Politics in Morocco

Anouar Boukhars

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9781136952104
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Middle Eastern History
• Index: History

Democratization and the process of political reform is a critical issue in the contemporary Middle East and North Africa. This book looks at the situation in Morocco and examines the role of the monarchy and the relative strengths and weaknesses of the Islamic and secular/liberal groupings campaigning to shape the local politics and society.

Politics in Morocco moves beyond the theoretical framework of the transition paradigm to give a thorough analysis of the dynamics of monarchical authoritarian rule and its implications. The author explores the formal and informal working mechanisms of authoritarian rule, the roles and functions of secular opposition forces, and the dynamics of political inclusion of Islamists in the structures of formal contestation. In doing so, he sheds fresh light on how authoritarian rule under King Mohamed VI is maintained and legitimised by a wide array of formal and informal political and social networks.

This in-depth investigation of political participation in Morocco offers a new perspective on the issue of democracy and monarchical rule in the Middle East. As such, it will be of great interest to students and scholars of Middle Eastern and North African politics, democratization studies and political Islam.

1
The Mohamedian years

In the 2007 legislative elections, public disenchantment with the Moroccan political system was on clear display. Two in three Moroccans boycotted the much-anticipated election despite repeated appeals by the King for voters to go the polls and cast their vote (Enhaili 2007a; Sater 2009). Worse, among the 37 percent of the 15 million people who bothered to vote, one in five cast spoiled/ blank ballots, making the real electoral participation rate a mere 18 percent (see Enhaili 2008). With 19 percent of the ballots invalid, the spoiled/blank ballot voters were 1 million Moroccans, a number that exceeded the combined total number of votes received by the top two parties: the conservative Istiqlal and the Islamist Party of Justice and Development (PJD) (Sehimi 2008a). If the number of blank and spoiled ballots was 19 percent at the national level, it was a whopping 30 percent in some of the kingdom’s big cities.

In the district of Casablanca-Anfa alone, the number of invalid ballots reached 36 percent while that of abstentionism stood at 74 percent. In other words, only 16 percent of registered voters got to vote for their candidate of choice. High levels of abstentions and spoiled ballots were also registered in the most important cities of the country: 85 percent in the northern city of Tangier, 81 in Casablanca, 80 in Meknès and Fès, 77 in Marrakech and Salé, and 72 percent in Rabat (Piermay 2007). Rural areas did much better (43 percent) thanks to the prevalence of kinship and patronage networks. If we add to these dismal numbers the 1 million newly registered voters who did not retrieve their voter registration cards and the many eligible but unregistered voters, then the scale of the boycott becomes even more alarming.¹

A cloak of political apathy

The 5.7 million Moroccans who voted represent by far the lowest turnout in Morocco’s recent history of state-managed liberalization. In 2002, there were 7.5 million voters who went to the polls. That number was significantly higher in 1992 and 1984, when turnout reached 64 and 67 percent, respectively. The 2007 dramatic downturn in voter participation was far lower than what the Moroccan authorities and the thirty-three competing parties had hoped for. A few weeks before the election, the interior minister, Chakib Benmoussa, acknowledged that the level of popular participation might not measure up to his ambitions, though he expressed his hope that the turnout would surpass the 52 percent of 2002. To be sure, the low turnout should not be surprising, though few people expected 84 percent of registered voters to either boycott the elections or cast invalid/spoiled ballots.

Before the 2007 elections, widespread political apathy was captured by numerous surveys that showed that only a small minority of Moroccans trust politicians. According to a survey released on May 2006 by Economiste/Sunergia, 73 percent of young people declared being ill-served by their estranged representatives in parliament and 60 percent had no confidence in the political class (Giguère 2007). Another survey carried out between January 31 and February 2007 by the 2007 Daba Association revealed the same widespread cynicism and mistrust in the kingdom’s institutions and political leaders (ibid.). Seventy-three percent of respondents aged eighteen to twenty-nine expressed little or no interest in politics, compared with 24 percent who were somewhat or very interested in politics. This reality of apathy, inertness, and lack of attention to politics was also evident in the fact that none of the respondents in the eighteen- to twenty-nine-year-old bracket was involved in politics or public life. Not one single respondent was a member of a syndicate or political association. The young’s elders are no better. Only 2 percent are engaged in public life (ibid.). But, despite this sorry state of affairs, significant majorities of respondents in the 2007 Daba survey declared their readiness to support candidates or parties that are making politics fresh and approachable.

After a decade at the helm of power, King Mohamed VI must be disappointed at the number of Moroccans who have little trust in the political institutions of the kingdom. The massive rejection of the 2007 legislative elections occurred despite the mobilization of civil society and active campaigns by organizations such as Daba 2007 to encourage people to vote and in spite of the fact that the parties adopted new media strategies and widely marketed their programs, which were marked for the first time by specific proposals and details. Even the government devoted significant resources to inform people of the need to vote. It organized major advertising blitzes that were timed to coincide with the different stages of the election calendar: the thirty-day registration period and the campaigning period. It instructed the two television stations it controls to intensify the number of political debates and programs devoted to catch the attention of as many Moroccans as possible and sensitize them to the importance of being politically active. The government also increased the number of polling places to accommodate voters.

It is important to note, however, that, though the overwhelming majority of Moroccans decided to stay home, majorities flocked to the polls in places where they believed their vote might matter. Moroccans have a utilitarian conception of politics. This is the reason why the Moroccan voter is often referred to in the kingdom as khobzite, a word derived from khobz (bread). A khobzite is somebody who has no political conviction and who follows his/her pure self-interest (Ghorbal 2007). When Moroccans see a potential benefit in voting, they do so in great numbers, as was amply demonstrated in Rehamna. In this small rural and very poor district in southern Morocco, Fouad El-Himma, a close associate of the King, won a clean sweep. Seventy-two percent of the electorate voted for him and his two handpicked allies.

The turnout, which was five times higher than the national average, could easily be explained by the fact that people voted in great numbers for El-Himma because they believed he would be able to deliver on his promises and improve their miserable lives. His close association with the monarch was enough to ensure his triumph and a high turnout. To the delight of the people of Rehamna, El-Himma, unlike most other politicians, quickly fulfilled his promise to his voters and managed to bring millions of US dollars’ worth of development projects to the area (Izddine 2008). Most important, he brought Mohamed VI himself to come to the region in a historic visit on which the monarch committed his government to invest 7 billion dirhams in social, economic, and urban projects in the period from 2008 to 2012 (Zerrour 2008).

Besides El-Himma’s strong hold, the only region to have been spared the apathy that blighted the 2007 poll was the south, where voters cast off their political lethargy and flocked to the polls. In Oued Eddahab-Lagouira, 62 percent of the electorate showed up at the polls. In the regions of Guelmim-Smara and Laâyoune-Boujdour, the turnout reached 58 and 49 percent, respectively (Enhaili 2007a). The main reason for this relatively high turnout can be accounted for by the fact that, unlike urban areas, the voting in the Sahara follows tribal lines. Like rural areas, the voting also follows feudal lines. All in all, to understand when and how the Moroccan voter casts his/her vote or abstains from voting altogether, it is important to conceive of elections “as exercises in competitive clientelism” (Lust 2009: 127).

Moroccan voters, like their counterparts in Egypt or Jordan, cast their ballots based on the potential ability of elected officials to dip into the public purse and bring home their share of state largesse (Lust 2009; Shehata 2008; Gohar 2008).² Very few Moroccans, if indeed any, expect their national representatives to be able to perform their primary legislative and oversight functions in a semi-authoritarian political system (Denoeux and Desfosses 2007: 79–108; Sater 2009: 381–400). The socio-economic setting also plays an important role in perpetuating the tradition of the Moroccan parliament as a source of provision of services. In an economic and political system revolving around social networks, personal connections, and in-group favoritism, people’s representatives in parliament constitute one, and often the only, opportunity to break into the networking game that is essential to get a job and circumvent the many rigid bureaucratic hurdles and delays.

This clientelistic logic of the relationship between the electorate and its national representatives also helps explain the question of who participates in politics. Unlike in Western democracies, where education and economic status offer the best predictor of voting turnout, regular voters in Morocco, and in most of the Arab world, tend to have low income and little education. Upper- and middleclass people are less swayed by the promise of nepotism connections as they already have their own familial or personal connections. Poorer people, however, can be more responsive to a credible platform of clientelist redistribution of goods in exchange for their votes (Bahdoud 2007: 35; Shehata 2008: 115). In short, the relationship between voters and seekers of national elected office resembles that of a neo-feudal relationship whereby a politician-cum-patron distributes cash and promises personal favors in exchange for political support (see, for instance, Catusse 2002a).

The regime’s authoritarian reflexes

The powerlessness of elected institutions has created widespread political apathy (see, for instance, National Democratic Institute 2008: 5). As the 2007 election results showed, the public is deeply distrustful of routinized politics where the power apparatus enjoys no constitutional limits on its power (Enhaili 2008). Political parties suffer from zero credibility. As will be shown in the third and fourth chapters, they are internally fragmented and unable to forge far-reaching opposition alliances for political transformation. Their promises of renewal are greeted with indifference and fatalism: indifference since all parties are in the end irrelevant as real power resides with the King and his acolytes; fatalism because the public view most parties with the exception, probably of the Islamists, as corrupt, out of ideas, and hopeless anyway. Their aging leadership is perceived as too pliant, complacent, and no longer capable of connecting with voters’ everyday concerns.

The current political structure as it stands is designed to delay the day when political agents and societal actors might successfully challenge the system’s soft authoritarianism by forcing the monarch to accept some constraints on his unlimited powers. To be sure, since Mohamed VI took the reins of power in 1999, Morocco has emerged as the most liberal Arab state, where basic freedoms are protected and nurtured, though not unconditionally. With the exception of some political and religious red lines, freedom of expression and the press is generally respected. Indeed, few would disagree with the fact that the gradual increase in individual liberties and the slow but steady process of economic and social liberalization promoted by the monarchy have made Morocco more open and less repressive. It is precisely because of Morocco’s transition from outright authoritarianism to state-managed liberalization that the country is held as a potential model for successful democratization. The existence of a robust civil society and the monarch’s sincere attempts to modernize the economy and promote growth might eventually lead to further relaxation of the King’s tight control of the political and economic system of the country.

For now, however, King Mohamed VI has not broken down the major relationships and culture of his father’s regime (Kausch 2007: 2–4). Whenever the monarchy perceives an action as crossing a “red line,” it moves quickly to tighten regulations, muzzle political discourse, or crack down against free expression. When Al Jarida Al Oukhra (renamed Nichane) published its infamous survey results, which put the King as the number two man of the year 2005, the monarch reportedly instructed the government to pass a law that strictly regulated political polling studies and prohibited pollsters from asking any questions about the King’s popularity, performance, or anything that deals with him and his family. Thus, when the French- and Arabic-language weeklies, TelQuel and Nichane, published in the summer of 2009 the results of a poll on the King’s performance during his ten-year reign, they were quickly seized on the ground of violating the 1958 press code and disturbing public order (Beaugé 2009). It did not matter that the poll showed overwhelming public support for the monarchy. The bottom line, as the communication minister Khalid Naciri plainly stated, is that “the monarchy cannot be the subject of debate, even through an opinion survey” (ibid.).

The regime has demonstrated at numerous occasions its intolerance of criticism. The arrest of the then seventy-two-year-old Mohamed Bougrine on June 5, 2007, and his subsequent sentencing to three years in prison is a clear message that no one is exempt from the coercive apparatus of the state. Mr. Bougrine was ultimately pardoned by the monarch after languishing in jail for ten months for the major offense of “harming Morocco’s ‘sacred values’ by speaking in defence of a group of rights campaigners jailed on accusations that they chanted anti-monarchy slogans” (Pfeiffer 2008).³ There are countless other cases when a number of people were sentenced to prison for showing what the regime construes as disrespect.

The case of Mohamed Erraji and Fouad Mourtada are illustrative in this regard. Erraji was sent to jail for suggesting in an article he published on September 3, 2008, in HesPress, a Moroccan daily news website, that some of the King’s activities and charitable practices are detrimental to the development of the country. The young blogger criticized the monarch for encouraging a culture of charitable handouts and dependency instead of one of performance and results. He especially took issue with a long-held practice in which the King gives lucrative licenses to run taxis to those able to get access to him and beg for them.

Likewise, Fouad Mourtada, a then twenty-six-year-old engineer, was arrested on February 5, 2008, and allegedly tortured for creating a profile of the King’s brother on Facebook. Posting a spoof profile of Crown Prince Moulay Rachid was considered a villainous practice that almost cost Mourtada three years in prison. A joke or not, Mourtada’s promising future would have been destroyed had the monarch not pardoned him. In the case of Mohamed Erraji, the appeals court in the southern city of Agadir overturned the initial verdict after an outpouring of international and local criticism and cleared him of all wrongdoing. The court justified its decision on the grounds that proper procedure was not followed in the initial trial, which saw the twenty-nine-year-old blogger convicted in a ten-minute trial and without a defense lawyer.

As the examples above demonstrate, the Moroccan regime has little tolerance for criticism. Prince Moulay Hicham, for example, became persona non grata for publicly calling on the King to modernize and democratize the monarchical institution. “The monarchy has to either dissociate itself from the old caliphal system or evolve from it,” the Prince said, adding that “democracy and sacredness are not compatible. That’s the whole problem with the Moroccan political system and a question which affects us all” (Anonymous 2005a).

Testing the red lines

Press freedom has especially had a rough time under the tenure of King Mohamed VI. The research done by the respected Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) shows that since 2000 the number of journalists who have been slammed with suspended or effective prison terms or seen their publications banned or censored altogether has been on the rise. The recent assault on freedom of the press came in October 2009 when a Rabat court sentenced the editor at the Arabic-language Moroccan weekly Al Michaal to a year in prison for “ill-intentioned publication of false information” and “allegations and unverified facts” about the health of Mohammed VI (Committee to Protect Journalists 2009a). The editor of the independent daily Al Jarida Al Oula was also prosecuted for the publication of an article “that quoted medical sources on August 27 as saying that the King, who had to cancel his activities for five days, was ill with a virus” (Committee to Protect Journalists 2009b).

Such incidents should not hide the fact that Morocco’s print media still operate in a better environment than that existing in most of the Arab world. There are seventeen private dailies and many other periodicals that provide the 300,000 Moroccans who read the news with different views.⁴ To be sure, the regime is not so much threatened by the proliferation of the print media. The most professional and outspoken dailies or weeklies are in French and their audiences remain small or specialized owing to the high rates of illiteracy and poverty. As long as these papers refrain from criticizing the monarchy, Islam, or Moroccan policies toward the Western Sahara, they are allowed to ventilate the frustrations of the people without fear of reprisals. For example, in 2005, the Moroccan weekly magazine TelQuel stunned the country when it revealed for the first time ever the palace’s budget along with details about Mohammed VI’s spending. Neither the media nor parliamentarians have ever dared discuss or even mention what the monarchical institution costs Moroccan taxpayers.

Nevertheless, press freedom in Morocco has sharply declined during the last six years. Morocco has for example joined ranks with other Arab countries in a rare display of unity to curb the growing influence of Arab satellite channels in the region. Under the agreement on satellite transmission, the Arab states have granted themselves the right to withdraw the licenses from those satellite channels that harm Arab identity, “negatively affect social peace,” and do not “respect the sov...