Moroccan King Mohammed VI’s proposed new constitution would do little to change the status quo, falling short of expectations raised during the heady early days of the Arab Spring, analysts say.
“In terms of the distribution and architecture of power, this constitution is still far from democratic,” political scientist Mohamed Madani of Mohammed V University in Rabat said.
The touted new constitutional monarchy is “drowned” amid a raft of qualifiers and not backed up by the text, Madani said.
Under the draft constitution unveiled by the king on Friday, he would remain head of state and the military and still appoint ambassadors and diplomats, while retaining the right to name top officials of unspecified “strategic” administrations.
In the highly anticipated national address promised back in March, King Mohammed offered a text that he said would “consolidate the pillars of a constitutional, democratic, parliamentary and social monarchy.”
Under the new basic law, to be put to a referendum on July 1, the king would no longer designate the prime minister, who would henceforth be named by the winning party in elections.
The 47-year-old monarch, who took over the Arab world’s longest-serving dynasty in 1999, currently holds virtually all power in the country, and he is also its top religious authority as the Commander of the Faithful.
“The king keeps all his prerogatives,” said Khadija Mohsen-Finan, a researcher at the University of Paris who specializes in the Maghreb. “He is the guarantor of all of this new equilibrium. That is how we are not in a parliamentary monarchy.”
Madani also said the king’s proposals were mainly cosmetic, noting that the text had grown from 108 to 180 articles, and from a legal text to a “program constitution” — but one that remains “royal.”
“The king still smothers the political scene with his power,” said historian Pierre Vermeren, author of Mohammed VI’s Morocco: The Unfinished Transition.
Measures such as the recognition of the minority Berber language Tamazight as an official language have “a very strong symbolic import [but] don’t change much in practice,” he said.
And deleting the article on the king’s religious power is no more than a “ruse,” he added.
“You remove the symbol of this article, but keep the essence: the title of Commander of the Faithful, which makes the king the sole religious authority of the country,” Vermeren said.
“By the yardstick of the expectations raised by the Arab revolutions, the advances are very weak,” Mohsen-Finan said.
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