Morocco: pragmatist’s election consolidates Islamists’ moderate trend

Caption: Abdelilah Benkiran, new leader of Morocco’s Islamist PJD, is known as a moderate pragmatist.

Morocco’s main Islamist opposition Justice and Development Party (PJD) has replaced Saad Eddine Othmani, its leader for the past five years, with a leading moderate. Abdelilah Benkiran, won the support of 684 of 1,628 delegates at the PJD’s congress last weekend. Othmani won 495 votes and parliamentarian Abdallah Baha trailed with 14 votes.

Benkiran the new leader is a leading light in the Tawhid wal Islah (Unity and Reform) Islamic civic associations, the social movement base from which the PJD draws its leading cadres. The PJD is generally seen as more transparent, accessible and rooted than the mainstream parties, in part because of its connections to this grass-roots network.

But Benkiran also heads the PJD’s policy-decision making National Council, and is known to place pragmatic policy concerns above religious issues. “Frankly, the citizens would not back us in the polls to impose veils on women and force men to grow beards and people to come mosques,” he told Reuters.

Othmani, who similarly emphasized “social justice and economic and social development as our priorities”, explicitly based PJD strategy on the experience of the Turkish AK party. He was an architect of the party’s centrist shift towards accommodation with the country’s monarchy and secular establishment, a position criticized by militant rank and file members and parliamentarians. But his replacement by another moderate suggests that he has been punished for the party’s disappointing performance in last year’s parliamentary election rather than for ideological transgressions.

The PJD had been expected to emerge as the majority party and enter a coalition government, but it only won 46 seats in the 325-member assembly, leaving it in second place behind the conservative Istiqlal party which formed the government.

While Morocco has been celebrated as a rare instance of liberalization in the Arab world, the conservative victory will only defer moves towards genuine democratization. Due to the pervasive influence of the makhzen – the tight-knit oligarchy of senior bureaucrats who advise the monarch – analysts suggest the contemporary Moroccan state remains, at best, a neo-makhzen entity.

Benkiran’s accession to the leadership appears likely to consolidate the PJD’s transformation from a clandestine revolutionary movement to a legal constitutional party. With its Algerian counterpart, the Mouvement de la Société pour la Paix (MSP, Movement of the Society for Peace) moderate Islamist parties are emerging “as actors that can play a role in the democratisation process of the Maghreb,” a recent EuroMeSCo analysis suggests.

“By integrating into the official political landscape, they have become conservative and centre-ground parties,” the authors suggest, “politically by adhering to the institutional frameworks of the kingdom and the nation, and economically in calling for liberalism.”

The PJD may have transcended the ideological rigidity and Islamic radicalism of its radical origins in the Movement of Unity and Reform. But it still has its critics among radical Islamists opposed to its accommodation with the state and from secular democrats who believe that, despite its incremental approach, the party retains a commitment to ultimately implementing sharia law.