Morocco’s Weird Populism Problem
A read into an interesting phenomenon Morocco faces.
While reading about Moroccan politics, you may be tempted to ask what are the main problems Moroccans face, you’ll mainly receive these as an answer: Corruption, Poor Education and Health.
Well, they’re true and measurable to some degree, but ask the same individuals directly “why do you think these are the problems and not something else?” and I guarantee you a large number of them if not all won’t answer you with a personal experience, and most probably they’ve gotten this answer in some way or another through news, social media, talking to others, politicians and activists discussing it. Again, this isn’t applicable to every Moroccan but it is dominant.
And when listening to this conversation about any of these topics or any other controversial topic really, you’d realize it’s framed in a rather populist way, as in “us vs. them” kind of mentality, the “them” isn’t necessarily the government, it could be an administration, elite or others. When looking at this from an outside perspective you’d notice a mismatch between what’s spread across populist circles and what is objectively true, this got further exacerbated by social media and easiness to spread news on the internet, there are many examples, like a recurring one in newspapers where quotes are picked out of contexts and heavily rephrased.
What makes this a threat to Morocco rather than say France, Vietnam or others is that there are many factors amplifying populist discourse:
- Morocco’s close geographic proximity to oil rich countries and developed European states unconsciously sets a basis for comparison, and as you can probably tell by now, a resource-less country starting from scratch can’t easily reach those high standards with what it got, consequently this is where populism thrives, because accepting reality as is can’t be easily swallowed so the dominant discourse frames it as Morocco being deprived of development and other loosely held theories.
- Morocco’s huge informal market is another disastrous factor, for decades the government tried to regulate it but there has always been fierce resistance and many in the elite or Makhzen — Morocco’s state apparatus — fear that the controversial nature of regulation would lead to populist ideals around falsified events or accusations which lead to instability, what you get is a population with high standards but are citizens by name and not practitioners of it, as in no taxes which indirectly creates a loop where those same citizens demand better services, the government is pushed to regulate the informal market, populism thrives and government retreats, repeat.
- Fatalism and this one combines the two, immigration is seen as the only way out due to Morocco’s geographic proximity to Europe and how “easy” it is compared to a Kenyan or an Indonesian to immigrate, so mentally you don’t have favourable views of Morocco or invest in it emotionally from the very beginning — even starting at a young age — , yet those same individuals amplify the populist discourse. This does have some symptoms of contrarianism because it does in some ways have influence over this phenomenon, this will be covered in the next article.
Morocco is in a critical development phase where sacrifice is needed to progress later, though due to Morocco’s peculiarities this came way later when other nations have overcome it, a good analogy is how you see muscular people in the gym as a new comer and decide to give up because other people got muscular before you. Moroccans look at South Korea, Europe or China and see something they can’t reach, and believe it or not this is something very common.
This article is only discussing one part of a wider puzzle about Morocco’s rocky path towards development; the next article of this series will look into the mentality and nature of society that also amplifies this to some effect.