Election campaigns in Morocco are entering their final hours before the start of electoral silence, ahead of the House of Representatives election scheduled for Wednesday 23 September. Twenty-eight parties are competing for 395 seats, which will determine the parliamentary and government composition leading the country over the next five years.
The vote will be Morocco’s 12th legislative election since independence. On-the-ground competition intensified in the hours before the electoral silence took effect, particularly in densely populated working-class neighbourhoods.
In Rabat’s Al-Taqaddoum neighbourhood, journalist Mokhtar Alablaoui said a difference of one or two seats could change the ranking of parties seeking to top the results, before King Mohammed VI appoints the head of government from the winning party to form the governing coalition. Alablaoui said the promises made by parties during the campaign included raising wages, cutting income tax, which he described as among the highest in the world, and introducing grants for unemployed people and those wishing to marry.
Income and purchasing power top the competition
Issues related to income and purchasing power have become the focus of competition between parties in the final days of the campaign. In Casablanca, journalist Maysaa Al-Fatnassi said the economic capital was witnessing the fiercest electoral contests for 57 seats distributed across 16 local constituencies.
She added that the city reflected the social and economic concerns of Moroccan society, foremost among them the rising cost of living and youth unemployment. In Tangier, journalist Aymen Al-Zubair reported the demands of factory workers, retirees and young people. He noted that participation by people aged between 18 and 25 in the previous election did not exceed 4% because of a loss of confidence, while unemployment among this group exceeds 35%.
In an effort to attract young people, parties pledged to provide bank loans for projects, reduce rents and increase the number of vocational training centres. There was a wide disparity between the figures included in the election programmes of governing coalition and opposition parties.
The National Rally of Independents promised to raise the minimum wage to 500 dollars, while the Authenticity and Modernity Party proposed a salary starting at 300 dollars a month. In the opposition camp, the Popular Movement announced a plan to allocate 100 dollars a month to every unemployed person with a higher education degree, while the Party of Progress and Socialism pledged to increase the minimum wage by 15%.
Election promises face mounting economic pressures
Economic analyst Badr Zaher Al-Azraq warned that implementing or fulfilling the parties’ pledges would be difficult, pointing to a chronic general budget deficit ranging between 3% and 4%. The deficit places the question of securing the funding needed for social and economic programmes at the centre of the debate over the realism of the election promises.
Samir Belfkih, a member of the Political Bureau of the Authenticity and Modernity Party, said his party was contesting the election with the aim of topping the results and leading the next government, drawing on its 13 years of experience in government and opposition. The party presented a programme estimated to cost about 350 billion dirhams, or nearly 37 billion dollars.
The programme includes what the party called a “Purchasing Power Pact”, with an annual cost of 30 billion dirhams, calculated at a rate of one US dollar to 9.55 Moroccan dirhams. The pact includes cutting income tax, raising wages from 500 to 5,000 dirhams and limiting the role of intermediaries.
Parties set out the costs of their social programmes
Belfkih linked these measures to addressing structural imbalances, including 280,000 cases of school dropout, which he said cost 97 billion dirhams, a decline in women’s economic activity rate to 19% and graduate unemployment reaching 37%. By contrast, Mustapha El Khalfi, a member of the General Secretariat of the Justice and Development Party and a former minister, said his party was offering a political alternative to what he described as the current government’s failures.
He added that the government had promised to provide one million jobs but, he said, had delivered only 100,000. The Justice and Development Party’s programme is based on “100 pledges”, led by five main measures. They include returning 7 million citizens to the healthcare coverage system, taking the total number covered to 18 million; providing vocational training for one million beneficiaries; and enforcing laws against corruption and conflicts of interest, as well as criminalising illicit enrichment.
The measures also include setting a cap on fuel profit margins to protect purchasing power, supporting families and continuing direct support for more than 100,000 widows. These pledges bring together social protection, employment, governance and energy price issues.
Incumbent Prime Minister Aziz Akhannouch, whom the article described as the former president of the National Rally of Independents, said his party was seeking to win the parliamentary election scheduled for 23 September.
Akhannouch defended his government’s record during campaign events, saying that the past five years had brought major challenges but that the government had nevertheless managed to fulfil a number of its commitments.
