The King’s Mirror: Morocco’s Mohammed VI
Reformist Monarch or Master of Managed Liberalisation?
On 30th July 1999, when King Mohammed VI ascended to the Moroccan throne, following the death of his father, Hasan II, he did so with the language of a new era. In his inaugural address to the nation, he promised to confront poverty and corruption and to create jobs and improve Morocco’s human rights record. Twenty-six years later, the kingdom he presided over has been reshaped in unambiguous ways: a high-speed rail line now cuts through the north, renewable energy targets have been boldly revised upwards, and a new constitution formally expanded civil liberties.
The same years have also seen protest leaders handed twenty-year prison sentences, journalists surveilled by military-grade spyware, and a generation of young Moroccans – youth unemployment now brushing 36 per cent – descend into the streets chanting ‘freedom, dignity and social justice'. The central question that this investigation pursues is not whether Morocco has changed under Mohammed VI, because it undeniably has, but rather who those changes have been designed to serve and what they have been designed to protect.
I. The Architecture of Reform
The record of reform under Mohammed VI is substantial enough to demand honest acknowledgement before it is interrogated. In 2004, the King championed a revision of the Moudawana, Morocco’s family code, granting women expanded rights to self-guardianship, divorce and custody – a meaningful advance in a socially conservative society where Islamist opposition was fierce. The economy was reoriented: the Green Morocco Plan of 2008 modernised agriculture, industrial acceleration plans cultivated competitive automotive and aeronautics sectors, and foreign direct investment increased markedly. According to research published by GIS Reports, the middle class expanded from 53 per cent of the population in 2012 to nearly 62 per cent in 2029. Primary school enrolment rose from 87 per cent in 1998 to 112 per cent by 2017, and infant mortality fell from 63 deaths per thousand births in 1990 to 20 by 2017.
The Arab Spring of 2011 brought the most dramatic constitutional moment of his reign. Faced with the 20 February Movement — a loose coalition of youth activists, trade unions, and civil society groups demanding accountability and democratic reform — the King moved with conspicuous speed. Within weeks of the protests’ onset, he announced constitutional revisions that were put to a referendum in July 2011 and passed. The updated constitution reduced the formal powers of the crown, mandated that the head of government be drawn from the party winning parliamentary elections, and enshrined judicial independence, gender equality, and the recognition of Amazigh (Berber) as an official language alongside Arabic. Internationally, observers noted the text’s progressive architecture: a new 22-article section on “Liberties and Fundamental Rights” introduced freedoms of information and the press and rights to housing, healthcare, and clean water.
And yet, the architecture of these reforms has never been designed by anyone other than the palace itself.
II. The Constitutional Smokescreen
The Journal of Democracy offered one of the most clinically precise assessments of the 2011 constitution in its immediate aftermath. The reforms, it concluded, may have constituted an elaborate “constitutional smokescreen” — impressive in appearance, but designed to leave the monarchy’s practical authority intact. That judgment has proven difficult to contest.
On paper, Morocco became a “constitutional, democratic, parliamentary and social Monarchy.” In practice, the King retained the presidency of the Council of Ministers, the Supreme Council of Security, and the Superior Council of the Judicial Power. He remained Commander of the Royal Armed Forces, retained the power to dissolve parliament, and continued to exercise the right of pardon — a prerogative with, as will be demonstrated, deeply political uses. The Constitution Project’s published text of the 2011 constitution confirms that sovereignty is theoretically vested in the nation, yet the King’s title as “Commander of the Faithful” — a religious designation that places him above ordinary political scrutiny — remained wholly untouched.
The Economist Intelligence Unit, rating Morocco a “hybrid regime” in 2022, was perhaps generous. The V-Dem Democracy Indices, as Wikipedia’s article on Moroccan politics notes, have consistently classified the country as a “closed autocracy” since the end of the eighteenth century – a characterisation that twelve months of constitutional drafting in 2011 has not overturned.
The International IDEA’s critical analysis of the 2011 constitution articulated the structural problem plainly: while some commentators noted its progressive protection of individual rights, others pointed out that the document “reinforces a rigid governance framework that protects entrenched interests at the expense of executive transparency and accountability". The Arab Center DC concluded in 2021 that “the promises of shared power and a constitutional monarchy in the aftermath of the 2011 Arab uprisings have not been kept" and that human rights provisions had proved “largely cosmetic", with legal reforms “much discussed but rarely enacted".
The most telling detail may be spatial: the 2011 document describes Morocco as geographically decentralised, divided into regions, prefectures, and communes. But as International IDEA’s analysis observed, “the prefectural and provincial levels are tightly controlled by the state", functioning as “extensions of central administration and a means of territorial control” rather than genuine vehicles of local self-governance.
III. The Hirak Rif: Where Reform Met Reality
If there is a single episode that strips the reform narrative of its cosmetic sheen, it is the state’s response to the Hirak Rif Movement of 2016 and 2017.
The movement was born from tragedy. On 28 October 2016, Mouhcine Fikri, a 31-year-old fishmonger in Al Hoceima, was crushed to death in a garbage compactor while attempting to recover fish confiscated by local authorities. The death crystallised decades of accumulated grievance in the Rif, a Berber-majority region in northern Morocco that has long experienced what its inhabitants describe as 'deliberate economic marginalisation and state neglect'. The demands of the Hirak — a cancer hospital, a university, improved roads, and jobs — were modest by any democratic standard. They were met with tear gas, mass arrests, and sentences of startling severity.
Nasser Zefzafi, the movement’s most prominent leader, was arrested on 29 May 2017 — initially for interrupting a mosque sermon he believed the authorities had co-opted as anti-protest propaganda. He stated he was subjected to torture on the day of his arrest; a video leaked by a website affiliated with Moroccan security forces, showing him with visible bruises and marks on his body, corroborated this account and sparked a further eruption of protests. On 26 June 2018, he was sentenced to twenty years in prison on charges that included “undermining the internal security of the state” and “incitement against the kingdom’s territorial unity". As Amnesty International examined the charge sheet in detail, it found that the prosecution’s central exhibit of “incitement” was Zefzafi pointing his finger at security forces and praying aloud, asking God for “his martyrdom". Such conduct, the organisation concluded, constituted peaceful free expression, not incitement to violence.
Over 150 other activists were arrested. Many were sentenced to prison terms of up to twenty years. Minors were held in pre-trial detention. The Casablanca Court of Appeals upheld these convictions. In August 2024, the UN Working Group on Arbitrary Detention published its opinion that Zefzafi’s detention was arbitrary, finding it stemmed solely from his peaceful protest and expression, and that violations of his right to a fair trial were so serious as to render the proceedings illegitimate. The Working Group further determined that his case was not isolated but “part of a pattern targeting him due to his ethnic identity and political activism, amounting to discrimination". As of 2025, Zefzafi remains imprisoned.
The Carnegie Endowment for International Peace spoke to Hirak activists five years after the movement’s suppression and found that residents of Al Hoceima said they saw “no difference” in their situation — that hospitals still lacked adequate staff and economic opportunities remained absent. The state had crushed the movement without addressing the conditions that produced it.
IV. The Press: A Pardoning Hand and a Prosecuting One
The relationship between the Moroccan state and its independent journalists is perhaps where the paradox of managed liberalisation is most visible. Two contradictory realities coexist in uncomfortable proximity.
On 29 July 2024, to mark the 25th anniversary of his reign, King Mohammed VI issued a royal pardon covering 2,476 prisoners. Among them were three of Morocco’s most prominent imprisoned journalists: Omar Radi, Soulaimane Raissouni, and Taoufik Bouachrine, who had served between four and six years on charges they denied — charges that human rights organisations characterised as instruments of political persecution. The pardon was welcomed internationally. PEN International and the Committee to Protect Journalists praised it as the product of years of sustained advocacy.
And yet, as the Human Rights Institute at UIU observed, the pardon did not overturn the journalists’ convictions. Their criminal records remained intact. Under Moroccan law, a criminal conviction can prevent a journalist from obtaining an official press licence, meaning that until their legal status is formally clarified, the released journalists remain unable to practise their profession without obstruction. The CPJ reported that after their release, pro-government media outlets launched campaigns to smear and harass them, spreading misinformation about their cases. One journalist, upon release, called for “a new phase” in Moroccan rights and liberties. His hope was premature.
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Since the pardon, Reporters Without Borders (RSF) documented an intensification rather than a relaxation of judicial pressure on the press. Morocco ranked 120th out of 180 countries in the 2025 World Press Freedom Index. In November 2024, journalist Hamid El Mahdaoui — editor of Badil.info and a chronicler of corruption in public life — was sentenced to 18 months in prison and a fine of 1.5 million dirhams (approximately £122,000) for a video in which he mentioned the Minister of Justice. He had previously been imprisoned during the Hirak crackdown. RSF noted that El Mahdaoui now faces five simultaneous legal proceedings, all initiated by the Justice Minister himself. In December 2024, freelance journalist Hanane Bakour received a suspended prison sentence for a Facebook post criticising the ruling party. In March 2025, prominent activist Fouad Abdelmoumni was sentenced to six months in prison for a Facebook post critiquing Moroccan-French relations.
The Freedom House Freedom on the Net 2025 report for Morocco is unambiguous: “Prominent journalists and activists were arrested and prosecuted for their online activities.” It notes that despite a 2016 press code officially abolishing prison sentences for press offences, “the government has found other ways to punish” journalists, exploiting the penal code’s articles on “insulting public officials and state institutions” — provisions that RSF has stated are being “interpreted in an extremely elastic and draconian manner". The Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism concluded in 2025 that Morocco’s “media landscape is at a crossroads", with the royal pardons offering only “a glimpse of progress” while “persistent obstacles to true media independence” remain structurally entrenched.
The Carnegie Endowment’s analysis of the Moudawana reform process in 2025 offered a broader observation that applies equally to press freedom: “The inclusive approach taken by the government in its efforts to reform has also embodied democratic principles…" But ultimately, King Mohammed VI’s absolute power over the reforms limits the impact of such democratic practice.” Hearings are frequently closed-door. The king has the ultimate say. Activism remains permitted only when it operates in conjunction with the palace’s own agenda, not against it.
V. Pegasus and the Digital Panopticon
While journalists were being prosecuted through visible legal proceedings, the Moroccan state was simultaneously deploying invisible ones.
Beginning in 2019, a series of forensic investigations by Amnesty International’s Security Lab established with high confidence that the Moroccan government had been using NSO Group’s Pegasus spyware, one of the most invasive surveillance technologies ever commercially deployed, to monitor human rights defenders, journalists, and activists. The initial report identified at least two targets: historian and rights advocate Maati Monjib and lawyer Abdessadak El Bouchattaoui, both of whom had been active during the Hirak Rif protests. A subsequent investigation revealed that journalist Omar Radi — the same Omar Radi who would later be imprisoned and eventually pardoned — had been subjected to multiple Pegasus “network injection” attacks, meaning his phone’s internet traffic was silently intercepted and the spyware installed without any action required on his part. The attacks, Amnesty found, had continued until at least January 2020, occurring even as NSO Group was publicly pledging that its tools would never be used against journalists or human rights activists.
The 2021 Pegasus Project — a global consortium of investigative journalists — confirmed Morocco as one of eleven confirmed NSO client states. The Guardian reported that 38 journalists in Morocco had been selected as potential targets. Morocco was also identified as having used Pegasus to target Aminatou Haidar, a celebrated Sahrawi rights defender and recipient of the Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights Award, with Amnesty’s Security Lab finding traces of infection on her devices as recently as October and November 2021 — months after the global revelations were published.
Morocco denied all involvement. Yet the evidence trail was forensic, not circumstantial. Amnesty’s analysts noted that the network injection attacks documented in Morocco required “either physical proximity to the targets or leverage over mobile operators in the country, which only a government could authorise". Six Moroccan activists announced plans to join a class action lawsuit in California against NSO Group. Lawyer Fouad Abdelmoumni – later himself imprisoned for a Facebook post – told AFP that 'Pegasus has been used to crush human rights activists, political dissidents, journalists and lawyers. This is unacceptable.”
What emerges is a picture of a state conducting two simultaneous conversations about civil liberties: one, a public-facing discourse of constitutional reform and royal clemency; the other, a covert programme of digital surveillance that, as one Moroccan rights defender told Amnesty International, functions as 'a type of punishment'. You can’t behave freely. It is part of their strategy to make you suspect you’re being watched so you feel like you’re under pressure all the time.”
VI. Gen Z 212: The Pressure Cooker Returns
By September 2025, the structural contradictions of Morocco’s reform model had once again broken the surface. On 14 September, a vigil was held outside Agadir’s Hassan II Hospital following the deaths of eight women in the hospital’s maternity ward — a tragedy that crystallised years of austerity-driven deterioration in public healthcare. Within days, a decentralised youth collective calling itself “GenZ 212” — the name a reference to Morocco’s international dialling code — had organised via Discord, TikTok, and Instagram, growing from 3,000 members to over 130,000 in a matter of days.
By 27 September 2025, demonstrations had swept Rabat, Casablanca, Agadir, Fez, Tangier, Meknes, and dozens of smaller cities, constituting the largest protests Morocco had seen since 2011. The demands were recognisably the same as those of 2011 and 2016 — access to quality public healthcare and education, jobs for young people, and an end to corruption — accompanied by a specific new grievance: the state’s willingness to invest billions of dirhams in stadiums for the 2025 Africa Cup of Nations and the 2030 FIFA World Cup co-hosting bid while hospitals lacked basic equipment. Youth unemployment stood at between 35 and 37 per cent, according to various official and analytical sources. As the Middle East Council on Global Affairs observed, “even university graduates face joblessness rates close to one in five, reinforcing the belief among young people that hard work and education no longer guarantee a stable future.”
The state’s response was familiar in its carrot-and-stick logic. Security forces deployed tear gas, rubber bullets, and armoured vehicles. At least three people were killed. Over 400 protesters were arrested. Yet the king, in his annual address to parliament on 10 October 2025, spoke of prioritising job creation for young people and improvements in education and healthcare — without once mentioning the protests directly. The day after, GenZ 212 announced a strategic pause in demonstrations. The Arab Center DC drew the obvious conclusion: “By addressing deep structural problems with only superficial solutions, the regime has maintained the appearance of stability without conceding the status quo – but that policy only released the steam from the pressure cooker without turning down the flame.”
The Carnegie Endowment’s analysts wrote that GenZ 212 had “shed light on the challenges that remain unaddressed in Morocco” and that the movement’s core questions were “not only about redistribution of wealth but also about priorities: What kind of development needs to take place and for whom?” It was a question the Hirak had asked in 2017. The February 20 Movement had asked for it in 2011. The answer, across three generations of protest and three cycles of royal response, has remained structurally consistent.
VII. The Formula and Its Future
Understanding Mohammed VI’s Morocco requires understanding the logic of what political analysts have taken to calling “managed liberalisation” — a governance model in which reform is real but calibrated, permitted but bounded, and always ultimately contingent on the crown’s approval. It is neither simple repression, as in the Hassan II era’s “years of lead", nor a genuine democratic transition. It is something more sophisticated: a system in which the vocabulary of modernity — constitutionalism, gender equality, sustainable development, and regional integration — is deployed to consolidate rather than dilute royal authority.
The Carnegie Endowment’s analysis of the Moudawana reform process captures the structural logic precisely. The government consulted civil society, academics, religious leaders, and government representatives. Democratic principles appeared to be embodied in the process. “But ultimately, King Mohammed VI’s absolute power over the reforms limits the impact of such democratic practice.” The process lacked transparency; hearings were closed-door, and the reforms’ scope was defined by the king’s judgement of what Islamic precepts permitted, not by popular mandate. Major cities like Rabat and Casablanca offer women greater awareness of their rights, while women in rural areas “remain subject to cultural traditions that do not adjust simply because a new set of laws is introduced".
This gap between legislative reform and lived reality is a recurring feature of the Moroccan model. The constitution guarantees freedom of expression. The press code abolished prison sentences for journalists. And yet, as Freedom House documents, people are imprisoned for Facebook posts, activists are surveilled by military-grade spyware, and a journalist can be sentenced to 18 months in prison and fined the equivalent of a hundred thousand pounds for mentioning a minister’s name in a video. The Moroccan constitution guarantees the protection of private life and freedom of expression in Article 1. The Moroccan penal code’s Articles 263–267, criminalising insults to public officials and state institutions, are deployed against those who exercise that freedom. The gap between the two is not accidental. It is the architecture of managed liberalisation.
What has changed with the Gen Z 212 protests is the arithmetic of risk. As the Arab Centre DC noted in November 2025, questions increasingly loom over Mohammed VI’s health — he underwent surgery in December 2024 after fracturing his shoulder and had reportedly suffered from sciatica — while 22-year-old Crown Prince Moulay Hassan has taken on a more visible public role, suggesting that a leadership transition may be approaching. Morocco is simultaneously under an “unusually bright international spotlight” as it prepares to co-host the 2030 World Cup. The international scrutiny that accompanies that role creates both an incentive to demonstrate liberalism and a vulnerability to the exposure of its contradictions.
RSF has noted that as Morocco’s 2026 elections approach, pressure on critical journalists is actively mounting — the Prime Minister is using his powers to restrict the press while the Minister of Justice has intensified prosecutions. More than 2,400 protesters from the Gen Z 212 movement face criminal charges in the courts. Nasser Zefzafi remains in a Moroccan prison, eight years after his arrest, despite a UN ruling that his detention is arbitrary. The journalists pardoned in July 2024 remain under legal clouds that prevent them from fully practising their profession.
Conclusion: The King’s Two Faces
The evidence assembled from this investigation does not support the conclusion that Mohammed VI is either a cynical dictator or a genuine democrat. What it supports is a more disquieting conclusion: that he is a highly capable manager of contradictions, presiding over a system in which reform and repression are not opposites but instruments deployed in tandem, each reinforcing the other’s utility.
The infrastructure investments are real. The railway runs. The solar farms generate power. The family code has been amended. The 2024 pardon was welcomed by those it freed. These are not inventions. But they exist within a system in which the king retains ultimate authority over what may be reformed and what may not, who may speak and who must be silenced, and which protests are tolerated and which are crushed. The Journal of Democracy’s assessment of the 2011 constitution — that the monarchy may have “outfoxed its opponents by producing an elaborate constitutional smokescreen” — remains the most precise analytical summary of two and a half decades of Moroccan governance.
True liberalisation — the kind that might allow Nasser Zefzafi to leave prison without signing a confession, that might permit a journalist to publish an investigation of the Justice Minister without facing five simultaneous legal proceedings, that might enable a protest movement to translate popular anger into structural policy change — would require the palace to relinquish something it has never relinquished in the entire history of the Alaouite dynasty: the final word.
Until that changes, the mirror Morocco holds up to the world reflects the image of a reformist king. The view from inside the frame is rather different.
