Where did he study? What's his background?

He attended Marie Médiatrice Catholic School and then Lycée Demba Diop before going on to Cheikh Anta Diop University in Dakar, where he earned a master's degree in law. He completed his baccalaureate in 2000 and obtained his master's degree in 2004.

From there the path got competitive fast. He sat entrance exams for the police officers' academy, the magistrates' academy and the École Nationale d'Administration (ENA), Senegal's elite leadership training school. He passed both the magistrates' exam and the ENA exam, but chose the ENA over the magistracy. That is a meaningful choice: the ENA is the pipeline for the senior civil servants who actually run the state, the people who control budgets, set tax policy and manage public assets.

He specialized in taxation and joined the Direction Générale des Impôts et Domaines, Senegal's tax and land administration, in 2007. That is where the political story really starts. It was during his time as a tax inspector that Diomaye Faye developed a close relationship with Ousmane Sonko, a fellow tax official and burgeoning political figure.

From tax office to party secretary

His entry into politics began with the creation of PASTEF, the African Patriots of Senegal for Work, Ethics and Fraternity, in 2014. Sonko led PASTEF, and Faye rose through several positions within the party before being appointed its Secretary General in 2022. PASTEF is the opposition movement that channeled years of public frustration with incumbent president Macky Sall into a concrete electoral force.

When Faye joined the tax administration, he was an active member of the newly formed Syndicat autonome des agents des impôts et domaines, the autonomous union of tax and domain agents. Union organizing inside a government bureaucracy is how you learn to read a room, build coalitions and hold a line under pressure. Those are exactly the skills that carried him through an imprisonment and straight into a presidential campaign.

The through-line in all of it is that he never came from wealth or from a political dynasty. He came from law school, a grueling civil service exam and a government salary. That background tends to produce a certain kind of leader: one who knows exactly how the machinery of the state works, because he spent years operating it from the inside.