“Soro Guillaume will resign in February, it’s understood, it’s decided,” Ivorian President Alassane Ouattara said while receiving the Ivorian press on 28 January for greetings.
This statement confirms a rumor spread in recent months in the country and is certainly the result of the last tête-à-tête that the two men had on the evening of Thursday, January 24th.
This is an evolution that sanctions a malaise that brooded in recent years at the top of the state between the two personalities whose relations were increasingly distant. Formerly number two of the Ivorian power, Soro Guillaume, who was an intimate of President Alassane Ouattara at the beginning of his first term, was relegated to fourth place with the establishment of the vice presidency and the Senate from late 2016.
In late 2016 and early 2017, successive mutinies and the arrest of his chief of protocol Kamarate Souleymane said Soul to Soul had fueled rumors about the likely involvement of the head of parliament in this uprising that had somewhat undermined the power of Abidjan and polarized Ouattara-Soro relations. The latter has subsequently shunned several political meetings of the RDR and RHDP which congress of January 26 and has approached the former president Henri Konan Bédié who is now the number one opponent in Ouattara. At the same time, Soro’s presidential ambitions were distilled by his supporters gathered in several political organizations including the RACI.
This next resignation takes place in a pre-election political context in view of the highly anticipated presidential election of 2020. And the most likely candidate Soro Guillaume – whose services deny information that he has already declared himself a candidate – can now better to dress in his opponent’s clothes to the one who at times was considered his political mentor.
