El PJD despide a un centenar de empleados y abandona el proyecto de su nueva sede

One month after the electoral debacle, the Justice and Development Party (PJD) is still in free fall. The polls stripped the Islamist party of power after a decade of uninterrupted government and after losing 112 seats and the country's major municipalities. The most important political force of the last 10 years was unsewn.

The electoral catastrophe led to the resignation of the former head of government, Saaeddine Othmani, and the party's leadership, identified as the main culprits in the resounding loss of Islamist hegemony in Moroccan politics, after a seven-place drop in the ranking of the most voted parties.

However, the definitive sifting of the PJD took place on Tuesday with the dismissal of 160 activists and workers of the party and the abandonment of its project to establish a new headquarters in one of the wealthy neighbourhoods of the capital, Rabat, according to the Moroccan digital newspaper Hespress. A move that drags the PJD towards the abyss of dissolution.

The party began to expel members from its ranks once the count was over. The forecasts, initially adverse to the party, did not anticipate such a collapse, but at most predicted a loss of support within the executive, which would have led to it being left out of the coalition or becoming a junior member.

The first profiles to be expelled from the party were the workers at the party's headquarters in several cities, including Rabat, and those in charge of managing the party's networks and digital communication, an area where they operated with skill and which had brought them benefits in previous elections.

Beyond the lack of results or malpractice, the party justifies the dismissals on economic grounds. The sharp decline in state revenues, corresponding to their low political representation, has pushed a hundred families into unemployment and forced many of them to relocate their homes.

The dismissals have outraged the rank and file of the formation and the supporters of the PJD. The consequences and, above all, the conditions in which they were carried out. Only Saaeddine Othmani, in his capacity as prime minister, and the rest of his cabinet ministers received compensation from the party. The rest of the expelled party activists, who are demanding a cumulative payment of close to 7 million dollars, have not.

This indignation adds to the discontent within the PJD over the poor strategic decisions of the party's general secretariat. During Othmani's tenure, the Islamist leader dismissed critics of his administration and promoted those who supported his views, leading to a long string of poor results.

The party denounced irregularities during the electoral process and called for the annulment of the elections, accusations that the international community and foreign observers do not seem to have echoed. And it did not stop there: the PJD also collapsed in the local and regional elections, dropping from 5,021 elected members to 777 at the communal level and from 174 seats to 18 at the regional level.