Morocco election campaign off to slow start

Candidates for the Moroccan Parliament face an uphill task in gaining the people’s confidence.

By Hassan Benmehdi for Magharebia in Casablanca – 17/11/11

More than 30 political parties are competing for a share of the 395 seats in the Chamber of Representatives, 70 more seats than in the 2007 legislative elections.

With the official launch of campaigning on Saturday (November 12th), preparations for Morocco’s November 25th legislative elections are entering the final stretch.

Election campaigning over the first few days has been somewhat timid. On the ground, the public has seen little action from the candidates.

Casablanca residents Ahmed, Rachid and Moustapha said there was no sense of the impending election: “Up to now we haven’t seen anyone, and we don’t even know which candidates are standing in our constituency.”

Abdelali, a road sweeper in Casablanca, echoed the detached feeling regarding the vote. “I live in a shanty town next to Sidi Othman, and I work for 1,700 dirhams (160 euros) a month. I’ve got a family of four, and like other people living around here with nothing, I can’t wait to see the candidates to tell them we can’t believe them anymore, and there’s no point in them asking us to go and vote for anything, because no-one here has the strength or the will to believe them anymore,” he said.

But within the political parties, there is certainly a lot of motivation. Instructions, general guidelines and advice have been issued to the candidates to help them win over the Moroccan public.

The youth vote is the great unknown once more and it is also the big challenge facing all the parties, who need to win the hearts and minds of the younger generations who, if they were to turn out in force, could swing the vote from one side to the other, say observers.

At the same time, the young members of the February 20 Movement continue to call for the public to boycott the elections.

But Hakim Benchamas, the assistant secretary-general of the Authenticity and Modernity Party (PAM), said the main challenge now was to convince voters to turn out at the polls. He said abstaining from the vote “allows the machinery of electoral fraud to continue working away”.

“You have to be serious with the public and stop lying to them,” said Abdellah Harrif, a February 20 Movement supervisor and secretary-general of Annahj Addimocrati.

The interior ministry said November 14th that 1,546 lists have been submitted to local constituencies, bearing the names of 5,392 candidates, both male and female. At the national level, a total of 19 lists have been registered, including 1,710 names made up of 1,140 female candidates and 570 youth candidates.

The state has budgeted 220 million dirhams to support the parties.

This content was commissioned for Magharebia.com.