Morocco Politics
Morocco is a constitutional monarchy with a parliamentary national legislative system under which ultimate authority rests with King Mohammed VI, who presides over the Council of Ministers. The king shares executive authority with Head of Government (prime minister) Saadeddine El Othmani. According to the constitution, the king appoints the head of government from the political party with the most seats in parliament and approves members of the government nominated by the head of government. International and domestic observers judged the 2016 parliamentary elections credible and relatively free from irregularities.
Significant human rights issues included: torture by some members of the security forces, although the government condemned the practice and made efforts to investigate and address any reports; allegations that there were political prisoners; serious restrictions on free expression, including criminalization of libel and certain content that criticized Islam, the monarchy, and the government’s position regarding territorial integrity; substantial interference with freedom of assembly and association; corruption; and criminalization of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, or intersex conduct.
According to the Freedom House 2020 Freedom in the World report, the press enjoyed a significant degree of freedom when reporting on economic and social policies, but authorities used an array of financial and legal mechanisms to punish critical journalists. International and domestic human rights groups criticized criminal prosecutions of journalists and publishers as well as libel suits, claiming that the government principally used these laws to restrict independent human rights groups, the press, and social media.
The Moroccan elections on 08 September 2021 were the first time that newly formulated electoral rules apply, including one particularly contentious one. In Morocco, rules on how elections are conducted are often amended before the event. Although the country's King Mohammed VI holds the most power, Morocco has staged a national vote around every five years since 1993.
This year, amendments included changes to the quota for women and the end of a youth quota in the country's 395-seat parliament. The latter had been introduced in the six months following February 2011's Arab Spring-style demonstrations in the country to encourage more Moroccans under 40 into politics. The most recent Moroccan parliament was 21% female, with 81 women politicians. It was one of several changes forming part of a reform of the constitution that was initiated by the Moroccan monarchy. The reform took the steam out of popular protest movements that began in 2011.
But by far the most controversial new rule for these elections was a change to what is known as the electoral quotient. This year's amendment meant that seats in parliament will be distributed based on the total number of eligible voters instead of the number who did actually vote. No other country calculates election results like this.
"It will be theoretically impossible for any party to gain more than one seat per constituency," Rania Elghazouli, a Rabat-based researcher explained in a post on the Friedrich Naumann Foundation's website in June 2021. "No political party will be mathematically able to exceed 100 seats in parliament, making it very difficult to have a clear winner."
The moderate Islamist political party that has had the greatest success in the last two elections, the Justice and Development Party (PJD), is likely to lose as much as a third of its seats compared to 2016 results. But smaller parties will get more of a chance to get into parliament, and others — including the PJD's main competition, the monarchy-friendly Authenticity and Modernity Party (PAM) — are likely to benefit too.
Morocco has, however, always had this kind of system, pointed out Mohamed Daadaoui, a political science professor at Oklahoma City University in the US who specializes in North African politics. The Moroccan monarchy "confines, constrains and plays divide-and-control" with the country's political parties to ensure that it always has the final say.
"Nobody could ever win the majority of seats in the Moroccan parliament because of the way that districts are drawn," Daadaoui said. "You always have to have a plurality, which means you will be forced to enter into a coalition government of un-likeminded political parties. The changes to the electoral coefficient make things even more difficult."
"These elections are not really going to change much in the political trajectory of Morocco," Daadaoui concluded. "They're just there to legitimize the existing regime and the system. They're done in such an electorally engineered and controlled way that this isn't really about who wins or doesn't."
The US-based academic predicted that voter turnout in Morocco would be even lower than the 43% registered at 2016 elections, owing to disillusionment with the political system as well as the COVID-19 pandemic. There isn't any real polling in Morocco, but other related surveys back up this assessment. In their annual Trust Index, the Moroccan Institute for Policy Analysis found that only 18% of the 1,400 locals they surveyed voted in the last elections and only 32% were thinking about voting this year. Additionally, 74% didn't trust political parties and 70% didn't trust the parliament.
Nonetheless, Daadaoui and others don't believe the next elections will lead to any kind of violent unrest. "Because this is not the first time that elections are not transformational for the country," Daadaoui pointed out. "People know in advance that these are elections are limited and that they [the elections] are meant to maintain a certain facade."
Because many voters don't register, turnout in Morocco is actually even lower than 43%. "I haven't really met anyone who expects major change in policy, although they do expect a change in the government," confirmed Bauke Baumann, head of the German think tank Heinrich Böll Foundation's office in Rabat. But Baumann did see some positives in the upcoming vote. Although voter expectations are low, Baumann hopes that the government that eventually emerges will be able to act upon the country's new development model, announced in late May 2021.
This vision for Morocco's future was commissioned by King Mohammed VI himself. It outlines ambitious goals, such as raising incomes, increasing private investment, taking better care of the country's natural resources and raising the numbers of women in the workforce, as well as societal objectives such as reducing underage marriage and increasing social inclusion.
"It would be crucial for the new government to take action on the recommendations of this report," Baumann argued. "That would be positive. The question is to which extent those recommendations can be implemented and, of course, it's also very much a question of political will of the government and all other institutions, including," he added, "those that are not elected."
Morocco's liberal RNI [National Rally of Independents] party has won the most seats in the country's parliamentary elections followed by another liberal party, PAM [Party of Authenticity and Modernity], while co-ruling moderate PJD [Party for Justice and Development] Islamists suffered a crushing defeat. RNI, led by billionaire agriculture minister Aziz Akhannouch, took 97 of the 395-seat parliament, followed by PAM with 82 seats and the conservative Istiqlal with 78 seats. The PJD, which had been a coalition partner in the previous two governments had only taken 12 seats after a count of 96% of all parliamentary seats. The results show a massive turnaround in fortunes as the RNI had only won 37 seats at the last election in 2016, while the PJD took 125. Turnout in the elections improved to 50.3%, up from 43% in 2016, as Morocco held parliamentary and local elections on the same day.
Morocco's King Mohammed VI on 10 September 2021 appointed Aziz Akhannouch of the liberal RNI party as prime minister and asked him to form a government. Akhannouch, a former agriculture minister, is one of Morocco's richest men with a fortune estimated at about $2 billion. He has led the liberal RNI party since 2016. Under reforms introduced in 2011, the king picks the prime minister from the largest party in parliament but retains veto power over cabinet members. In recent years he has taken back more powers within the palace walls.
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