Supporters of the Socialist Union of Popular Forces[/caption]Before the candidature procedure for the Moroccan socialist party’s (USFP) leadership ended last November, three out of eight pre-candidates chose to withdraw from the election race. These non-candidates–all members of the political bureau of the USFP nicknamed the ‘Violet party’—are initiators of a movement called the Union for the Future.
Putting forward several reasons for their withdrawal, they hinted at preparations for the USFP’s Ninth Congress, which takes place mid-December. They claimed that “the lack of practical conditions for the realization of a qualitative leap in the course of the party" cannot “meet the conditions of party’s modernization so that it can regain its role and place" within the national political scene.” In a letter signed by two of its members, the group stated that “the competition for the party leadership is devoid of any political content to a contractual clear distinction between leadership and base.”
It is worth mentioning that the three had to nominate a candidate to convince party members to join their platform, the Union for the Future—a sort of a roadmap to revive the party. Now five candidates are in the running for the party’s leadership, all of whom claim to be keen to restore the party’s former glory. Yet so far, all they have succeeded in is recycling the same old lines, just this time à la française.
The French Parti Socialiste has always been a model for the USFP. The Moroccan party’s title is even a close translation of the French Premier Secrétaire. This influence has been picked up on in the media: first in a radio debate on Morocco’s Radio Plus on Tuesday, then in a televised debate on Wednesday. So could this be the beginning of a new culture of democracy and transparency, or is it just a case of ‘putting a plaster on a wooden leg,’ as the French saying goes?
It would be stating the obvious to say that these party elections are taking place in an unprecedented political context: every political context is unprecedented and unique. Nonetheless, one element—and maybe the most important—that gives this political context a certain déjà vu zest of new—old debacle, is indeed the party itself. When it was in the opposition, USFP had been able to forge a narrative that enticed a fairly large swathe of the population, making it the party of popular forces—as it emphatically pointed out in its trade name, the Socialist Union of Popular Forces.
But after the party was ensnared into power in a kind of harlequin-style government in the late 1990s, it was fairly obvious that the socialists would drift away from the popular basis that was their raison d’être. There ensued a serious rift within the USFP that, after a fratricide and internecine wrangle—in pure Moroccan political tradition—led to the creation of another dissident Leftist movement.
That was not the only blight on its image suffered by the party. Along with the debilitating fragmentation in the Moroccan Left movement, the party—or at least a large part of its leadership—became an office-driven and a lefty brand of the ‘administration’ parties that were once an easy target of socialists’s public sarcasm and loathing. It seems, then, that the new USFP leadership’s mission is a mission impossible: how can they win back lost trust and build a union for the future?
