Islamist Opposition in Authoritarian Regimes: The Party of Justice and Development in Morocco

Party Institutionalization and Emancipation from the Islamist Movement

32 2 Party Institutionalization and Emancipation from the Islamist Movement Two interrelated influences affecting Islamist party choices are the party’s own organization and its relationship with the ISMO that brought it into being. At the beginning of a party’s life, leadership choices are unconstrained. How much this changes depends on the shape and value of the organization’s internal rules and bodies, organizational investment, and its approach toward membership recruitment. Taken together, organizational development thus defines the extent and form to which an organization is a constraint on leadership decisions; it also indicates the extent to which the organization is intended to and can be used as a tool to reach out to voters. The way party organization is set up and evolves over time can take many different forms regarding the degree of institutionalization and party membership . The organizational evolution of an Islamist party can involve the building of a strong and solid organization with a large amount of hierarchical and functional subunits, clearly defined channels of articulation, and decisionmaking procedures. The party can aim at a mass membership to reach out to new segments of society or to be a vanguard party with a small but committed membership. In both cases, to gain and maintain members requires that they be offered incentives for their participation—for instance, a say in the selection of candidates for public office. However, the development of an Islamist party might also mirror the evolution of other political parties in Morocco, which often remain empty skeletons where organizational units exist only virtually , decisions are taken by a small group of leaders, membership is passive or absent, and party activities are restricted to the two weeks of official electoral Party Institutionalization and Emancipation | 33 campaigning. In that case, party organization per se would have little impact on the party’s course; party decisions would be the outcome of bargaining among key leaders. Relevant for the party’s freedom of action as an organization is also its relationship with its founding organization. This organization “behind” the party has created it to pursue the organization’s interests inside and perhaps outside the formal political institutions. What type of influence this ISMO will try to exert obviously depends on its preferences. Yet a likely scenario is that its leaders and activists are more committed to a purist agenda given that they have not become political party members and do not experience institutional constraints and socialization. How much impact the ISMO can have, be it through direct interference on decision making or through more indirect channels, is strongly linked to aspects of organizational development. Besides some critical initial choices—for instance, to give the party formal autonomy or not—two issues will be crucial in defining the strength of party boundaries vis-à-vis the ISMO. One is the degree of implementation of formal rules inside the party and whether the party organization , not the ISMO, is the locus of legitimate decision making for party concerns . This issue is obviously linked to the process of party institutionalization. The second is the degree of party dependency on external resources for creating support: Does the party have to rely on the ISMO for human and material resources, or can it mobilize by its own means? My interests here are four core themes of the PJD’s organizational development and its relationship with its Islamist founding organization, the MUR, in the past decade. These four themes are the degree of intraorganizational institutionalization as mirrored in organizational complexity and structural coherence ; power relationships in the party; the party’s approach to membership; and its emancipation process from its founding organization, the MUR. Party Organization The Setting Up of Party Organization After having struck the deal in 1992 to integrate the MUR with the dormant MPCD,Islamistleaderstouredthecountryandstartedtobuilduportoreanimate 34 | Islamist Opposition in Authoritarian Regimes the party’s local and provincial units. These so-called federations existed mainly on paper. Although the integration deal did not become official until 1996, the Islamist leadership aimed to make it a fact from early on through a deliberate investment in the party organization. The creation or reanimation of party structures started in the cities, where the Islamists could rely on existing movement structures, mainly in Casablanca, Tangier, Rabat, Fes, and Oujda (interview no. 2). The leadership sometimes also called upon former student leaders to open branches in unexplored cities (interview no. 20). Integrating with a theoretically...