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Morocco has a new government: Prime Minister-select Fatima Ezzahra El Mansouri has sealed a coalition agreement with three partners — Istiqlal, the Socialist Union of Popular Forces, and the Progress and Socialism Party — handing her centrist Authenticity and Modernity Party (PAM) a working majority in the 395-seat parliament, state news agency MAP reported. El Mansouri is now set to send a cabinet list to the king for approval before facing parliament with a policy program.
El Mansouri is up against some challenges: Morocco is one of the region’s growth stories, with the IMF projecting 4.6% expansion in 2026, well ahead of a broader MENA region which is set to contract at about 2%. But headline unemployment is at 12.2% and youth joblessness is near 27%, the same pressures that drove last year’s Gen Z protests and July’s Ceuta migration crisis. El Mansouri also inherits the final stretch of a USD 20 bn infrastructure push for the 2030 World Cup, which Morocco co-hosts with Spain and Portugal.
The backstory: PAM, founded in 2008 by a senior adviser to King Mohammed VI as a secular counterweight to the Islamist Justice and Development Party (PJD), won the 23 September legislative vote and displaced the National Rally of Independents (RNI) at the top of the coalition. The king tapped El Mansouri — a lawyer, Marrakech mayor, and former housing minister — last month, succeeding b’naire businessman Aziz Akhannouch, who led the outgoing coalition government from 2021.
