Understanding the Moroccan Elections

To try and comprehend the complexities of the Moroccan elections is a difficult job for a non-Moroccan lay person. Thankfully there is a superb blog that unpacks the elections and makes understanding a little easier.

The blog by "The Moorish Wanderer" has been running a series of well written articles under the title of "Moroccan Elections for the Clueless".

While we would be first to admit to the "clueless" tag, we are, after reading the articles, at least aware of the depth of our ignorance.

Taking time to read the posts is a valuable exercise and The Moorish Wanderer is to be congratulated on the effort and expertise that have gone into the blog.

7102 Candidates, 32 political parties and 92 districts

The blog delivers some wonderful insights such as the statistics about the educational levels of the candidates -

The good news is, we shall have at least 80% of the next batch of Representatives (on local ballot) with a decent education degree: only 200 of these have no education, and realistically, only 23 to 50 can get into parliament. So on education requirement, the next parliament might well be more prepared to deal with the difficult task of representing the public. 90% of head ballot candidates have at least a High School degree – all 1,422 of them.

Though there is a national ballot list, women are campaigning for local ballots as well, though it is worth pointing out only 5% of those are Women-led. Diversity with ‘young’ candidates (it is a bit of stretch to consider all those 35-yo when the median age among adult population is closer to 30, and overall median age is 20-24) and Women -who are way under-represented with respect to their relative share in total population, i.e. 50.8% of total population, 48.7% of adult population. Perhaps local lists are diverse enough to try to attract gender and demographic votes, but the ballot system is such only n°1 and n°2 are guaranteed a seat if their win is large enough, the others have a much lower chance to make it to Parliament house.


Read more and become informed here : The Moorish Wanderer

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