The Orientalism of the “Progressive” Gaze: How Anti-Moroccan Discourse Recycles Morophobic Tropes

Yet, paradoxically, the discourse emerging from prominent “leftist” voices—particularly within the Spanish media ecosystem—often mirrors, whether consciously or not, the morophobic tropes historically deployed by Spain’s far right. These narratives, while draped in the language of “human rights” or “decolonial justice,” betray a deep-seated unease with Moroccan sovereignty, identity, and geopolitical agency.

Cultural critic Edward Said warned of this phenomenon in Orientalism (1978), where he highlighted the tendency of Western discourses to infantilize or demonize the non-European Other, particularly when that Other asserts autonomy outside Western paradigms. Today, a similar logic persists—albeit cloaked in new rhetorical garments. The relentless portrayal of Morocco as a “totalitarian,” “repressive,” or “expansionist” state functions less as critique than as a reproduction of colonial anxiety: the fear that the subaltern might not only speak, but govern—and succeed.

Consider the case of a prominent Spanish columnist who has long positioned himself as a specialist on Morocco and the broader Maghreb. His writing, widely circulated and often treated as authoritative, rarely deviates from a familiar script: Morocco is invariably framed as opaque, duplicitous, and menacing. Across numerous columns and media interventions, the country is portrayed not as a complex, modernizing regional actor, but as a quasi-imperial monarchy bent on subverting international norms.

By contrast, Algeria—despite its well-documented authoritarianism and civil-military entrenchment—receives comparatively little critical scrutiny. This asymmetry reveals less about North African politics than about the psychic economy of radical left discourse: Morocco, unlike Algeria, defies the script. It is pro-monarchy, pro-market, and increasingly successful. That, perhaps, is the real “threat.”

Voices from the Sahrawi activist space contribute a parallel, though distinct, strand to this phenomenon. Their critiques, often received uncritically in sympathetic media, reduce the region’s political dynamics to a binary of oppressor and oppressed—casting Moroccans as inherently domineering and Sahrawis as permanently subjugated. The narrative flattens identity, disallows internal diversity, and overlooks the lived complexity of Sahrawi communities. Crucially, it converges with right-wing narratives that depict Morocco as patriarchal, Islamic, monarchic—and therefore incompatible with European modernity.

Indeed, the convergence of these supposedly progressive critiques with far-right anxieties is more than semantic. It is structural. The Spanish far right has long constructed Morocco—and Moroccans in the diaspora—as threatening, foreign, and culturally irreconcilable with Europe. What is striking is how readily some voices on the left replicate this framing: the Moroccan state as a shadowy “Makhzen,” its diplomacy as conspiratorial, its politics as inherently illegitimate. These are not analyses. They are recycled mythologies, rooted in an Orientalist epistemology that denies Moroccan agency.

As cultural theorist Rey Chow has argued, “progressive” discourses often reinscribe power when they frame the non-Western Other solely in terms of victimhood and lack. By denying Morocco the capacity for legitimacy or success outside Western-approved paradigms, such critiques enact a subtle but persistent form of epistemic violence. They reduce Morocco to a case study in dysfunction rather than a political subject in its own right.

This is not to deny the necessity of critique. Like all states, Morocco must be held to account on human rights, transparency, and democratic reform. But critique must not become caricature. Nor should it serve as a conduit for older, more insidious narratives—especially when those narratives reinforce the symbolic architecture of exclusion upon which Europe’s far right thrives.

In the end, the question is not whether these commentators are consciously aligned with reactionary politics. They may well believe they are defending the principles of justice and decoloniality. But in the discursive field, intention is secondary to effect. And the effect of their discourse is to furnish Spain’s anti-Moroccan imaginary with new intellectual armor—polished not with nationalist slogans, but with the language of progressive virtue.