ABSTRACT
As outlined in the previous chapter, contemporary Moroccan politics owes many of its characteristics to the way that the state’s primary institution, the monarchy, interacted with plural political forces. One basic feature of this interaction has been alliance building against a common, domestic rival, while offering to sel - ected groups opportunities to be included in the distribution of societal power and wealth. While these alliances tended to follow clannish and tribal logics until the mid-1970s, it has increasingly become based on socio-economic characteristics and political ideologies. Effectively, the rise of political Islam since the early 1980s, as well as the mass arrival of countryside dwellers in the main cities, created strong incentives for former opposition parties to ally with the regime. After 1992, tragic events in neighbouring Algeria compounded the political elite’s willingness to make concessions to the monarch, a trajectory that some Islamists followed in the late 1990s.
