Royal keep it up

One voter, four poll workers. Overall, voter turnout in the parliamentary elections in Morocco was around 20 percent. Essaouira, September 23, 2026

One voter, four poll workers. Overall, voter turnout in the parliamentary election in Morocco was around 20 percent. Essaouira, September 23, 2026

Such images are familiar from dictatorships: mothers gather in public places to demand information about the whereabouts of their children or to complain about their imprisonment.

In Morocco, too, around thirty mothers gathered in front of the parliament building in the capital Rabat last Saturday. And here too it was about protest against repression. This cannot be compared with the brutality of the 1980s, when helicopters opened fire on demonstrators during revolts against bread price increases in 1981 and 1984. That was under King Hassan II, in power from 1961 until his death in 1999. Under his son, King Mohammed VI, who has now ruled for 27 years, the repression is more selective and measured.

According to the president of the Moroccan Association for Human Rights, almost 750 young people, including dozens of minors, are still in detention.

After the majority of young protesters demonstrated for a few weeks last fall under the banner of "Generation Z 212" - 212 stands for the country's international telephone code - a scenario of repressive containment of the partly militant protests was played out again. At the same time, however, the monarchical state power made concessions. Since the deaths of eight women in the maternity ward of a hospital in Agadir, southern Morocco, sparked the first demonstrations, a number of clinics have since been inaugurated or renovated. However, traces of the revolt are still visible. In Kénitra, a city north of Rabat with half a million inhabitants, there are still numerous unerased graffiti slogans signed “Gen Z” along an inner-city canal.

Almost 750 young people, including dozens of minors, are still in detention, according to Hakim Sikouk, president of the Moroccan Association for Human Rights. To date, the Moroccan authorities have criminally investigated a total of 2,400 people in connection with the protests. Mothers and grandmothers of prison inmates went public on Sunday. This also included Saadia Ben Ziania, whose 15-year-old grandson has been in custody since the fall of protests and who made a public appeal to King Mohammed VI for his release. directed.

The parliament in front of whose headquarters there were protests had been re-elected just three days earlier, on Wednesday last week. What particularly stood out was the extremely low voter turnout of officially 38 percent, which, however, only applies to those eligible to vote who had previously registered in the electoral register. But only 15.8 million people out of 27 million of voting age are registered there. The real participation rate was more like a fifth of the population of voting age, a negative record. The young generation in particular stayed away from both the voter registers and the election at an above-average rate. This is likely to reflect social inequality in access to health, education and acceptable jobs and the associated frustration.

In the last election in 2021, the Islamist Justice and Development Party (PJD) suffered a resounding defeat. Their share of the vote, from over 27 percent five years earlier, had shrunk to just 4.3 percent. The reason was probably that the prime ministers appointed by the PJD, first Abdelilah Benkirane and then Saadeddine al-Othmani, had little to say; the instructions came from the royal family or the security apparatus. In 2021, the then Interior Minister banned the incumbent Prime Minister al-Othmani, to whom he was theoretically - but not practically - subordinate, from an election rally, citing pandemic measures due to Covid-19. Last week the PJD reached at least 15.2 percent again. Last Monday, the party's committees decided that they would not continue to be part of the future government.

The prerogative to form a government now lies with the Party for Credibility and Modernity (PAM) – the winner of the election received 22.1 percent of the vote, according to official results – which was set up from 2008 by the current monarch's advisor Fouad Ali al-Himma and is often described as a party of notables. In doing so, it has to come to terms with the similarly structured previous ruling party RNI (National Collection of Independents) under the previous Prime Minister Aziz Akhannouch, which received 13 percent of the vote. Social democracy in the form of the USFP only received 6.9 percent of the vote. Apart from the attempt at economic and technical modernization, no far-reaching political changes are to be expected from a government of the two parties loyal to the king, PAM and RNI.