Driss Basri liked to wave his dubious academic credentials (2) to fend off accusations of heavy-handedness, and to distinguish himself from former strongmen Mohamed Oufkir and Ahmed Dlimi, both officers scarcely known for their intellectual capacity or political acumen. His real expertise was however in the field of "electoral engineering", wink wink, nod nod, say no more... In that field, the Basri electoral machine met few matches.

Gerrymandering wasn't even needed back then (it is probably a sign of relative progress that it is the main manipulative instrument at the hands of the ministry of the interior today), and as for stuffing the ballot boxes, any thirld world country and many regions or cities in the first world (just think of Florida in 2000, Chicago in 1960, Corsica since Napoleon, Paris under Chirac's and Tiberi's mayorships and probably quite a few Italian precincts) could easily claim the top of the podium. What really distinguished Basri's electoral shehanigans was his manoeuvring, which fitted somewhat with John Waterbury's otherwise widely criticised - but this is another debate - segmentarity theory (3).

Basri, acting of course on royal instructions, was not content with winning elections that were in fact lost in the polling booths - as keen as he was on never letting the then opposition (4) win the elections or even come a close second, he also was in ensuring that the opposition parties, and especially their leadership, always had enough to lose from breaking with the makhzen to keep them on board. His ill-famed predecessor as the strongman of the régime, general Mohamed Oufkir, a brutish colonial officer, was more of the sledghammer type, taking personally part in the indiscriminate shooting of hundreds of youths and students in the Casablanca riots of March 23, 1965, and rumored to have killed with his own hands Mehdi Ben Barka, socialist and tiers-mondiste opposition leader of international fame kidnapped in Paris in 1965 never to reappear again. This ferociously repressive line, which was of course that of King Hassan II, led the opposition parties to condone political violence: while the left-wing of the UNFP, the ancestor of the USFP, initiated a catastrophic and bloody venture into Che Guevara-like guerilla in 1973, both the Istiqlal and the UNFP had contacts with the 1971-72 plotters (5). The hardline approach had just served to isolate the King.

Driss Basri thus cleverly devised his own line. While repression, censure, torture and violent clampdown of any form of popular protest were widely and willingly used under his term, (his long years at the head of the interior ministry were part and parcel of the années de plomb, or "years of lead") he also resorted extensively to seduction, corruption and flattery to give opposition parties - or more correctly their leaderships - a stake in the political system. The main opposition parties, the Istiqlal and the USFP, were allowed to win some local councils in large towns (Agadir, some local councils in Casablanca and Rabat for the USFP, Fès and Marrakech for the Istiqlal). The ministry of the interior being in charge of the supervision and the financing of local councils, it allowed Basri to use patronage as a means to accomodate and mollify opposition leaders. The election of the smaller parties' leaders, always a risky venture under Morocco's first-past-the-post electoral system, initially the formerly communist Ali Yata, leader of the PPS (ex- Parti communiste marocain) from 1945 to his death in 1997, and then Mohamed Bensaïd Aït Idder, a former resistance fighter and leader of the extreme left-wing OADP, was not discouraged, to put it mildly.

Basri's tactics went even further: his speciality was fomenting splits in the opposition parties, which he did as late as 1997, when the FFD (Jabhat al-qiwa ad-dimoqratia - a non-descript and opportunistic party) left the PPS a few months before the general elections, at a time when the PPS was in the throes of internal dispute with the left-wing of the party, led by Simon Lévy, who by the way was probably the last Jewish political leader of national stature in Moroccan politics (6). The extreme left-wing OADP was also afflicted by a very similar scission, its right wing leaving the party to from the PSD (which has since then joined the USFP in a very fitting move), also a few months before the legislative elections of 1997.

But Basri was not content with splitting the opposition: he was also weary of having too strong and unified royalist parties. The 1963 elections, viewed as the cleanest in Moroccan history, had seen a sweeping victory for the opposition parties, with the Istiqlal getting 32% of the votes and the UNFP 24,5%, i.e. a crushing majority of 56,5% of the votes for the two main parties of the National Movement. The royalist party - the FDIC - hastily created a couple of months before the elections by then interior minister Ahmed Réda Guédira, a close friend of Hassan II, only received 36% of the votes, mostly in rural and more malleable areas of the country. With the first-past-the-post system and some amount of gerrymandering, the FDIC got 69 seats, playing level with the Istiqlal (42 seats) and the UNFP (27 seats), with 6 seats going to independent candidates. Guédira had stood his ground, being independent-minded (7) and had even created tensions between himself, the King and the army. Parliament was dissolved in 1965, after King Hassan II imposed emergency rule after the March 23 Casablanca riots.

That mistake was never to repeat itself. This applied both to the relatively clean elections - the following ones were to be grossly manipulated - and to the relatively independent royalist party. The caricatural 1970 elections, widely boycotted by most parties and grossly manipulated, returned a Parliament of unaffiliated MPs. The slightly less caricatural 1977 elections, which saw the return to electoral politics of the National Movement (Istiqlal, USFP and PPS), produced an overwhelming majority for the so-called Independents, who later formed the RNI party (At-tajammouε al-watani lil-ahrar, right-of-center), headed, I kid you not, by the King's own brother-in-law, Ahmed Osman, who had married Lalla Nezha. That party, a typical parti administratif, was a mere instrument of the King's attempts at controlling the political scene, even serving as a shadow opposition in 1983-1984 when the USFP had walked out of Parliament. The deep personal inimity between Osman and Basri, the latter probably jealous of Osman's close access to Hassan II led to the creation of the UC (Ittihad ad-doustouri, right-wing and slavishly royalist), headed by the UNFP renegade Maati Bouabid. A splinter group within the RNI left the party to from the PND (Al-hizb al-watani ad-dimoqrati, non-descript right-wing and opportunistic bunch of local potentates), supposedly to represent the interests of rural Moroccans. The PND was by the way headed by Abdallah Kadiri, a former military officer and a personal friend of Basri's...

Rural Morocco's political representation was long a preserve of the Mouvement populaire (MP - Al-haraka ach-chaεbia), led by the eccentric nonagerian Mahjoubi Aherdane, a Berber former colonial officer in the French army who resigned from his post for nationalistic reasons. Opulent landlord in the Oulmés region, self-styled poet and painter, of erratic ideological persuasion, Aherdane has been excellent at driving people from his party, which he leads in the fashion of a tribal faction. Aherdane even managed to be ejected from his own party, creating the MNP, while many other splinter groups were created - the MDS (led by the notorious torturer Mahmoud Archane, infamous during the années de plomb), the UD, Al Ahd, and certainly others I've forgotten. Ideological reasons have never played any part whatsoever in these splits, animated mainly by personal or regional motives. The MNP, the MP and the UD have now reunited in the UMP, the Union des Mouvements populaires. Even the ethnic factor has been overstated: while the leadership of the UMP is predominantly Berber, I was surprised, when reading the results of the 97 elections, to notice the large amount of candidates from the MP, MNP and MDS wearing fassi names (8). Ideological factors, except loyalty to the makhzen, are largely non-existent: while Mahjoubi Aherdane has been known to err between the extremes of the ideological divide (he once said that Morocco didn't need a Constitution since it had the Quran, and is a longstanding friend of Dr Abdelkrim Khatib, honorary president of the islamist PJD (Hizb al-εadala wa at-tanmia - islamist and royalist, of the Muslim brotherhood mould), his son, Ouzzin Aherdane, who at well over 50 heads the youth section of the party, is a fiery militant of the Berber cause who's often lapsed into outright hostility towards Arabs and muslims in the many Berber magazines he's published since the 80's.

Even here, although part of the numerous splits within the MP have been caused Mahjoubi Aherdane's archaic and autocratic leadership style, Basri was known to have facilitated some of those, especially the creation of the MDS at the initiative of former police commissioner Mahmoud Archane, who's probably the most well-known torturer still around from the années de plomb. Mohand Laenser, who ousted Mahjoubi Aherdane from the MP in the 80's, was a minister then, as he still is today, and could not have staged such a coup without royal assent.

It would be wrong to think that these practices have stopped: they have merely subsided, since the fragmentation of the Moroccan political scene, with thirty-three parties competing in the 2007 elections and a few other who haven't bothered, means that no clear opposition, save of course the PJD, emerges. The current electoral system, in place since 2002 and based on proportional representation ensures that no party can emerge with an outright majority. The only conceivable parliamentary majority is thus a coalition of parties - and to underline the structural character of this partisan fragmentation, Morocco is probably the only country having experienced the first-past-the-post electoral system for six elections in a row (1963, 1970, 1977, 1984, 1992 and 1997) without ever having known a bipolar partisan system or a party winning an outright majority of seats in Parliament. Of course, this was the intended outcome under Basri's watch, and his successors under Mohammed VI's reign have only had to fine-tune things a bit.

In view of the supposedly unassailable popularity of the islamist PJD, Fouad Ali el Himma, who until a few weeks ago had been deputy minister of the interior since Mohammed VI's - a close friend of his - accession to the throne, and who was the real decision-maker in that ministerial department, was known to have tried to strenghten the cluster of parties around the MP, on the assumption that a strong MP could unite forces with the USFP and the Istiqlal party in order the contain the PJD. The Union des mouvements populaires was thus created under the unofficial auspices of the Palace and the ministry of the interior, which are also thought to lie behind the change of leadership of the RNI, where the corrupt and inefficient Ahmed Osman, Mohammed VI's uncle by marriage, had overstayed his due.

The split within the USFP, which saw the departure of the finest of their militants who left to form Fidélité à la démocratie, which later joined the PSU, was largely ideological and based on the internal politics of the party, and the splinter group is considerably more critical of the makhzen than the very bland bunch left at the USFP. As for the one within the PJD, which saw Mohammed Fadili leave that party to from a supposedly more moderate PRV (Hizb an-nahda wal fadila), it was largely facilitated by the authorities.

One major progress this year is lastly that the PJD, without doubt the most popular and well-organised party today in Morocco, didn't have its arms twisted in order to refrain from fielding candidates in a all constituencies. One of the major objections to the sincerity of the 2002 elections was namely that the PJD had refrained - officially "volunarily", in order not to frighten the bourgeois, but most probably after being made an offer they couldn't refuse - from fielding candidates in half of the 91 constituencies, thus cutting by half its potential result. And do not think that it avoided those rural constituencies where it is thought to be the weakest - the PJD refrained from fielding candidates in urban strongholds in Casablanca and Tanger. In spite of that, the PJD made a strong showing, coming second in terms of votes, with rumors that its total tally had been arbitrarily reduced...

Further reading:

Tel Quel has published sometime ago a very good recap on the manipulation of partisan politics by the late Hassan II.

An invaluable book on the latest Moroccan elections, and a good source on the previous ones, is also available, en français: "Scènes et coulisses de l'élection au Maroc: les législatives de 2002", edited by Mounia Bennani-Chraïbi, Myriam Catusse and Jean-Claude Santucci., at the Paris publishing house Karthala. A very good sourcebook, with interesting case studies - from Casablanca, shantytowns, the Sahara and the countryside. A bit cautious perhaps on the limits of the liberalisation that occurred in 2002.

An official assessment of the evolution of the electoral process from Independance to 2002, also en français.

To be continued.

(1) The House of Representatives is elected through direct universal suffrage. The other House of Parliament, the House of Councillors, is elected by great electors - elected members of local councils, workers councils, and of Chambers of trade, agriculture, craft and fishing.

(2) His academic merits were obtained in very dubious circumstances. He obtained his licence de droit and diplôme d'enseignement supérieur (DES) while being a police commissioner. It is not known if he turned up in police uniform at exams - remember, the 70's in Morocco were known as the années de plomb (years of lead) on account of the bloody and ruthless political repression initiated by the makhzen - but I hold from a first-hand source that he didn't write his essays then. Those who have met him in real life, among whom the journalist Zakya Daoud who mentioned this fact in her recent memoirs ("Les Années Lamalif. 1958-1988, trente ans de journalisme au Maroc") - attest to his very colloquial and rough French, which contrasted starkly with the academic French in his voluminous public law books .

(3) John Waterbury wrote what is still the best book about post-independence Moroccan politics, "The Commander of the Faithful: the Moroccan Political Elite - a Study in Segmented Politics", an incredibly rich book which was tranlated into Arabic and published in Morocco for the first time a couple of years ago.

(4) Consisting of the left-wing parties of the so-called National Movement, i.e. the heirs to the political movements struggling against the Franco-Spanish occupation: the USFP (Al-ittihad al-ichtiraki lil-qouwwat ach-chaεbia - socialist in name only), the PPS (Hizb at-taqaddoum wa al-ichtirakiya - heir to the prohibited Parti communiste marocain, was probably the only royalist communist party in the world from 1974 and onwards, has since 1990 turned into a bland social-liberal grouping with more and more frequent incursions into secularism) and the OADP (Monadamat Al εamal ad-dimoqrati ach-chaεbi - a splinter group from the Marxist-leninist extreme left, who went parliamantarian at the beginning of the 80's but kept its head high as it fiercely denounced the various human rights abuses at a time when Driss Basri was all powerful - it has now merged into the PSU, a left-wing grouping). The nationalist Istiqlal party, though nominally part of the National Movement, frequently made lapses into government participation. The National Movement was revived at the beginning of the 90's, with the creation of the Koutlah ad-dimoqratiya (the Democratic Bloc), heir to a similar alliance during the 70's called the Koutlah al wataniya (the National Bloc).

(5) Two violent, bloody and mercifully unsuccesful coups d'Etat took place in 1971 and 1972 - had they succeeded, Morocco would probably still be plagued by military rule, with the examples of Algeria, Tunisia, Egypt, Syria and Pakistan in mind. In 1971, a force comprising hundreds of cadets stormed the King's birthday party at the royal palace of Skhirat, near Rabat, killing hundreds of guests and employees. In 1972, a couple of fighter airplanes from the Moroccan Royal Air Force attempted to shoot down the royal Boeing transporting the King but failed miserably. Dozens were killed when the airport were the Boeing landed was sprayed with machine-gun fire. Further dozens of lives, including that of general Oufkir, were taken in the merciless repression which followed.

(6) Abraham Serfaty, former leader of the illegal Marxist-leninist Ila al amam, has abondoned partisan politics since his return from exile in 1999. André Azoulay has never engaged in party politics, even if his role as moustachar al malik (adviser to the King, or conseiller du Roi) is a more weighty one than most ministerial posts. Serge Berdugo, the head of the Conseil des Communautés israëlites du Maroc, former minister and current ambassador, is also non-partisan. Sion Assidon, former member of Ila al amam, has also left partisan politics. He later founded the Moroccan chapter of Transparency International, before joining its international governing body, and has taken part in the activities of the Moroccan Support Committee for the Struggle of the Palestinian People. He is by the way married to a Palestinian.

(7) He proved his mettle in saving, as the lawyer he was, many accused cadets from the firing squad in the court martial taking place after the failed 1971 coup d'Etat.

(8) Full disclosure: I come a from a very well-known fassi family, and could therefore tend to be (un)consciously prejudiced against those not sharing that blissful ancestry.