There is an old saying in journalism: don’t shoot at an ambulance. Fair enough. But an ambulance, at least, comes to someone’s rescue. Aziz Akhannouch’s government mostly came to the rescue of its own interests. That is now over. With provisional results formally announced on September 24 by Interior Minister Abdelouafi Laftit, Morocco’s political landscape is heading for a historic shift. On a nationwide turnout of 38%, the verdict at the ballot box amounted to a resounding rebuke of the outgoing government and, at its head, the National Rally of Independents (RNI) and Akhannouch himself.
The provisional make-up of the House of Representatives puts the Authenticity and Modernity Party (PAM) in first place with 97 seats, leaving the RNI a distant second with just 66, barely ahead of the Istiqlal Party on 65 and the PJD on 54.
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For Aziz Akhannouch’s party, the fall is all the more bruising because in 2021 it had swept into first place with 102 seats, establishing itself as the dominant force on the political scene. Quite an achievement: nearly half the result in just five years. Armed with enormous resources deployed both on the ground and online, and convinced that their electoral machine was infallible, RNI leaders were banking on a landslide victory. They had failed to reckon with the quiet anger of voters. The outgoing Head of Government’s party must now settle for a supporting role, probably in opposition, with PAM having already ruled out any future alliance.
When electoral business hits the wall of reality
In its bid to hold on to power, the RNI and Aziz Akhannouch fell back on a well-worn formula: rely on local powerbrokers capable of delivering votes in their strongholds, pour vast sums into a campaign with all the trappings of plutocracy, and pull every lever of a finely tuned electoral business machine.
But this strategy, detached from reality, ran headlong into the government’s disastrous record. In September 2021, under the falsely empathetic slogan #YouDeserveBetter, the party promised a program that was “costed, credible and achievable.” Five years later, the verdict is damning: virtually none of those promises has been kept.
The one million jobs promised to revive the post-Covid economy never materialized, while unemployment climbed past the historic 13% mark, bearing down on young people and graduates. For all the government’s trumpeting of its social programs, the public health system sank into its worst crisis, marked by a mass exodus of doctors and sprawling medical deserts. Public schools were paralyzed for months by teachers’ strikes: a school year sacrificed, families left stranded. Faced with the strikers, Akhannouch first showed contempt, then capitulated—too late to salvage anything.
Scandals, crises and blurred lines
Public discontent ran so deep that all the energy and money poured in by the RNI came to nothing. Aziz Akhannouch’s term will be indelibly associated with major crises and high-profile scandals that ultimately destroyed the credibility of political action.
Citizen protests driven by movements such as GenZ212 laid bare a generational rupture fuelled by the soaring cost of living and contempt from the political elite. Then came emblematic controversies, from the Agadir hospital scandal to glaring failures in the allocation of agricultural subsidies, exposing a technocratic style of government divorced from the suffering of rural communities battered by a historic drought.
Worse still, the five-year term was tainted by an unprecedented blurring of lines by Aziz Akhannouch himself, who freely mixed high office with his private interests at the helm of powerful business holdings. For the first time, Morocco was governed by a man who simultaneously headed one of the country’s largest private groups—and who never saw fit to choose between the two. Between his businesses and the state, there were no longer walls but bridges. Several executives from his group secured ministerial positions or were appointed to head strategic institutions. Companies linked to him bid for public contracts, beginning with the Greater Casablanca desalination plant. And while Moroccans were paying steep prices at the pump, the Head of Government remained one of the biggest players in the fuel market.
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Morocco has had businessmen in politics before. What it had never seen was a government in which the interests of a business group and those of the state became so intertwined that it was no longer clear which was serving the other. The word “oligarchy,” long uttered only in whispers, eventually entered the mainstream political debate. This was a long way from the stature expected of a statesman concerned with the public interest.
History will record these elections as a political humiliation for Aziz Akhannouch’s party. Morocco’s institutional landscape is now set for a major shift in both the balance of power and the methods of government. Moroccan democracy has demonstrated its ability to turn the page on a certain brand of technocratic arrogance and reaffirm a fundamental truth: in politics, promises made and the ethics of accountability ultimately face judgment at the ballot box.
Put to the test of power, the RNI’s gilded technocracy demonstrated the gulf between triumphant campaign promises and the hard realities of governing—a gulf that only the sovereign verdict of the electorate could close.
Aziz Akhannouch leaves behind a discredited public discourse. He also leaves a toxic precedent: the idea that a country can be governed without ever ceasing to run one’s own business interests. The next government’s first task will be to restate an obvious truth that this term in office allowed to fade from view: the state is not a subsidiary.
