Morocco's ruling coalition feuds in public as election nears amid youth unemployment anger

Morocco's three governing parties are trading public accusations and leaked recordings less than three weeks before a parliamentary election that was meant to let voters judge a government already shaken by a year of street protests over hospitals, schools and jobs.

Candidates began filing to stand in the September 23 vote for the 395-seat House of Representatives on August 31, and by the afternoon of the first day, 702 candidate lists from 27 political parties had been submitted through the Interior Ministry's electronic filing platform, according to the government's official news portal. The filing window closes on September 9, and the formal campaign period runs from September 10 to midnight on September 22, the day before polls open. The vote follows months of preparatory work by the Interior Ministry, which spent the first half of the year consulting party leaders on the electoral framework before finalising the rules now governing the race.

What should be a routine handover of the electoral baton has instead exposed open discord inside the outgoing coalition. A leaked audio recording attributed to House Speaker Rachid Talbi Alami, a senior figure in the ruling National Rally of Independents (RNI), surfaced this week criticising Budget Minister Fouzi Lekjaa — who also heads Morocco's football federation — and warning against handing him the finance portfolio in any future government. The recording has been widely circulated by Moroccan outlets, including a detailed account published by Al Jazeera, and has turned what was meant to be a unified pre-campaign period into a public airing of coalition grievances.

The numbers behind the vote

The election will decide the composition of Morocco's lower house of parliament, elected through a two-tier proportional system: 305 seats from 92 local, multi-member constituencies and 90 from twelve regional constituencies reserved in large part for women candidates. A party needs 198 seats for an outright majority, a threshold no single party has approached in recent Moroccan elections, which typically produce multi-party coalitions.

The outgoing government's economic record sits at the centre of the campaign. Morocco's Haut-Commissariat au Plan, the state statistics agency, reported that the strict unemployment rate fell to 9.5 percent in the second quarter of 2026, down from 10.8 percent three months earlier — a drop reported by Morocco World News that officials have cited as evidence of improvement. But the aggregate figure conceals sharp disparities: unemployment among women stood at 14.8 percent against 8.1 percent for men, and among Moroccans aged 15 to 24 it remained at 27.2 percent. Holders of advanced diplomas fared worse than the unqualified, with a jobless rate of 16.7 percent compared with 3.8 percent for those with no diploma at all — a statistic that has fuelled resentment among educated young Moroccans who say the growth model has passed them by.

How the government arrived at this campaign under pressure

Prime Minister Aziz Akhannouch's RNI-led coalition, formed with the Authenticity and Modernity Party (PAM) and the Istiqlal Party after the 2021 election, governs against the backdrop of the 2025 Gen Z 212 protests, a leaderless youth movement that emerged after eight pregnant women died at a public hospital in Agadir. The deaths, which protesters linked to years of underinvestment in healthcare even as the government poured money into stadiums for the 2030 World Cup that Morocco is co-hosting, triggered weeks of demonstrations in which at least three people were killed in clashes with security forces and hundreds were arrested, according to reporting from that period.

"We, the youth of Morocco, are requesting your majesty to intervene for a profound and just reform," the Gen Z 212 movement wrote in a public letter to King Mohammed VI, one of its central demands being the dismissal of Akhannouch's government.

The king did not remove the government, but in his Throne Day address on July 29 he called for a "new phase" of development after the 2026 election and made industrial self-sufficiency, rather than direct social spending, the centrepiece of his remarks — a speech published in full on the official Moroccan royal palace communications portal. Government spokesperson Mustapha Baitas said at the time that "the message has been received" and that authorities were accelerating healthcare projects, but critics say the response has been incremental rather than structural.

Who stands to gain or lose

The coalition parties enter the race with unequal fortunes. RNI, PAM and Istiqlal collectively hold roughly 270 of the chamber's 395 seats from 2021, but polling cited by regional outlets points to eroding public trust across the governing bloc, with Istiqlal — the more socially conservative of the three, led by Nizar Baraka — seen gaining ground at the expense of Akhannouch's RNI. Opposition and Islamist-leaning parties are expected to try to capitalise on anger over living costs and the healthcare failures that fed the 2025 protests, though Morocco's political system, in which the king retains final say over appointing the head of government and key ministries such as defence, interior, foreign affairs and religious affairs, limits how far any single election result can reshape the country's direction.

Ordinary Moroccan households remain the most direct stakeholders. Rural voters face a persistently lower but still significant jobless rate of 5.4 percent against 11.9 percent in urban areas, according to the national statistics agency, while young graduates entering an economy that created far fewer jobs than the government had promised make up a growing bloc of frustrated first-time and repeat voters. Moroccans living abroad, numbering in the millions, remain unable to vote from outside the country after a 2021 proposal to enable diaspora balloting was rejected by parliament — an exclusion that diaspora advocacy groups have raised again ahead of this vote.

The dispute over dividing power in advance

Reaction to the leaked recording has split along predictably defensive lines. RNI party president Mohamed Chaouki characterised the exposed internal debate as ordinary political discussion rather than evidence of dysfunction. Akhannouch himself sought to shut down the controversy, telling reporters that "the focus should be on winning the election rather than distributing government posts in advance." Lekjaa, the minister targeted in the recording, dismissed the idea that anyone was carving up future power, saying that dividing up "the spoils without having hunted them" was not something that concerned him. None of the three coalition parties has suggested the dispute will fracture their electoral alliance before September 23, but the episode has undercut their shared message of stability heading into the vote.

What happens next

Candidate lists must be finalised by September 9, after which official campaigning opens on September 10 and runs until midnight on September 22. Voting takes place on September 23, with results expected to determine which combination of parties can assemble the 198 seats needed for a governing majority. Under Morocco's constitution, King Mohammed VI is required to appoint a head of government from the party that wins the most seats, but coalition negotiations — historically involving weeks of bargaining among the top vote-getters — will determine who actually leads the next cabinet and whether Akhannouch, weakened by the protests and now by open coalition infighting, remains in office. Whoever emerges will inherit both the King's call for an industrial-led "new phase" of development and the unresolved demands of a youth movement that has not gone away simply because an election has been called.