported and not audited), while public budget-risk material lists SSPP with capital of XOF 277.4m and equity of minus XOF 165.7m at end-2023.

APS (State-Controlled) is the national news agency, created by Ordonnance n° 59-054 of 2 April 1959 and reorganised as a société nationale by Law n° 2020-03 of 7 January 2020; it received around XOF 233m in FADP-linked 2025 public support, made up of a XOF 197m allocation and an additional XOF 36m contribution linked to shared public-media facility costs.

None of the three outlets has shifted classification since 2022. The 2024 turnover of state-media leadership changed the political alignment of the appointees but not the underlying structure: state or public-majority ownership, executive appointment authority, public-funding dependence and the absence of arm’s-length editorial safeguards. The distinction between SC and CaPu tracks the line between the directly state-funded broadcaster and news agency on one hand, and the public-majority newspaper publisher with a hybrid, more commercially exposed revenue model on the other. The main contestation during the review period has shifted to the regulatory and financial environment, the CNRM reform, the FADP allocation, the Supreme Court’s annulment of the media-registration orders, and the fiscal envelope available to public media, rather than to the typology of the outlets themselves. RTS and APS remain State-Controlled (SC), and SSPP/Le Soleil remains Captured Public/State-Managed (CaPu) for 2026.

Media profiles