ABSTRACT
The Western media predicted that an Islamist “tsunami” would sweep Morocco on September 7, 2007. That scenario never materialized and was never going to (see, for instance, Enhaili 2007b). Keen observers of the kingdom’s affairs knew that the 2007 legislative elections were not going to produce an electoral cataclysm. The heterogeneity of the Islamist movement in Morocco, the ethnic pluralism of the country’s make-up, and the diverse and at times discordant currents within the Party of Justice and Development are enough to blunt speculations about the party’s inevitable ascent in national politics. The structure of Morocco’s electoral map, with its complex voting system and skillful gerrymandering of electoral constituencies, is another major factor in preventing a meteoric electoral rise of the legal Islamists. Nevertheless, the failure of the PJD to make any meaningful gains constituted one of the main surprises of the election. Most public opinion polls, including a 2006 survey by the US-based International Republican Institute, had shown that the moderate Islamist party would significantly improve on its 2002 tally of forty-two seats and was likely to emerge as the single largest party (Spiegel 2007). Instead, the PJD was slightly outperformed by the nationalist Istiqlal party despite the fact that it fielded parliamentary candidates in most of the ninety-five electoral districts, compared with about fifty-five in 2002.
