20120208
AFP
Senegal's opposition ratcheted up pressure on President Abdoulaye Wade to renounce his bid for a third term in office with a thousands-strong protest march, as the leader paraded through the capital.

As election campaigning heated up ahead of February 26 polls, Foreign Minister Madicke Niang summoned US Ambassador Lewis Lukens to a meeting, a statement said.

Both the foreign ministry and embassy remained mum on details of the meeting, but it came after Wade recently lashed out at comments by Washington urging power to pass "to the next generation".

An interview with Lukens was published in the opposition newspaper Le Pop on Tuesday, in which he says it was "regrettable that Wade has chosen to compromise the elections, to put the security of his country in peril by insisting on seeking a third mandate."

Embassy spokeswoman Sara Devlin said the details of the meeting could not be divulged and "we do not see this as out of the ordinary."

Wade, 85, who has slammed comments from Washington and Paris on his candidacy, made his way through the suburbs in a convoy, standing in an open-roofed car waving to onlookers as campaign music blared.

Some applauded wildly, others looked on and some shouted: "You must lower the price of rice."

"I am very satisfied to see I am still very, very, very popular," said Wade.

Asked later about his push for a third mandate, after he introduced a two-term limit in the constitution in 2001, Wade said: "Two mandates, three mandates, ten mandates, this is not very important.

"This must be a question for the Senegalese people, and not for foreigners, from France or United States," he said, adding that his predecessors Leopold Sedar Senghor and Abdou Diouf had served 40 and 20 years respectively.

His tour of the capital came hours after the streets thronged with with more than 5,000 opposition supporters chanting and carrying banners reading "Get out old man!" during a three-hour march.

The opposition protesters dispersed without incident after a tense face-off at a police blockade preventing them from entering the central Plateau district where they had planned to push on to the interior ministry, blocks away from the presidential palace.

Senegalese music icon Youssou Ndour, whose bid to stand in the February 26 presidential election was rejected by the west African state's top court, attended the march along with several opposition candidates.

Dozens of police were out keeping a close watch on the march, the latest in a wave of protests in the run-up to the election in a country generally regarded as one of Africa's most stable democracies.

Opposition protests last week descended into riots, leaving four people dead as tension flared over Wade's third term candidacy which the opposition says is unconstitutional.

The Constitutional Council on January 27 upheld Wade's assertion that he could run again because the constitutional cap was only introduced in 2008, after his latest reelection.

Eight opposition candidates as well as Ndour have decided to wage a common campaign for the vote.

During an M23 meeting on Monday, one of the candidates, Cheikh Tidiane Gadio, Wade's former foreign minister, said if the president took part in the vote the opposition would refuse to recognise him.

"If Abdoulaye Wade persists, we will not recognise him, nor recognise his government and we will organise a campaign for the recognition of a national transition council which we will create," he said.

Wade was first elected in 2000 after 25 years in opposition.

But initial euphoria over his election has given way to fatigue over corruption, electricity cuts, rising fuel and food prices while Wade focuses on big legacy construction projects using what a US diplomatic cable published on Wikileaks refers to as "pie in the sky" rhetoric.

He is also accused of trying to groom his son Karim Wade as his successor.