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ABSTRACT
This article examines the effects of electoral engineering in the 2021 Moroccan parliamentary elections. It demonstrates that Morocco’s proportional system, introduced in 2002 and reformed in 2021, is designed to co-opt political parties, prevent a predominant party and promote party system fragmentation, in line with the monarchy’s interests. Nevertheless, the electoral system is not imposed on political parties. The analysis of the process of electoral reform yields evidence of the political parties’ involvement in electoral engineering, the changing political stances of the Moroccan parties, the role of administrative parties as intermediaries of the Minister of the Interior and, ultimately, the connivance between the political regime and the political parties, which acquiesce to the electoral rules in the expectation of being rewarded with seats and even office. In addition, the in-depth electoral analysis and the electoral simulation conducted in this paper reveal that the 2021 electoral reform led to an extreme multi-party system with balance between parties. The electoral amendments were particularly detrimental to the largest party, and to a lesser extent to the second and third parties. By contrast, the electoral reform benefitted small and medium-size parties in the new regional districts, where most of them are significantly overrepresented.
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank the anonymous reviewers for their valuable suggestions for improving the quality of the paper. I am particularly grateful to Professors Irene Fernández-Molina and Pablo Oñate for our fruitful discussions on the content of this article, as well as Bernabé López-García, Francesco Cavatorta, Valeria Resta and Saïd Kirhlani for their helpful comments on earlier versions of this article.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Supplemental data
Supplemental data for this article can be accessed online at https://doi.org/10.1080/13629395.2023.2194153
Notes
1. Morocco is an illustrative case of electoral autocracy, where a broad spectrum of political parties take part in politics and are able to run for office in elections with a moderate degree of electoral integrity. Nevertheless, the autonomy of elected institutions (Parliament and government) is reduced by the effective power held by the king, who centralizes the decision-making.
2. See the simulation on 2016 electoral results at local-district level carried out by the Moroccan think tank TAFRA: https://tafra.ma/calcul-et-si-les-elections-de-2016-avaient-ete-reformees/. As voter register data are not available, TAFRA uses the overall population of legal voting age to calculate the quota, which means a higher quota and therefore results may not be entirely accurate.
3. Electoral data are available in Arabic at: http://www.elections.ma/elections/legislatives/resultats.aspx.
4. The administrative parties were born to ensure parliamentary support for the king’s political initiatives, to counterbalance opposition parties, and to attract the new economic and political elites of the country (Bennani-Chraïbi, 2021; Santucci, 2006; Willis, 2002). The most recent administrative party is the PAM, born in 2008 as a ‘bulwark’ against the electoral rise of the PJD (Boussaid, 2009). The PAM was promoted by Fouad El-Himma, Mohammed VI’s close friend, and former deputy interior minister.
5. These three parties – together the extinct Organization of Democratic and Popular Action (OADP) and the National Union of Popular Forces (UNFP) — formed the Kutla al-Dimocratiya (Democratic Bloc), an opposition alliance until they became part of the ‘government of alternance’ in 1998, a coalition government of seven parties led by the socialist Abderrahmane Youssoufi. The inclusion of these opposition parties in the government was a significant step in their co-optation by the political regime and put an end to the divide between pro-regime and opposition parties in the Moroccan party system.
6. After many attempts to gain official recognition as a political party, the Islamist At-Tawhid wal-Islah (Unity and Reform) movement was allowed in 1997 to join an already existent but inactive party, the Popular Democratic and Constitutional Movement (MPDC) — a splinter faction of the MP – founded by the well-respected Abdelkrim Al-Khatib in 1967. In 1998 the MPDC changed its name to the current Party of Justice and Development.
7. From the first parliamentary elections of 1963 until the elections of 1997, plurality voting in single-member constituencies was used, which benefited the parties promoted by the palace and supported by rural elites (Lust-Okar & Jamal, 2002; López-García, 2000).
8. The law is available in Arabic at http://www.elections.ma/documentations/docs/loi_04.21.pdf.
9. The regional districts comprised 1 three-member district, 2 five-member ones, 1 six-member, 3 seven-member, 1 eight-member, 3 ten-member and 1 twelve-member.
10. See the report of the general secretary of the USFP, Dris Lachgar, pointing out the issues of the negotiations at the party’s national council (USFP website, 19 December 2020).
11. Interview with Ali Hamedine, member of the executive committee of the PJD and member of the House of Councillors, 16 March 2022.
12. Interview with Ali Hamedine.
13. See declarations of the PAM general secretary, 16 March 2021, and discussions in the political bureau and the national council, 13 November 2020. Also, TelQuel, 9 October 2020.
14. MP, 12 March 2021.
15. See the memorandum on the USFP website, July 2020.
16. The Constitutional Court declared itself not competent to rule on this mechanism since the Moroccan constitution does not refer to the procedure for the assignation of seats and grants Parliament the authority to develop the electoral rules (Constitutional Court Decision 118/21, 7 April 2021). See PJD’s legal argumentations in Medias24, 27 March 2021.
17. Declaration of the PI executive committee, 16 February 2021; PI website, 22 July 2020; L’Opinion, 22 July 2020; PI press release, 24 July 2021; PAM website, 13 September 2020; Medias24, 28 February 2021.
18. Morocco’s official website, 11 February 2021.
19. HR website, 23 February 2021; Tel Quel, 24 February 2021.
20. Voting results on the HR website.
21. Given the failure to reach a unanimous agreement on the electoral quota, the minister Laftit asked not to include the quota based on voter register in the new electoral law. However, this must be seen as part of the ‘Moroccan democratic theatre’ since, judging by past experience, it was inconceivable that the administrative parties would vote against a decision by the Ministry of the Interior.
22. In this research, small parties are considered those that hold less than 3 per cent of the total number of seats; medium-size parties, between 3 and 20 per cent; and the largest parties those that hold more than 20 per cent of the seats.
23. The LSq index computes the square root of half the sum of the squares of the difference between percentages of the vote and seats for each political party.
24. The formula to calculate Rae’s index of fractionalization is F = 1-∑ (pi)2, where pi is the proportion of votes/seats of each party and ∑ is the sum of the proportion of votes/seats of all the parties squared. The index ranges from 0 (absence of fragmentation) to 1 (maximum fragmentation).
25. The Effective Number of Parties provides information on the number of electoral or parliamentary parties weighed according to the relative strength in votes or seats. The formula is N = 1/, where N is the number of parties and
is the square of the proportion of votes/seats of each party.
26. According to Bennani-Chraïbi (2021, p. 182), Moroccan turnout depends on the sociological characteristics of voters, their social inclusion, and their relationship to politics (disaffection with and/or rejection of the political system).
27. It is significant that turnout presents sharp differences at local district level (see Table A.1 in the online Appendix for each local district). The highest turnout rates correspond to small districts, mainly to rural and desert areas in the Western-Saharan provinces under Moroccan administration whose superior turnout is presented as adhesion to Moroccan sovereignty by the political regime (see the Ministry of Communication website 9 September 2021). On the contrary, electoral abstention was above 65 per cent in populated urban areas such as the eight electoral districts of Casablanca, the two districts of Fez, the two districts of Rabat, one of the electoral districts of Salé (Médina), and also in the only district of the prefectures of Oujda (four-member) and Tangier-Assilah.
28. Author’s own estimations for VAP turnout and invalid votes.
29. El-Othmani, president of the national council of the PJD – less charismatic and notably more compliant than Benkirane – formed a coalition government under the conditions set by the RNI, including the PJD, RNI, MP, PPS, USFP, and UC (see Szmolka, 2021).
30. The RNI did not win seats in the two-member districts of M’diq-Fnideq, Guercif, Mediouna, Youssoufia, Assa-Zag and Es-mara.
31. The PJD won seats in the local districts of Meknès, Kenitra-Kenitra, Casablanca-Anfa and Taroudant Sud; and, the MDS in Khemisset-Tiflet Rommani, Safi and Errachidia.
32. Specifically, the RNI took an additional seat in the twelve-member district of Casablanca-Settat, in the ten-member districts of Fès-Mèknes and Rabat-Salé-Kenitra, and in the seven-member district of Sous-Massa. Likewise, the PAM gained a second seat in the ten-member district of Marrakech.
33. In the elections of 2021, the average number of competing parties was 16 in local districts and 18.6 in regional districts (see Tables A.1 and A.2 in the online Appendix).