Morocco’s King Mohammed VI has appointed Fatima Ezzahra El Mansouri as head of government, making her the first woman to lead a Moroccan cabinet.
The King received the leader of the Authenticity and Modernity Party (PAM) at the royal palace in Rabat on September 29 and asked her to form an administration, the Ministry of the Royal Household said.
Article 47 of the constitution obliges the monarch to pick the head of government from the party that wins most seats in the House of Representatives. The PAM took 97 of the 395 seats in the September 23 election.
Its coalition partners trailed well behind, the National Rally of Independents (RNI) on 66 seats and the Istiqlal Party on 65. Turnout was 38 per cent, the lowest since 2007.
The three parties have governed together since 2021 and between them hold a comfortable majority, which leaves El Mansouri free to renew the same coalition rather than look elsewhere.
El Mansouri, a 50-year-old lawyer, has been mayor of Marrakech and served as minister for urban planning and housing since 2021. She is the second woman to head a government in the Arab world, after Najla Bouden in Tunisia.
She called the appointment a historic moment and a source of pride for Moroccan women, according to the state news agency MAP. She promised realistic and concrete answers to the expectations of Moroccans, and of the young in particular.
She had been widely expected to lose out to Fouzi Lekjaa, the president of the Royal Moroccan Football Federation and the outgoing government’s budget chief, who joined the PAM shortly before the vote.
For Brussels, the new face in Rabat inherits the file that matters most. The European Commission has kept its migration money flowing to Morocco since the invasion of Ceuta on July 30 and 31, when about 72,000 people crossed the EU’s only land border with Africa.
The indicative migration package for the kingdom stands at €500 million for the 2021-2027 period, and the Commission has said it wants a strategic and comprehensive partnership with Rabat concluded before the end of the year.
Any such deal would now be negotiated with a Moroccan Government led by El Mansouri. Senior figures in the outgoing coalition restated Morocco’s claim to the Spanish city of Ceuta in the run-up to the vote.
The incoming administration will also oversee the final stretch of preparations for the 2030 World Cup, which Morocco co-hosts with Spain and Portugal.
