(Daily Star) RABAT: Morocco’s February 20 protest movement played a key role in pushing reforms this year but it missed the Arab Spring slipstream and the king awaits Friday’s polls untroubled by their boycott call.
Seizing on the dwindling popularity of Morocco’s traditional political parties, the pro-reform movement has slammed as a farce the upcoming parliamentary elections in the absolute monarchy and is calling for a boycott.
It says the polls will not address key issues of income inequality, widespread unemployment or corruption, nor will they change the current political system, where the king and a small cadre of others wield enormous power.
“These elections will be marked with a weak voter turnout, and that will strengthen our movement,” predicted Ouidade Melhaf of the group’s Rabat wing, adding that most Moroccans had little interest in elections anyway.
The protest group is an eclectic crew of cyber-activists, radical Islamists, left-wing activists, students and independents and has already prompted some level of political change.
In March, protests inspired by the revolts in Tunisia and Egypt led King Mohammed VI to initiate a series of reforms.
Under the reforms, approved in a July 1 referendum, the monarch devolved significant political powers to the prime minister and parliament, though he remained head of state and the military.
The February 2011 protests that gave the movement its name showed that what was once considered one of the region’s most stable regimes was not immune to the wind of change sweeping the region.
But observers say the referendum brought about little real change and argue that the king managed the Arab Spring with great nous, managing to steal the protest movement’s fire by making some concessions.
Among the measures he introduced were wage hikes for civil servants and other steps aimed at curbing unemployment.
The February 20 movement has since lost momentum and is grappling with internal divisions, as disagreements emerge between radical Islamists and other members.
“Calls for a boycott of the elections will not consolidate their movement. They will only achieve that by developing their social networks on the ground,” political analyst Mohamed Madani told AFP.
Protests held Sunday drew smaller crowds than the February 20 group might have hoped for, with a turnout of around 10,000 in Tangiers, 5,000 in Casablanca and 2,000 in the nation’s capital Rabat.
Such street protests had been greeted with an enthusiastic response at the start of the Arab Spring, but economist Fouad Abdelmoumni said many in the middle and working classes have become alienated from the movement.
“When people hear that part of the movement is made up of Islamist fanatics and fanatical communists, they are afraid,” Abdelmoumni said.
In a recent internal memo, the movement had admitted to a number of weaknesses and called for a clearer and more simple campaign platform.
Baudoin Dupret of the Rabat-based Jacques Berque research centre said trade unions remained more potent agents of social change, adding that they were conspicuously absent from the February 20 movement.
“The population isn’t very interested in politics or in the elections, yet the February 20 movement is first and foremost a political group,” he said.
Dupret argued that if turnout is low on Friday, it will owe more to traditional popular estrangement from the political system in a country where a third of the population is illiterate than to any boycott call.
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