Migration and the frustrations of young people hang over elections in Morocco on Wednesday.
In the last year, young people have been at the center of two major national crises: the 2025 Gen Z protests and the sudden, deadly mass crossing this summer into Ceuta, a sliver of the European Union on Morocco’s northern coast.
The issues that drove those crises are at the forefront of the legislative elections in the North African country, a constitutional monarchy. Unemployment is high, schools and hospitals are crumbling, and the space for public expression is shrinking.
On Wednesday, 27 parties are on the ballot, with candidates competing for 395 seats in the lower house of Parliament. Voting centers opened at 8 a.m. local time and will close at 7 p.m., with the first results expected on Thursday.
Two centrist parties that have been part of the governing coalition since 2021, the National Rally of Independents, and the Authenticity and Modernity Party, are the front-runners, according to an analysis by the Moroccan Institute for Policy Analysis. The parties have made jobs and the economy the central themes of their campaign, but there has been little enthusiasm about their pitch.
Prominent members of two parties competing for parliamentary seats include Rachid Talbi Alami, the speaker of Parliament, left, and Fouzi Lekjaa, the budget minister.Credit…Jalal Morchidi/EPA, via Shutterstock; Abdel Majid Bziouat/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
Will young people vote?
King Mohammed VI and Morocco’s government are betting that co-hosting the 2030 soccer World Cup, along with Spain and Portugal, will inject investment and vigor into the economy, but that possibility appears to have done little to lessen popular disenchantment.
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Young Moroccans have had an ambivalent relationship both with electoral politics and with the World Cup. People aged 18 to 24 make up 12 percent of the population but just 4 percent of the 15.8 million registered voters.
In October last year, thousands of young people protested the deaths of eight women at a dilapidated hospital in Agadir, a city on the Atlantic coast. Their slogans contrasted the millions that the government was spending on the World Cup with the dire state of public services.
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The protests, inspired by similar youth movements in Nepal and in Madagascar, began after a loosely organized group known as Gen Z 212 demanded that Prime Minister Aziz Akhannouch step down.
