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

Introduction: The Framework of the Study

xix Introduction The Framework of the Study The Islamist Party of Justice and Development (PJD, Parti de la justice et du développement) was the projected winner of the Moroccan parliamentary elections in 2007. In the months before the elections, the Islamists were highly scrutinized. Whereas some feared the policies of an Islamist government —the Spanish newspaper El País, for example, put photographs of fully veiled women next to an article on the forthcoming elections—others reassuringly reported on how “moderate” the PJD was. The PJD did not win the elections; it actually lost votes compared to its results in 2002. Two months later I was in Rabat, talking to PJD leaders about the electoral results. What had gone wrong? The outcome was first unsurprisingly blamed on electoral fraud. The king ultimately had not wanted an Islamist prime minister, and other parties had been buying votes. When I pushed them a bit more, they admitted that other factors were involved. The PJD had not mobilized the street for its positions—for example, against an unpopular increase of the value-added tax—for fear of provoking the regime. Moreover, the party had lost the support of its Islamist founding organization, which in previous elections had campaigned vigorously for it. There had also been some discontent among party members about the procedures to nominate the candidates for the elections. These events provide a good illustration of this study’s perspective. In the end, the relevant questions to ask regarding the 2007 legislative elections were not which policies a PJD-led government would pursue, but which strategies the party had pursued in the years before the elections and why. The episode also points at some important factors to consider in the analysis: the interactions with xx | Introduction the authoritarian regime, the relation with the Islamist social movement, and the evolution of the PJD’s organization. What electoral mobilization choices do Islamist opposition parties make? How do they relate to authoritarian incumbents? Which key factors influence these parties’ choices and thus their evolution? This book seeks to contribute to answering these questions by studying the Moroccan PJD. The case study covers the period from 1992 to 2007. The book traces and explains the PJD’s choices through an analysis of organizational, ideological, and institutional constraints. It adopts a simple but novel perspective on Islamist parties as opposition in electoral authoritarian regimes, whose main difference with other oppositional actors in such regimes is their origin from and linkage to a powerful social movement . The study is based on field research in Morocco in 2003–4 and 2007, and it uses both qualitative and quantitative data. A typical and legitimate critique of scholarship on the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) is that it is atheoretical and cut off from major trends of political science research (see Anderson 1999, 2006). This study attempts to avoid this problem by placing the Moroccan case in an explicit heuristic model based on a broader literature on opposition, electoral authoritarian regimes, political parties, and social movements. Moreover—beyond the interpretation of the Moroccan case—I also hope to contribute to our knowledge about other Islamist parties and more generally about opposition strategies in authoritarian regimes.1 The last chapter thus compares key choices made by the PJD with those made by another Islamist party, the Jordanian Islamic Action Front (IAF, Jabhat al-‘Amal al-Islami) in the framework of the heuristic model. Islam and Democracy, Islamists and Democratization How scholars and the media framed the PJD’s potential victory in the 2007 elections reflected the focus of almost two decades of research and debates around 1. See McKeown 2004, Platt 1999, Snow and Trom 2002, and Stake 2000 for recent discussions of case studies and theory building. In general, recent discussions of case-study research have a more process-oriented and realistic view of research than earlier ones, emphasizing the constant interactions between foreknowledge, empirical findings, and theory building. Introduction | xxi Islamist electoral participation: What exactly is the ideology of Islamist political parties? Is it compatible with democracy? Can Islamists moderate, and if so, which factors are conducive to their doing so? The origin of these questions lies in the electoral landslide of the Algerian Islamic Salvation Front (FIS, al-Jabha al-Islamiyya li-l-Inqadh or Front islamique du salut) and the subsequent military coup in 1992 and civil war. Ever since then, there has been...