Abdelilah Benkirane declared the PJD’s 2021 rout behind it after Wednesday’s legislative elections, saying those who had written off the party had been proved wrong as it fought its way back into Morocco’s political reckoning.
The PJD secretary-general struck a defiant note in an election-night address, saying the party had survived a crisis that had brought it close to collapse and returned without abandoning the principles on which it had built its earlier electoral success.
The numbers eventually gave him grounds for a comeback claim, though not the return to the top that the party’s early figures had suggested.
Official provisional results announced by Interior Minister Abdelouafi Laftit early Thursday gave the PJD 54 seats—more than four times the 13 it won in 2021, but enough only for fourth place behind PAM on 97, RNI on 66 and Istiqlal on 65.
When Benkirane spoke, however, the party was working off its own returns from polling stations. Those figures, he said, had the PJD ahead by wide margins in a number of constituencies, with some races already settled in its favor.
For Benkirane, even that early showing was enough to revisit the debacle of five years ago. The PJD had entered the 2021 election after a decade in which it twice led legislative polls, winning 107 seats in 2011 and 125 in 2016. It left the 2021 contest with just 13.
Its opponents, Benkirane said, believed the party was finished.
He credited members who stayed the course through what he called a “temporary crisis,” despite an external environment he described as hostile and an internal situation he said had come close to collapse.
The road back, he said, had been difficult.
Benkirane singled out the PJD’s 13-member parliamentary group, arguing that its diminished numbers had not kept it quiet in the outgoing House and pointing to its questions, positions and parliamentary interventions.
He then turned his fire on the outgoing government.
The PJD, he claimed, had exposed what he called the government’s “true face,” citing the fuel controversy, alleged conflicts of interest and public money spent on the livestock import program.
Benkirane linked the latter to the rise in meat prices and the circumstances that left Moroccans unable to perform the Eid Al-Adha sacrifice, folding some of the party’s sharpest attacks on the outgoing government back into his account of its own recovery.
PAM came in for criticism too. Benkirane said the PJD had stood up to the party while resisting changes that, in his view, threatened the Moroccan family and its religious foundations.
He also took a swipe at rival parties’ electioneering, contrasting their campaigns with the reception he said PJD candidates had received. Some parties, he argued, had suddenly discovered areas they had scarcely visited for years.
The final order would prove less favorable to the PJD than those early returns suggested. But Benkirane said the party would stay the course, arguing that its leadership and rank and file had delivered on their pledge to restore the PJD’s place in the political arena.
