It was a rather subdued election night at the PPS headquarters on Wednesday, where a handful of party members and political bureau figures waited for the numbers to come in while television crews and reporters gathered for what promised to be a long night.
There was little by way of celebration yet.
As word from the count filtered back to Rabat, some among the party leadership wore their concern rather plainly. The PPS had no result to trumpet, but Charafat Afilal already had one number on her mind: 38.02pc.
The former minister and political bureau member said the turnout should set “alarm bells ringing” over the state of the democratic process.
With 61.98pc of registered voters staying away from the ballot box, Afilal laid much of the blame at the outgoing government’s door.
“The current government has set a bad example and driven people away from elections and political engagement in general,” she told Le360.
Her charge was that five years in office had left behind a political vacuum and fed the public disenchantment that, in her reading, showed up in Wednesday’s turnout.
It was a political broadside delivered before the full electoral picture had emerged and from a party that spent the campaign trying to turn dissatisfaction with the outgoing majority to its advantage.
Afilal struck a markedly different note when it came to the conduct of the election itself. The campaign, she said, had been orderly, while local authorities had remained completely neutral—an acknowledgement that her criticism was directed at the political record of the outgoing government rather than the administration of the vote.
For the PPS, the argument over a political alternative had been part of its pitch throughout the campaign. On Wednesday night, Afilal was tying that argument to the one figure already beyond dispute. Turnout had closed at 38.02 pc. The PPS’s own numbers were still coming in.
