Islamist Parties and Political Normalization in the Muslim World

5. Searching for Political Normalization: The Party of Justice and Development in Morocco

Chapter 5 Searching for Political Normalization: The Party of Justice and Development in Morocco driss maghraoui saloua zerhouni While a number of countries in the Middle East have gone through major revolutions and social upheavals since 2011, the Moroccan regime, thanks to well-orchestrated constitutional reforms, has effectively managed to avoid some of the violent outcomes that characterized politics in other authoritarian regimes in the region. An important component of this outcome was ultimately the role the Islamist Party of Justice and Development (Hizb al-Adala wa al-Tanmiyya; PJD) was allowed to play by the regime to achieve what some Moroccan analysts called the ‘‘second alternance.’’ The first alternance occurred in 1998, when long-excluded political parties were allowed to form a government under leftist prime minister Abderrahman Youssoufi of the Union Socialiste des Forces Populaires (USFP), and were integrated directly into the political system. What made the contemporary integration of the Islamist PJD into government possible is not only the astute political maneuverings of the monarchy and its established strategies of segmentation and co-optation of the opposition, but also the presence of PJD as an alternative to other largely discredited political parties. We argue here that by virtue of its predisposition to further normalize its presence in Moroccan politics, PJD took full advantage of the Arab Spring and the more recent pressures on the regime to engage in constitutional reforms. Searching for Political Normalization 113 The Moroccan case presents a situation in which an Islamist party has become a strategic political actor not by seeking to establish a new political order as in Tunisia or Egypt, but by increasing its power through a process that helps perpetuate a structurally undemocratic political system. PJD has done well in recent elections and has emerged at the forefront of formal politics in Morocco; however, it is not entirely within formal institutions that real political power resides. This chapter articulates the processes PJD went through to ultimately play a governing role and normalize as a mainstream political party. We first contextualize the nature of political participation in Morocco and then highlight the dynamic interaction between the Moroccan monarchical regime and PJD as it has evolved politically. We subsequently assess the nature of Islamist electoral participation in Morocco by looking first at the 1997 local and legislative elections and then at the 2011 elections, which resulted in a historical success for PJD. We argue that PJD was able to achieve electoral success in part because of the juxtaposition of its Islamist credentials with its ‘‘normal’’ political behavior, which allowed it to both maintain a foothold in the existing system and also capture protest voters. We conclude the chapter by stressing that in the absence of a real democratic system in Morocco, PJD will remain entangled in the institutional constraints of an undemocratic regime that still has full control over the decision-making process, which may undermine its long-term credibility. PJD in the Moroccan Political Context Although not the only Islamist group in Morocco, PJD is the most important Islamist actor in the electoral system, and emerged as the dominant political party in Moroccan politics in 2011. It has nonelectoral Islamist challengers, such as the Justice and Charity Movement (Al-Adl wal-Ihsane), as well as non-Islamist party challengers. The PJD emerged out of a broader Islamic movement in the 1990s, and after an initial incarnation when it was known as the Popular Democratic and Constitutional Movement (MPDC), became known as PJD in 1998. Its first foray into the electoral arena was as the MPDC in 1997, a critical political period for the movement, and it subsequently competed in elections throughout the 2000s, enlarging its support over time, most dramatically in 2011. Although it is a major political party in Morocco, the attributes and behavior of PJD cannot be understood without reference to its place in the broader Moroccan political 114 Driss Maghraoui and Saloua Zerhouni system, in which political parties have traditionally been comparatively weak political actors compared to the monarchy, which dominates the political system and shapes its political culture. In the last several decades, much has remained constant in the Moroccan system, although periods of constitutional reform have increasingly allowed political parties opportunities to participate in the system. Since independence, the Moroccan regime has been reluctant to expand political competition in a manner that would support meaningful contestation from a wide range of opposition actors. The...