ABSTRACT
When Morocco celebrated fifty years of independence in March 2006, the US International Republican Institute (IRI) released the results of a political survey that it conducted among the Moroccan electorate. Asked who they would choose to win national elections if voting was held that day, some 47 per cent of those surveyed picked the Islamist Justice and Development Party (Hizb Al ‘Adala Wa At Tanmiyya or PJD),1 a legal opposition party that calls for the imposition of Islamic virtues in politics and public affairs. The news had the effect of a political bomb, as it raised the spectre of an ‘Algerian scenario’ when a similar victory of the Algerian Islamic Salvation Front (FIS) in 1991-2 led to a civil war between radical Islamists and the regime.
