3 - Moroccan Politics: Defensive at Home, Assertive Abroad

Summary

In the post Arab Spring era, after uprisings unseated the authoritarian regimes in Tunisia and Egypt, the MENA region continues to undergo massive changes. As I have argued, ‘between Syria's crackdown and Libya's quagmire, the Arab spring seems stalled and the momentum for further regime change’ all but gone. While demands for socio-economic and political reforms have continued, not all MENA regimes have used violence to push back on those demands. Morocco has been able to rely on the popular appeal of its monarchy to deal with its protest movement, through ‘a calibrated political strategy of sheepish reforms, while also benefitting from the fledgling opposition movement's lack of coherence and organization’. Domestically, the monarchy in Morocco continues to be confident in its carefully managed style of governance and engineered electoral contests that add legitimacy to the political system. Regionally, the monarchy advances a robust foreign policy that centres around the perennial conflict in the Western Sahara involving Algeria as a regional foe and buoyed most recently by US recognition of Morocco's claims on the territory. Morocco's domestic politics have been shaped by three different interrelated events that show-cased the supremacy of the regime in managing the political arena and its ability in placating the different opposition forces. The events of the Arab uprisings, the Hirak protests and the ascent of the Islamist Party of Justice and Development (PJD) have each challenged the regime domestically and forced it to adopt different strategies of cooptation and confinement. Foreign policy issues centred around the Western Sahara conflict have also served to distract from the domestic challenges and unite Moroccans around a nationalist consensus.

This chapter analyses the Moroccan regime's confidence at home, as displayed in its handling of each of the three challenges of the ‘Moroccan’ Arab Uprisings and the 20 February Movement, the Hirak protests and the resurgence of the Islamist PJD's popularity at the polls. In addressing each of these challenges, the Moroccan regime has been the sole authority in an increasingly authoritarian edifice. However, protests in the last decade have also unmasked a new kind of dilemma for the monarchy: the failure of the regime's dual strategy of appearing above the political fray, while at the same time managing the political system and opposition forces.