By MATT BRADLEY
Wall Street journal MIDDLE EAST NEWS
RABAT, Morocco—Violent uprisings continue to upend much of the Arab world, but many Moroccans expect their parliamentary polls Friday to demonstrate the possibility of peaceful, stable political change.
A moderate Islamist political party is expected to make strong gains following a series of constitutional changes by Morocco’s king earlier this year that, for the first time, will separate elected political power and the country’s judiciary from royal authority.
Morocco’s elections offer the first real test for two monarchies—Morocco and Jordan—that have taken a middle-of-the-road approach to the Arab Spring. They swiftly offered the promise of incremental democratic changes to appease their restive publics.
That contrasts with the cycle of expanding protests that has now toppled four Arab regimes, as well as the breakdown of all reform processes in Bahrain.
But if timely concessions to protests in Morocco and the Kingdom of Jordan have spared those countries the deaths, destruction and economic collapse others have seen, they might also have diminished the potential for lasting political reform.
The success of Morocco’s managed revolution now hangs on Friday’s elections and whether the new parliament will be able to push political reforms forward within a system that remains tightly restrained by royal authority.
“You could say Morocco offers a textbook case of how you completely cut out the Arab Spring,” said Michael Willis, a lecturer in the oriental-studies faculty at Oxford University. “Morocco was in basically the same position as it was a year ago. It made enough changes to take the winds out of the protest movements.”
The fall of Egypt’s President Hosni Mubarak on Feb. 11 brought tens of thousands of Moroccans into the streets on Feb. 20. Unlike the demands in the Arab republics of Egypt, Tunisia, Syria and Yemen, Moroccan protesters made more cautious calls for a constitutional monarchy akin to that of the U.K.
On July 1, an overwhelming majority of Moroccans voted in a referendum to approve constitutional amendments that would elevate the office of prime minister to a new post called “head of government.”
The constitutional changes obligate King Mohammed VI to choose the “head of government” from the party that holds the parliamentary plurality, rather than a wild-card candidate of his choice.
The new head of government will have the added power to dismiss parliament and lead the council of ministers who draft state policy. The referendum also creates an independent judiciary and offers mild advances in women’s rights, freedom of expression and equality for ethnic minorities.
While the concessions represented a burst of daylight onto Morocco’s closed political system, they still preserved ultimate power in the monarchy. The king alone remains the final arbiter for most executive decisions, causing many in the “February 20 Movement” to consider the changes illusory. Most February 20 members plan to boycott Friday’s elections.
A similar pattern unfolded in Jordan, where King Abdullah II moved quickly to dissolve the government on Feb. 1 and guarantee lasting reforms in a rousing speech. The relatively wealthy kingdom also offered a $500 million package of food and fuel subsidies and added tens of thousands of new government jobs to the payroll to appease protesters.
As in Morocco, the actual concessions were limited. But despite continuing agitation from mostly Islamist dissidents, the king’s slight sway toward democracy has managed to mostly quell popular anger for the time being.
One limiting factor for protest movements in Jordan and Morocco is the countries’ relative prosperity and freedom. Both countries enjoy higher levels of economic development than Egypt or Yemen, and personal liberties that far exceed those of Syria and pre-revolutionary Libya and Tunisia.
The fact that Morocco and Jordan are both monarchies—unlike five of the republics that have been undone by the so-called Arab Spring—also lends legitimacy to their status quo.
Both countries’ success in managing internal dissent has been so instructive that the exclusive economic club of six Gulf Arab monarchies, the Gulf Cooperation Council, entertained Moroccan and Jordanian requests in September for admission and continues to explore the issue. “If [the reforms] do work, the Gulf monarchies can learn a lot from them,” said Shadi Hamid, the director of research at the Brooking’s Institution Doha Center. “Instead of all-out repression, what you can do is adopt gradual reform, and that will keep the majority of your citizens happy for the short run.”
In Morocco’s seaside capital of Rabat, many believe they have achieved an enviable balance between reform and stability that has eluded much of the Arab world.
Under King Mohammed VI’s new constitutional changes, a leader of Morocco’s Islamist Justice and Development Party, or PJD, could conceivably become the next “head of government”—an unthinkable prospect only one year ago.
While it took revolutions in Tunisia and Egypt to give real electoral empowerment to Islamists, the PJD expects to win about 70 of the parliament’s 395 seats in Friday’s parliamentary vote among a wide field of more than 20 political parties that agreed to the election’s terms in August. There are 33 parties in the current parliament, which was elected in 2007.
Seventy seats would represent a significant increase from the 47 seats the PJD now holds in parliament, where the party currently with the most seats is the Authenticity and Modernity Party, formed in 2008 from among existing lawmakers by supporters of King Mohammed VI in a bid to create a pro-palace majority. It holds 55 seats.
“Moroccans are convinced that they can achieve very profound changes and reforms without major instability. I think they’re right,” said Mehdi Mezouari, a young parliamentary candidate for the Socialist Union of Popular Forces, a left-of-center political party.
Nevertheless, activists complain that the old patterns of corruption, vote-buying and local patronage persist. The king hasn’t redrawn electoral districts to empower national parties over local power-brokers, and the palace-aligned ministry of interior will continue to oversee the voting process. Morocco’s most powerful Islamist group, the Justice and Charity Party, remains illegal.
In that sense, Morocco’s soft revolution remains a work-in-progress.
“Yes, Moroccans are the exception” to the Arab Spring, said Aicha Abassi, a former February 20 movement activist who left to work for the Islamist PJD. “But I want the world to know that this exception must move on if the king doesn’t keep his promise.”
Write to Matt Bradley atmatt.bradley
