The last triumph of Mohammed VI
Morocco's recent general elections have confirmed the success of the state model forged piece by piece by King Mohammed VI since he acceded to the throne, just over 20 years ago, to succeed his father, Hassan II. The current monarch, who speaks fluent Spanish and also holds the highest religious authority in his country, has chosen the path of modernisation, industrialisation and economic liberalism in the face of the stagnation of archaic Islamism that constantly strives to dominate the lives and times of Moroccans.
The old sultanate, a recurrent victim of invasions and occupations over the centuries, has thus culminated its return to international sovereignty under a monarch who has suffered the mockery, if not ostracism, of his European "equals", especially the Spanish, who are so fond of calling a "satrap" what they do not understand, with a certain superiority that betrays a pamphilism in the management of the times.
The triumph of the king, whom I would prefer to call sultan, has been to seize not only the strings of the citizenry, who by tradition revere him publicly and privately, but also those of geopolitics and the power that gives his country, the cradle and scene of so many civilisational, ethnic, cultural and linguistic mixtures, its position as the Atlantic and Mediterranean key to recovering its status as the land of the Muslim West, which is what its name means in Arabic.
The polls gave him that certificate on 8 September with the unstoppable rise of the party of his friend Aziz Akhannouch, the National Rally of Independents (RNI), the second largest fortune (number 12 on the Forbes list for Africa) in Morocco after the Palace, with 102 seats in the Parliament of 395 deputies, compared to the colossal debacle of the Justice and Development Party, the leading representative of the Islamists, which governed for the last ten years and has gone from 125 seats to just 13.
The turnaround in the will of the people can be attributed, on the one hand, to the management of the pandemic and the growing social protest due to marginalisation and frustration in the street and, on the other hand, to the business interests of the new prime minister, who has a comfortable command of the national economy with multiple sectors, ranging from the production and marketing of milk and water to oil and its distribution, and who has been able to transfer his own marketing and commissions to a political campaign in which the competition has been the imams and clerics of the mosques.
The results also endorse the Authenticity and Modernity Party, founded in 2008 by Ali Fuad el-Himma, who is now the monarch's main advisor, with 87 MPs; and keep the nationalist Istiqlal (81) in its place, followed by the Socialist Union of Popular Forces (34), the Popular Movement (28), the Progress and Socialism Party (22) and the Constitutional Union (18); Mohammed VI himself undoubtedly won the elections by a landslide, thus consolidating the decisive scenario for continuing his reforms, privatisations and industrial investments, especially in the Tangiers hub, where most of the automotive, aeronautical and technological factories are concentrated, including the thriving port of Tangier Med; But also with its free trade zones in Kenitra, Mohammedia, Casablanca, Tetouan, Oujda and more recently El Aaiun and Dakhla, the latter being a region of strong international controversy due to the eternal conflict over Western Sahara.
The real tools are clear: Morocco's increasingly assertive and demanding position in its Mediterranean and Atlantic geographical context; its status as a buffer against radical Islamism and for economic migration from sub-Saharan countries; its strong alliance with the United States and Europe; its predominant position in the Maghreb, as opposed to a nineteenth-century Algeria, obscure and ex-satellite of the former USSR; its attentions to convergence with black African countries; its growing influence within ECOWAS and the AU; and, finally the fall of the Polisario Front and its independence theses through attrition, a decisive factor especially in Spain and the Canary Islands, traditionally abducted by the Tindouf thesis.
It seems that the whole world has now realised the indisputable and convenient importance of Morocco for peace in this part of the world, although there are still loud and anachronistic exceptions to an unstoppable dynamic drawn square and square by the last sultan of the north of the nearby continent.