Abderrahmane Youssoufi: an embodiment of the mutations of the Moroccan left

Abstract

ABSTRACT At first sight, becoming the Prime Minister of Hassan II after having been considered, a few decades earlier, to be ‘the foreign minister of the resistance and the plotters’ against the monarchy might constitute a spectacular turnaround in a political career. In fact, this reversal was part of a process that was both slow and discontinuous, with bifurcations, and moments of fluidity and uncertainty. By examining oral sources from an interactionist perspective, this article shows that Youssoufi is the paragon of a segment of the nationalist elites, and that his trajectory embodies the transformations in the relations between a part of the Moroccan left and the monarchy. It stresses that individual and collective destiny cannot be reduced to explanations in terms of ‘domestication’, and that not everything was played out beforehand and once and for all. These strategic changes were intrinsically linked to variations in the resources available to the actors, their perceptions of their environment and the dynamics at work within it, their appreciation of the cards they could play, and so on. More specifically, if the left epitomised by Youssoufi benefited from ‘reputational capital’ acquired through repression, it never managed to accumulate the organisational capital of the mass parties. After bidding a regretful farewell to the revolution, the Maquis, and even the putsch, its leaders chose the only option they perceived as available to them: institutional participation.