ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on relationships of political parties to changing patterns of patronage. More economic competition, foisted on Morocco by international authorities and donors by indigenous capitalists, may reinvigorate political parties and make them less dependent on royal governmental largesse. However numerous the entities that may meet formal definitions of a political party, the old ones seem to have lost much of their credibility throughout North Africa, whereas the new ones have yet to be tested. Authoritarian barriers to entry have certainly not yet broken down in Morocco, where the industry of manufacturing political parties is the most mature. The poles of “state” and “society” were too twisted together for political parties to acquire any autonomy or real staying power as intermediaries between state and society anywhere in the region. In April Habib Bourguiba’s old Parliament passed a law on political parties that guaranteed a multiparty system and met most of the specifications of the Mouvement des Democrates Socialistes.
