Crown Center for Middle East Studies

Cost of Governing: Morocco’s Party of Justice and Development after 2011

A Brown Bag Seminar with Mohammed Masbah

April 11, 2018

Demonstrators holding a banner

Since 2011, the Islamist Justice and Development Party (PJD) has led Morocco’s coalition government. Despite increasing the number of its representatives in parliament in 2015 and 2016, due to pressures from the palace and other coalition partners, the PJD was forced to make concessions to continue its rule. These included the stepping down of its charismatic leader Abdelilah Benkirane and the installation of a weakened coalition government. In this talk, Mohammed Masbah looks at the cost of governing for the PJD and provides an assessment of their success and failures since 2011. In doing so, he also compares the PJD to other regional Islamist political parties and asks what is the price Islamists have to pay in order to remain in power?

Mohammed Masbah is a Junior Research Fellow at the Crown Center.