The tally sheets were still coming through the door at PJD headquarters on Wednesday night when the opposition party began talking up what it believes could be a return to form at the ballot box.
Copies of polling-station records arriving at the party’s Rabat headquarters were showing PJD candidates ahead in a string of constituencies, according to Abdelali Hamieddine, a member of its General Secretariat and spokesman for its central election campaign leadership.
The official scoreboard, however, was yet to go up.
For a party trying to put the bruising 2021 election behind it, even those early returns were enough to raise the temperature at headquarters.
For now, the figures being pored over in Rabat belong to the PJD’s own count. Representatives of candidate lists are entitled to copies of polling-station records, which parties can use to keep their own running tallies as the count proceeds.
They are not the official results.
Those will emerge through the formal count after the polling station returns are consolidated, with the Interior Ministry due to announce provisional results.
Until then, the PJD has numbers on its desks—and a claim of a comeback still waiting to meet the official count.
