ABSTRACT
On 23 July 1999 King Hassan II of Morocco died. His eldest son,
Mohammed VI, immediately acceded to the throne. Although the transition
to 36-year-old Mohammed’s rule was uneventful, the challenges confronting
the new monarch were enormous. Mohammed VI had inherited a gradual
process of top-down liberalization from his father. In the late 1990s, after a
series of constitutional reforms, Hassan II had initiated Morocco’s first
experiment with a gouvernement d’alternance that, in theory, would alternate
between centrist coalitions of the left and right.1 In March 1998, after national elections, Hassan appointed Abderrahman Youssoufi as prime minis-
ter and charged him with the formation of a cabinet. Youssoufi, the longtime
leader-in-exile of the center-left Socialist Union of Popular Forces (USFP)
and a strong critic of the Palace, appointed a cabinet of 40 ministers from
seven political parties. Notably, however, Youssoufi was not charged with
appointing four dominant ‘‘sovereign’’ ministers: Interior, Justice, Islamic
Affairs, and Foreign Affairs. Since the Makhzen (the powerful, central gov-
ernment surrounding the King and the Royal Palace) selects sovereign ministers, it was justifiable to wonder how a government of alternance could
be held accountable when its powers were so carefully limited.
