Marruecos publica las listas electorales de cara a las próximas elecciones 

The Alawi country will hold its next legislative and municipal elections on 8 September, according to the decrees approved by the Government Council in Rabat. Similarly, the government announced that the election of the members of the Parliament's Chamber of Councillors will be held on 5 October, and the election of the members of the Ministries of Agriculture, Trade, Industry, Handicrafts, Services and Fisheries on 6 August.

This is the first time that Morocco will go to the polls on a working day, instead of Friday, the traditional polling day. This modification was the result of a proposal put forward by several political parties, which argued that social participation in the polls would be higher if held on a full working day.

In Morocco, the Minister of the Interior informed citizens that the corrective tables of the general electoral lists, comprising the decisions of the administrative commissions, have been made available for public consultation from 9 to 15 July.  Likewise, any person whose application for registration or transfer of registration has been rejected or whose name has been removed from the electoral list on which they are registered may lodge an appeal with the competent court, which must issue its decision within a maximum of five days from the date of lodging the appeal at the court's registry office, according to the same source.

For his part, the Moroccan Minister of Islamic Affairs, Ahmed Taoufik, stressed in a speech before the House of Representatives (lower house) that imams have also been banned for years from exercising any political or trade union activity. The minister told the deputies that he hoped they would share this "need for mosques to maintain neutrality and for electoral promises addressed to clerics to be forbidden", Taoufik said.

Since 2002, Morocco has adopted a system based on proportional representation by electoral lists using the "largest remainder" method, which was calculated on the basis of valid votes. From now on, the electoral quotient will be calculated on the basis of the lists of registered voters, whether they have voted or not, which can lead to large differences in results considering that in 2016 there were 5.8 million valid votes out of a census of 15.7 million. In other words, the higher the electoral quotient, the less chance any party has of reaching it, which in practice translates into a distribution of seats among all parties, including the very minority ones.

The experts consulted by Efe agree that this is a new method that has no precedent in the world, and that it will result in an atomisation of Parliament and the weakening of the majority parties, particularly the PJD, the most voted party in all the elections of the past decade. In the last legislative elections in October 2016, the Islamist party won 125 seats out of a total of 395 in the lower house - 18 seats more than in the previous legislature - while strengthening its representation in the country's major cities.

However, the growth in votes and seats has been paralleled by a decline in power in the Executive: while in 2011 the PJD, in addition to the Presidency of the Government, was at the head of strategic ministries such as Justice and Foreign Affairs, in 2016 it was left out of the most important ministries after having to share them with a heterogeneous coalition of five parties that was imposed on it in tough negotiations.

In contrast to the PJD, the rest of the parties defend the new reform because, they say, it will guarantee equal opportunities and pluralism in the legislative institution, including the Authenticity and Modernity Party (PAM), which came second in the 2016 elections and will also be disadvantaged by the new electoral quotient.

The approval of these laws is a fundamental stage in the organisation of this "election year" in which the legislative elections coincide with the municipal and regional elections starting in the autumn, and from which a government will emerge to manage the post-pandemic.

This year's elections have the particularity of being held in a context marked by the COVID-19 health crisis and by the strong polarisation between all the political parties and, in front of them, the Justice and Development Party (PJD), which heads the current electoral coalition and aspires to a third term in office, after having clearly won the two previous legislative elections.