Last Thursday night, cheers bellowed across Senegal’s capital Dakar. A few blocks from where I stood in the city’s posh Plateau district, Ousmane Sonko and Bassirou Diomaye Faye left the prison they had been held in for months. Since 2017, Sonko has led a powerful opposition movement that has railed against current president Macky Sall and the status quo he represents. Since Sonko is unable to run himself, Faye will represent his party in the presidential election. The jubilation that swept through this metropolis reveals much about the limits and possibilities of democracy not only in Senegal, or even West Africa, but across the world.

In recent years, people have gotten used to hearing about democratic backsliding. Senegal’s neighbors and fellow former French colonies Burkina Faso, Mali, and Niger have epitomized this worrying trend. Within this so-called junta belt, many citizens rallied behind military coups that toppled democratically elected leaders widely seen as French puppets or self-serving elites. Beyond these countries, voters have seemed to lose faith in postcolonial democracies from Nigeria to Pakistan. This is to say nothing of the poor state of democracy in Europe and North America. Taken together, these stories make it seem that voters across the world have given up on the democratic process. Instead, citizens have placed their faith in generals and strongmen. The people, it seems, have left democracy behind.

Senegal challenges this narrative. Over the past few weeks, it has become clear that it is the country’s rulers, and not its voters, who have lost faith in the democratic process. The Senegalese people pushed back, just as they have for decades. In doing so, they breathed new life into the country’s political system in a way that should inspire anyone hoping to defend and revitalize democracy.