Government, governance, the economy, culture and identity in Morocco over the last ten months of 2014
By: Mohamed Abdelouahab Rafiki
Government, governance, the economy, culture and identity in Morocco over the last ten months of 2014
By: Mohamed Abdelouahab Rafiki
All political actors in the Kingdom agree that our country is in a phase of transition at every level; where they differ is in how they assess the pace, the need and the priority of the choices Morocco must make in the political and economic fields. From the signals and content of the royal speeches, which have come very close to the reality of the major problems, through the radical change in young people’s growing interest in public affairs, with methods and initiatives unknown in the years of political stagnation, to the dismal political state of most parties and political bodies, our country is in urgent need of further change: first, to overcome its lagging economic and social position at the bottom of international rankings; and second, to develop political, economic and cultural action, which is evolving rapidly.
1. Government and governance: the pivot of change in Morocco’s destiny
Since this report seeks to understand political, economic and cultural action over the past months of the current year, we have no doubt that the most important pivotal development has been the effort of the current government majority to achieve enough cohesion and responsiveness to secure a stable footing between a heterogeneous opposition and a largely combative media. This stability was crowned by the first Council of Ministers after the government reshuffle, and reinforced by the King’s reassurance to the head of government of his support for the government, as the head of government stated earlier. It was greatly helped by the long lull in the strikes, sit-ins and marches – with general and sectoral demands – that had marked the Moroccan political scene since 2011, and by the focus on internal cohesion among the allied parties through major concessions by the majority party. Mr Nabil Benabdallah said as much in an important radio statement, in which he spoke of the Justice and Development Party giving up amendments it had been about to introduce into the Family Code.
– Democratic transition: still the great crossroads, despite the government’s stability
A number of opposition bodies, especially those not active within party politics, still make the democratic transition to a full parliamentary monarchy a condition for serious engagement and for building trust in dealing with the official system and its governments. This has produced an unjustified passivity on the part of that opposition, which belittles and ignores other important reforms, whether concerning the government’s powers or the decisions and measures it produces.
This has led to stagnation in the initiatives and activity of these bodies, and would almost lend credence to the claim that they rode on the 20 February youth movement, were it not that these bodies were a core component of that movement. The 20 February movement held Moroccan parties to be the main reason why despotism endures, which led all parties to show some internal responsiveness to young people’s demands for internal democracy and visible effectiveness.
The government, for its part, has confined itself to activating the margin of powers granted by the 2011 Constitution, particularly at the legislative level, where progress has also stalled, on the grounds that pockets of resistance within the state are obstructing the smooth course of legislative and procedural reforms.
All this makes reform under the Kingdom’s new constitution slow. Also troubling are statements by some leaders of the majority party, most of which suggest that their role is limited to steering Morocco through a dangerous phase – without realising that this also means they are a safe bridge that secures despotism a longer life and better conditions for restoring the repressive state, which has begun to show its claws again through continued arrests and bans on demonstrations. We will return to this in the section on justice and freedoms.
– Most of the opposition remains superficial, oscillating between exploiting women’s issues and the centrality of the monarchy
Facing a government with a narrow and hampered margin for action, we find a parliamentary opposition that often lacks seriousness. Although the parliamentary scene has seen exceptional cooperation in recent months to speed up the adoption of important laws through joint committees, the party opposition, ever since a key party left the first version of the government, has remained hostage to tit-for-tat media battles, so that its options have become limited and often trivial. It has handed the government several gifts, notably through the regrettable recent incidents following the royal speech to parliament. The alliance of the Scales and the Rose (the Istiqlal Party and the USFP) has brought this opposition nothing more than media coordination.
Rescue came, however, from the trade-union front, after the government introduced reforms of the pension fund described as anti-social, which we will discuss in detail in the economic part of this presentation.
Moreover, strategic decisions such as the “Hadar” (vigilance) security plan and the launch of major projects have remained the exclusive preserve of royal initiative, even as to when they are launched, and the government has looked more like a private secretariat than an executive body representing the parliamentary majority.
– Foreign policy: a great leap forward
Algeria and the Polisario remained the names most often heard in the Kingdom’s foreign policy until the Kingdom launched strong royal initiatives towards sub-Saharan West Africa, including strengthening the position of a company that holds 53 per cent of a French company active in West Africa. Another feature of recent months has been the special relationship resulting from King Mohammed VI’s visit to Tunisia: Morocco contributed strongly to the success of the recent Tunisian elections and of an international conference to revive investment in the Tunisian economy. Moroccan diplomacy remained consistent in its performance, apart from a few significant mistakes that revealed differences between the positions of the foreign ministry and the official position of the state. A clear example is the confusion in Morocco’s position on the coup in Egypt, even though Moroccan parties were unanimous – in the media at least – that the coup option in Egypt was a bad choice. And despite successive media provocations by the Egyptian coup media, Morocco maintained a strange silence until apologies came from the Egyptian side after some official moves.
The number of African states recognising the colonial-era separatist entity has fallen to just 17 this year.
Nor should we overlook Morocco’s systematic efforts to spread religious moderation to counter the thinking that produces extremism, in countries that have become a breeding ground for terrorist groups.
2. The state of the economy: the politicians’ gamble and the fate of the poor
At the economic and social level:
The Moroccan economy is one of the best-performing economies in North Africa and West Asia, yet it faces problems:
Falling international demand for Moroccan products, combined with declining remittances from Moroccans working abroad and a significant drop in tourist numbers, particularly from Europe. The results have been a chronic trade deficit, falling foreign-currency reserves and low annual growth rates.
The introduction of the fuel-price indexation system today, at a time when the international situation portends war in the Gulf region, which will inevitably send the price of a barrel of oil soaring. This will lead the government to raise domestic fuel prices automatically, and thus the prices of goods and services across the country.
The completion of the policies of international financial institutions, in line with the ambitions of domestic and international capital and the pressures of the International Monetary Fund, placing the burden of all these policies on the middle and lower classes.
In fairness, the past months show the government’s methodical success in focusing on maintaining economic balances to avoid a loss of control, by speeding up the release of many measures to support the poorer classes, such as activating compensation for job loss, support for widows and simplifying the procedure for setting up small businesses. But if we picture maintaining balance in the Moroccan economy as balancing the scales of rich and poor, the poor in this country are still being asked to be patient with the announced and automatic increases that hit them hard, exposing their purchasing power directly to fluctuations in the international market.
Perhaps the most dangerous step the government has taken, and one that jeopardises its consensus on maintaining economic balances, is its reform of the pension fund, which has caused heated debate between supporters and opponents.
What gives hope that the Moroccan opposition can be effective is its renewed ability to mount a response that protects ordinary citizens from such a measure, through the general strike – the opposition’s first serious action in the last three years.
We note with great satisfaction the vitality of civil society concerned with the forthcoming electoral law, and the aspiration of most actors to an electoral law that reflects the true will of voters by reducing the role of the Ministry of the Interior in the electoral process – although clear transparency has been recorded in electoral operations since 2002.
3. Justice and freedoms
– Justice: the long beginning of reform
There is satisfaction with the bold decisions of the Minister of Justice and with decisions by judges who annulled investigations at the Guelmim court on suspicion of torture. But these decisions are no more than positive signals in view of citizens’ aspirations to a fully independent judicial system, a fair public prosecution and strong oversight mechanisms.
Judicial work in Morocco has developed, as international observers attest, but everyone still considers the judiciary’s capacity to be diminished, given the serious incident of a judge being dismissed by an official of the executive, which calls into question the government’s commitment to judicial independence.
Turning to the national dialogue organised by the Ministry of Justice to draw up a charter and a national consensus on a comprehensive judicial reform project, we regret the attempts to abort it and the withdrawal of a number of judges from a dialogue we consider decisive for building an agreed set of foundations. The most valuable thing Morocco could achieve at this stage is a comprehensive judicial reform that springs from the judicial actors themselves.
– Freedoms:
Three years after the majority party took office, some of the most important laws that honest activists and human rights defenders in this country have been waiting for – to do justice to and protect their efforts in the struggle for human rights and freedoms – have still not been adopted: the law on associations and the press law. After the publication of the digital code, which met with widespread rejection, the government seems to be trying to get past an unprecedented anger and awareness of rights and freedoms among young people, who are active especially in alternative social media.
Anyone following the state of freedoms in Morocco cannot but express deep concern at the public authorities’ ban on the activities of many long-established human rights organisations in Morocco, especially the Moroccan Association for Human Rights, which seems to be facing a national decision to restrict its activities, as well as at the Ibn Rushd Centre being forced to dissolve its association because of continued official restrictions on the centre’s intellectual and enlightenment activities.
We also note abuses and arbitrary arrests in various prisons of the Kingdom, and the entrenchment of “forms of violence and discrimination” against those described as Islamist detainees, in the absence of a clear vision for settling this file. Hunger strikes continue in Moroccan prisons in protest, first, at the deteriorating conditions there, and second, at the government’s inability to close the file because of the repercussions of what is happening in Syria and the large number of Moroccans who have joined ISIS.
– The impact of the coup in Egypt on the situation in Morocco
The military coup in Egypt and its repercussions on political behaviour in Morocco.
From the moment the Tunisian revolution triumphed, Morocco was strongly affected by the Arab Spring, notably through the protest movements that came together in the large and surprising march of all the traditional actors on 20 February 2011.
Since that day, the swings of Tunisia and Egypt in particular between democracy and chaos have been reflected in the behaviour of all politicians in the Kingdom, which has historically preserved its political specificity from the eastern Maghreb and the Arab East for centuries, while being strongly influenced by them as a source of solutions and theories. The strongest example of what we have observed is the military coup in Egypt and its repercussions on Moroccans’ political behaviour.
The direct expression of positions on the military coup in Egypt, significant as it was, was only a minor and unremarkable outward sign compared with the practical behaviour and positions that changed and upset the balance of pressure as a result of the overturning of the political balance in Egypt.
Morocco’s call for respect for democracy and its rejection of military solutions to settle disagreements do not seem consistent with its swift recognition of the election of President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, and with repeated official voices in Egypt saying that Morocco was among the few countries that supported the coup, by backing the so-called road map drawn up by the military in place of the road map agreed with the Brotherhood after the fall of Mubarak’s rule.
What is strange about the way Egyptian events have been reflected in Morocco is the extent to which the positions of Egypt’s political parties have been copied and mirrored in the positions and behaviour of Moroccan politicians. Moroccan Islamists rejected the coup in Egypt outright, while the Justice and Development Party considerably toned down its challenge to its opponents: at the time it chose to submit to the conditions of the parties the head of government asked to patch up his government after the Istiqlal Party withdrew from it, following the rise of Hamid Chabat’s power and influence within the Istiqlal Party and his attempt to ride the wave of backlash against the Arab Spring.
It seems that a firm decision had been taken to weaken a government that came to power after the storm of the 20 February movement – led by a party that had been officially prevented from fulfilling its ambitions, either by limiting the number of seats it could contest, as in 2002, or by isolating it from any alliance, as in 2007. In any case, it cannot aspire to an absolute majority, given the nature of the electoral law, which prevents an absolute majority, and the electoral districting decisions designed to keep the vote fragmented.
We can say that the coup in Egypt greatly weakened Moroccan society’s confidence that political conditions would improve and that political action would be freed from the deep state’s tight control over public affairs. Powerful forces lurking within and outside the state seized on this shift in public opinion and exploited it at a critical moment, which in recent months led to the formation of a government that does not do justice to the party that formed it, and to the passing of laws that do not reflect the party’s orientation and electoral promises.
