The rallies are over, the ballots counted and the posters will soon come down. After nearly six million Moroccans went to the polls on Wednesday, a campaign fought by 7,277 candidates across the country has been whittled down to 395 provisional winners and a considerably altered House of Representatives.
It was a sprawling exercise. There were 40,694 polling stations, 3,931 central polling offices, 28 parties in the running and more than 3,000 accredited observers keeping watch. In the fortnight before polling day, parties mounted nearly 21,000 campaign activities that drew an estimated 1.5 million people.
Yet when it came to putting a ballot in the box, much of the electorate stayed away. Of the 15.8m people on the rolls, just under six million voted, leaving turnout at 38 percent—down from 50.88pc five years ago and below even the 42.27pc recorded in 2016.
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That drop sits awkwardly beside what the Interior Ministry described as record campaign activity. Candidates had been on the road in force. Field tours—the door-to-door, street and neighborhood work that formed much of the campaign—drew some 730,000 participants. Another 407,000 attended rallies. Across all forms of campaigning, the ministry counted an average 115,000 participants a day.
The crowds on the campaign trail, it turned out, did not all follow the parties to the polling booth. Nor was voter appetite the same everywhere.
While the national figure stopped at 38pc, Laayoune-Sakia El Hamra turned out at 77pc. Dakhla-Oued Eddahab was also well above the national average, while other parts of the country pulled the overall number down.
Those who did vote had plenty to choose from. Twenty-eight parties, including two formations contesting as an alliance, had put forward 1,847 local and regional lists. Between them were 7,277 candidates chasing 395 places in Parliament—a little over 18 hopefuls for every seat.
Women accounted for 2,659 candidacies, or 37pc of the field. There were 1,783 women on regional lists and another 876 contesting local constituencies. But at the sharp end of the local contests, the numbers thinned considerably: only 120 women headed local lists.
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By Wednesday morning, the campaigning had given way to the less glamorous business of getting millions of voters through the system.
The country had been divided among 40,694 polling stations, feeding into 3,931 central polling offices—about 11 stations to each central office. At 7pm, the doors closed and the count began.
Local ballots were dealt with first, followed by regional ones. Candidate representatives could follow the count inside polling stations, while the paperwork moved up through central offices and counting commissions chaired by judges.
Through the night, thousands of local counts began adding up to a national picture. PAM eventually came out on top with 97 of the 395 seats. RNI, which had swept the 2021 election with 102, fell to 66. Istiqlal was one seat behind on 65, while PJD climbed back from the 13 seats left to it after its 2021 drubbing to take 54.
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Below the leading four, the seats were spread more thinly. MP took 29, USFP 26, PPS 19 and UC 17. MDS and the Left Alliance won eight each, with the remaining seats falling to smaller parties.
Those numbers told the political story of the night. Another set of numbers was meant to tell whether the contest itself had stayed within the lines.
There were 3,006 accredited observers on the ground, 2,023 of them from civil society organizations and 783 from the National Human Rights Council. Some 200 international observers representing organizations from Africa, Europe, the Americas and the Middle East were also present.
Central, regional and provincial committees had been activated to deal with suspected electoral offenses, with complaints and possible violations handled under judicial supervision. Laftit said the cases brought before the authorities were dealt with under the law and that no incident serious enough to upset the overall conduct of the election had been recorded.
That machinery had been put in place against an electoral framework revised ahead of the vote, with changes billed as safeguards against malpractice and measures to bring more young people and women into political life.
The candidate numbers suggest the latter effort had some reach among women, who made up more than a third of those standing. Whether the campaign managed the same with young voters is harder to read from turnout alone. What can be read is the distance between mobilization and participation.
