Race for local seats set to start Saturday in Morocco

The electoral campaign for the local elections, due next June 12, will be launched on Saturday, May 30 with 30 parties vying for 27,795 seats in 1,503 urban and rural councils across the north African Kingdom. The race to the seats will end before midnight on the night of balloting.

With the new double digit quota of 12%, women candidates will compete for more than 3,300 seats in the 2009 polls, after holding a little more than a half-percent of the country's local political positions in 2003.

The quota system, as provided in the law provisions regulating the elections, shows Morocco's resolve to dramatically increase the representation of women in elected councils by the means of serious incentives.

In fact, no less than 10 million Dirhams (1.14 million U.S. Dollars) were allocated for setting up a Fund for Support to the Promotion of the Political Representation of Women.

The fund, governed by a central committee, including representatives of political parties, of the government and of the civil society, is meant to increase women's awareness of and participation in the political action and local management.

A system of financial incentives to strengthen women's representation was also launched. Under the banner of these measures, the funds allocated to political parties, on the basis of the number of seats won in the ordinary electoral districts, will be five times higher for female elects than for male ones.

Keen on guaranteeing polls' transparency and fairness, Interior Minister, Chakib Benmoussa has recently said that a series of preventive and repressive measures will be applied to “help dealing firmly with any manoeuvre and actions seeking to undermine the electoral process."

He affirmed that the government will fight with the necessary firmness against any attempt to use the resources of the State, of local authorities and public institutions for electoral purposes. He stressed that the government will work to moralize the upcoming elections and to apply the laws rigorously against any attempt to mar the electoral process.

The Moroccan government had launched on January 5 a seven-week campaign to update voter electoral rolls. Some 1.64 million new voters were registered in the lists under this operation while 3,630,886 persons were disenfranchised.

Necessary measures have been taken to mobilize both voters and parties through holding ballotter-friendly awareness campaigns in media outlets, and providing the running parties with all means, including media and TV timeslots, to defend and explain their agendas for "the council of the future”.

In this race, political parties will face the double challenge of mobilizing the 13,360,219 voters expected to cast their ballots and of selecting an elite of managers to handle the new tasks of development, a duty that now falls on locally elected officials.

MAP