Abdelilah Benkirane ruled out joining any government led by PAM on Thursday, drawing an early line under coalition speculation after the PJD returned from its 2021 electoral drubbing with 54 seats.
“For me, there is absolutely no room for participating in a government led by the Authenticity and Modernity Party,” the PJD secretary-general said as he opened a meeting of the party’s General Secretariat.
PAM came first in Wednesday’s legislative elections with 97 seats, according to provisional results, while the PJD finished fourth on 54.
For Benkirane, the arithmetic did not alter an old political fault line.
Speaking to Le360, he said the PJD would take its place in the opposition and pointed to PAM’s origins and the history between the two parties when asked why a party freshly returned with 54 MPs should rule itself out of a governing arrangement.
“The Justice and Development Party’s place is in the opposition,” he said.
That position comes after an election that handed the PJD considerably more parliamentary muscle than it has had for the past five years.
The party went into Wednesday’s vote with just 13 MPs, the remnants of a crushing defeat in 2021. It came out with a provisional 54—still well short of PAM’s 97, but enough to put it back among the four largest blocs in the House.
Benkirane called the result “positive and good,” though he said the election had been marred by some violations.
He was less upbeat about the number of people who voted.
Turnout stood at 38.02pc nationwide, compared with 50.86pc in 2021 and 42.27pc in 2016. Nearly six million voters cast ballots on Wednesday.
Benkirane described the figure as relatively weak but said it had remained above what he called a “frightening minimum threshold” and had thereby “saved the nation’s honor.”
If Benkirane closed one door, Mustapha El Khalfi was already looking at the ground the party had regained.
The PJD General Secretariat member said the jump from 13 to 54 seats amounted to an “important political shift,” arguing that the party had recovered ground in Morocco’s cities.
Urban voting, he argued, tends to carry a stronger political character, and the PJD’s performance in the cities showed that it had re-established itself as a major force in the country’s urban centers.
El Khalfi cast the PJD’s journey from government to a 13-seat parliamentary rump and now back to a 54-member bloc as evidence of what he called the “Moroccan exception”—the continued participation of an Islamist-reference party within the electoral system.
A party could leave government through the ballot box, return through it or serve in opposition, he said, contrasting that course with what he described as undemocratic treatment of Islamist parties elsewhere.
For now, it is the opposition benches that both men have in their sights.
El Khalfi stopped short of speaking for the party’s formal bodies, describing the position as his personal view and noting that the PJD’s National Council would meet to assess the election results.
