Morocco’s moderate Islamist party won a parliamentary election for the first time, preliminary results showed on Saturday, the latest religious party to achieve huge gains on the back of the Arab Spring.
The victory by the Justice and Development Party (PJD) comes just a month after Islamists won Tunisia’s post-revolution election and days before their predicted surge in Egyptian polls.
With 288 out of the 395 seats up for grabs awarded, the party had captured 80 seats in Friday’s election, Moroccan Interior Minister Taib Cherkaoui told a news conference.
That is nearly double the 45 seats won by Moroccan Prime Minister Abbas el-Fassi’s Independence Party which finished second and has headed a five-party coalition government since 2007.
“We thank the Moroccans who voted for the PJD and we can only be satisfied,” PJD Secretary-General Abdelilah Benkirane told reporters.
Cars honked their horns while passengers threw fliers out of car windows bearing images of a lamp, the party’s symbol, in Morocco’s seaside capital Rabat after the partial results were released.
According to a new constitution overwhelmingly approved in a July referendum, King Mohammed VI must now pick the prime minister from the party that won the most seats in parliament instead of naming whomever he pleases.
It was the king who proposed changes to the constitution in March, as autocratic regimes toppled in nearby Tunisia, Egypt and Libya and pro-democracy protests swelled at home.
King Mohammed is the latest scion of a monarchy that has ruled the country for 350 years. The new constitution curbs some, but not all, of his near-absolute powers.
The Islamists will have to govern with other parties and Benkirane acknowledged his party would need to tailor its program to appease prospective coalition partners.
The PJD was “open to everyone” when it came to forming alliances, he said.
“The nub of our program and of those who will govern with us will have a double axis: democracy and good governance,” Benkirane told the France 24 television channel.
The PJD has gradually increased its share of the vote in Morocco, seen as one of the most stable countries in the region.
After winning just eight seats in 1997, it surged in popularity, scooping 42 seats in the 2002 election, the first of King Mohammed VI’s reign.
It then increased its share in the last election in 2007 when it finished second with 47 seats.
The party focused at first on social issues, such as opposition to summer music festivals and the sale of alcohol, but has shifted to issues with broader voter appeal like the fight against corruption and high unemployment.
During the current campaign it promised to cut poverty in half and raise the minimum wage by 50 percent.
Unlike the banned Islamist opposition group Justice and Charity, the Justice and Development Party pledges its allegiance to the monarchy.
However, Benkirane’s past attacks on the Berber people and homosexuals have provoked controversy.
The two parties that make up the outgoing governing coalition — the Independence Party and Socialist Union of Popular Forces — have said they would be willing to govern with the Islamist party.
Voter turnout was 45.4 percent, up from 37 percent from the last parliamentary election in 2007, but lower than the 51.6 percent turnout recorded in 2002.
With the midday sun blazing, an experimental orange and white F-16 fighter jet launched with a familiar roar that is a hallmark of US airpower, but the aerial combat that followed was unlike any other: This F-16 was controlled by artificial intelligence (AI), not a human pilot, and riding in the front seat was US Secretary of the Air Force Frank Kendall. AI marks one of the biggest advances in military aviation since the introduction of stealth in the early 1990s, and the US Air Force has aggressively leaned in. Even though the technology is not fully developed, the service is planning
INTERNATIONAL PROBE: Australian and US authorities were helping coordinate the investigation of the case, which follows the 2015 murder of Australian surfers in Mexico Three bodies were found in Mexico’s Baja California state, the FBI said on Friday, days after two Australians and an American went missing during a surfing trip in an area hit by cartel violence. Authorities used a pulley system to hoist what appeared to be lifeless bodies covered in mud from a shaft on a cliff high above the Pacific. “We confirm there were three individuals found deceased in Santo Tomas, Baja California,” a statement from the FBI’s office in San Diego, California, said without providing the identities of the victims. Australian brothers Jake and Callum Robinson and their American friend Jack Carter
Le Tuan Binh keeps his Moroccan soldier father’s tombstone at his village home north of Hanoi, a treasured reminder of a man whose community in Vietnam has been largely forgotten. Mzid Ben Ali, or “Mohammed” as Binh calls him, was one of tens of thousands of North Africans who served in the French army as it battled to maintain its colonial rule of Indochina. He fought for France against the Viet Minh independence movement in the 1950s, before leaving the military — as either a defector or a captive — and making a life for himself in Vietnam. “It’s very emotional for me,”
UNDER INVESTIGATION: Members of the local Muslim community had raised concerns with the police about the boy, who officials said might have been radicalized online A 16-year-old boy armed with a knife was shot dead by police after he stabbed a man in the Australian west coast city of Perth, officials said yesterday. The incident occurred in the parking lot of a hardware store in suburban Willetton on Saturday night. The teen attacked the man and then rushed at police officers before he was shot, Western Australian Premier Roger Cook told reporters. “There are indications he had been radicalized online,” Cook told a news conference, adding that it appeared he acted alone. A man in his 30s was found at the scene with a stab wound to his back.