Morocco is a homeland that planted the tree of its identity in the field of its own soil long ago, and watered it with the sap of its mind. Geography has a presence whose effect has never lapsed, and its people have maps that move along the lines of time. The Atlantic Ocean, which the early Arabs called the "Sea of Darkness," had more than one voice in its towering waves, and the Mediterranean has a civilizational jostling that never subsides: the ebb and flow between war and peace, and the widening spaces of intellectual, philosophical, and scientific exchange. Nature's mountains and valleys, its desert and its green world, hold places in the mind whose working never rests. The Moroccan people are a fabric that never ceases to sharpen its threads through the force of creative movement.
Over the past three decades the Kingdom of Morocco has achieved a model industrial leap, outdoing some European countries in doing so: it has overtaken Italy in the volume of its car manufacturing, and has localized the manufacture of aircraft parts of various kinds. In 2011 Morocco witnessed a historic political shift. In March of that year King Mohammed VI announced a course of constitutional reform; a committee was formed to prepare a draft of a new constitution; the committee's work was put to a popular referendum; and the constitution was approved by a large popular majority. The new constitution contained operative articles that marked a great shift across the whole of the state's political life.
The new constitution provided that the head of government be appointed from the political party that tops the elections to the House of Representatives, and gave parliament a greater role in exercising legislative power and entrenching its independence. It widened the scope of rights and freedoms, and made Amazigh an official language alongside Arabic. It also provided for the protection of all the tributaries that make up the national identity- Arab, Amazigh, and Hassani, and the African, Andalusian, Hebrew, and Mediterranean components- and enshrined the principle of equality between men and women and the goal of parity between them.
Last Tuesday, September 29, King Mohammed VI charged Fatima Zahra Mansouri, a leader of the Authenticity and Modernity Party, which topped the elections to the House of Representatives, with forming the new government. The appointment expresses more than one meaning. The first is full respect for the new constitution in all its articles. The second is that Morocco is pushing hard toward comprehensive modernization in its political and social life, for women are no longer that pliant figure incapable of leadership. It also signals esteem for the academic qualifications and the political and administrative experience of whoever holds the premiership, without sinking into the mire that centuries of discriminatory backwardness and the belittling of women have piled up.
Morocco's prime minister-designate, Fatima Zahra Mansouri, is no passing amateur of politics. She has combined learning, work, and experience from every side. She has been a prominent leader of the Authenticity and Modernity Party since its fifth national congress in 2024, and she coordinates its collective leadership; she has served more than once as mayor of Marrakech; and she was minister of national territorial planning, urban planning, housing, and city policy, a post that brings together national portfolios of the greatest importance. She has also been elected to the House of Representatives more than once. She holds advanced qualifications in law, having studied at Moroccan, French, and American universities, and has practiced as a lawyer. All of this gives her everything that leads fair-minded people to congratulate the office of prime minister on her assuming it, more than they congratulate her on taking it.
Many great challenges await Fatima Zahra Mansouri in her new position. The first is forming a coalition government of more than two parties alongside her own. The parliamentary seats were scattered in the last elections: her party, which won the highest number, took 97 seats, and she needs at least 198 members of the House of Representatives to form her government. The cabinet that awaits Zahra must achieve full cohesion if she is to meet the national obligations before her, the most important being jobs for thousands of young people, the economic problems sweeping every part of the world, and the preparations for the 2030 football World Cup, co-hosted with Spain and Portugal. Another question is never absent. In every democratic life there are opposition political formations that will mobilize their political strength to brake the government's progress in carrying out the program it promised voters, and the Justice and Development Party announced early on its opposition to Fatima Zahra Mansouri's government, as soon as her appointment was announced.
The first question before her remains securing the minimum number required in the House of Representatives. That calls for opening a dialogue with the parties that hold seats in the chamber, so that she can obtain the necessary majority, along with a minimum of understanding and cohesion in the government's work.
An Arab woman's taking the premiership of an Arab state is a flash of optimism and hope in our world, where hoarse voices grow louder, their tongues uttering nothing but the belittling of women's worth and attacks on their abilities, calling for them to be treated with humiliating inferiority, and sprinkling over all this the dust of what was lost in a dead past. The Moroccan event is big- bezzaf, as Moroccans say. Zahra rises in Morocco.
