Morocco’s domestic crisis of (derailed) democratisation

Abstract

ABSTRACT In the North African context, Morocco is a clear example of democratic backsliding. Since popular protests broke out in 2011, institutional reforms were implemented under the leadership of the monarchy, leading the Moroccan polity to change without altering its defining features. The previous decade had indeed seen Morocco trailing a thin line between social moderation and repression and between political openings and counter-revolution. Between 2011 and 2022 the process of democratic backsliding accelerated, thus turning Morocco into a ‘hybrid regime'. By tracing continuities and changes in the past decade mainly at the political and institutional levels, this article explores the pattern of democratic backsliding undertaken by Morocco by empirically contextualising it within the deterioration of the main features of citizenship understood according to the categorisation introduced by Marshall and Bottomore (1987) that distinguishes between civic, political and social rights. To explain this pattern, the article argues that external factors linked to the deterioration of the regional context (the conflict with Algeria over the Western Sahara and the spill-over of Libyan instability) as well as the rising tensions with the European Union (EU) have not only underpinned Morocco’s geopolitical reorientation but also sustained its domestic crisis of (unfinished) democratisation.