Profile: Morocco's Abdelilah Benkirane
Where is Islamism heading in Morocco and beyond?
Morocco’s Justice and Development Party (French acronym PJD) held its ninth congress on April 26-27 and re-elected, by a vote of nearly 70%, Abdelilah Benkirane as its General Secretary.
Benkirane’s biography is available in abbreviated form in some English-language sources, but Arabic sites such as Al Jazeera have fuller versions. Born in 1954 in Morocco’s capital Rabat to a family with some famous Islamic scholars in its past, Benkirane earned a degree in physics in 1979 and worked in various fields, including teaching, publishing, and journalism. Meanwhile, he was active in underground Islamist movements in the 1970s and 1980s, namely al-Shabiba al-Islamiyya (the Islamic Youth, often transliterated as Chebiba) and an offshoot of that movement called al-Jama‘a al-Islamiyya (the Islamic Group, a name borne by several movements in North Africa at the time). In the mid-1980s, after authorities arrested some of his compatriots, he turned to more open activism. Several Islamist movements and proto-parties existed at the time, going by various names, and eventually coalesced into an organization called the Movement for Unicity/Oneness and Reform (harakat al-tawhid* wa-l-islah) in 1996, and also into a legally recognized party, which took the name PJD in 1998. Benkirane was key to those processes of unification, recognition, and solidification of the movement.
The PJD competed in legislative elections from 1997 onwards, performing solidly in the elections of 2002 and 2007 before winning a plurality of seats in the 2011 elections. Held amid the Arab Spring, which reached Morocco and prompted the monarchy to make various concessions and reforms, the 2011 elections resulted in the PJD forming a government. Benkirane had taken over as leader of the party in 2008, and so he became prime minister in 2011. He led the PJD to another plurality victory in the 2016 elections, gaining eighteen seats. He himself won five elections as parliamentary deputy for the city of Salé, which is adjacent to Rabat. After the 2016 victory, however, Benkirane struggled to form a coalition government and was eventually replaced as prime minister by his longtime PJD colleague Saadeddine Othmani. The latter went on to serve as prime minister until 2021, when the PJD was crushed in that year’s parliamentary elections, losing an astonishing 112 out of 125 seats. Analysts have explained that defeat in various ways, but one persuasive take comes from Mohammed Masbah, who says the political deadlock of 2016-2017 was a turning point for the PJD, both for its image and in its internal cohesion: “The new PJD leadership was unable to strike a balance between being loyal to the palace, managing a government coalition and preserving the party machine.”
Since 2021, then, the PJD has been back in the opposition. After the party’s exit from government, Benkirane achieved a major political comeback, winning an internal election to become the party’s secretary general in October 2021. Back at the helm of the party, he has frequently made news for his statements, especially his criticisms of Morocco’s diplomatic relations with Israel; Jeune Afrique calls him the “king of polemics.” Yet his prominence in the media may not necessarily translate into votes in the coming parliamentary elections in 2026. That same magazine, in a different article published after the recent party congress, argues that the party is in bad shape materially amid “a hemorrhage of followers, internal tensions, [and] financial difficulties.”
One challenge for Benkirane and the PJD is that their brand is somewhat fuzzy. Are they Islamists? If so, what does that label even mean? Their time in power was, moreover, largely costly to their image and brand. As Shadi Hamid, drawing on the work of anthropologist Avi Spiegel, wrote in 2023, “Ostensibly in power, the party was powerless when it came to what mattered most: national economic strategy, international relations, defense, and internal security. On Islam, the very thing that animated the PJD’s founding, the party was similarly constrained.” Al Jazeera, in the (sympathetic) profile I linked to above, notes that many of the PJD’s policies while in government were unpopular, including increasing the price of fuel; the PJD also failed to achieve goals such as reducing corruption, a failure that cuts into the Islamist appeal as supposedly more moral managers of the state.
The Gaza War has, in some ways, helped Benkirane and the PJD rebuild their brand both as an opposition party and as a specifically Islamist one. This latest PJD party congress had an internationalist, pan-Islamist flavor. The headlines in advance of the congress were dominated by reports that Hamas would attend; ultimately, neither Hamas nor Muslim Brotherhood delegations from Jordan and Libya were there, but the prominent Islamist-leaning Mauritanian scholar Muhammad al-Hasan Wuld al-Dedew was in attendance. Both al-Dedew and Benkirane himself made the plight of Palestine a key theme in their remarks. The PJD, and not necessarily for instrumentalist reasons, is positioning itself as the voice of Moroccans who feel strongly about Palestine, and is also reasserting its Islamist character as a party. At the time same, when the party lays out its priorities, they all appear relatively short-term and narrow, mainly having to do with rebuilding in order to compete effectively in 2026; the party’s challenge is to articulate a compelling governing vision and identity beyond just criticism of the current rulers and broad gestures towards Palestine and Islam.
If the PJD is heading into the 2026 campaign in a weak state, the PJD may also benefit from the weakness of the current ruling coalition of three parties and the seeming unpopularity of current Prime Minister Aziz Akhannouch, a billionaire. The problems that faced the PJD, including seemingly high levels of corruption, have continued to dog the current ruling parties.
In a way, the bar is relatively low for Benkirane - the party already hit a low point in 2021, and any substantial improvement on that performance in 2026 would redound to Benkirane’s credit. On the other hand, another shutout in 2026 could leave the party looking like a rump, a vestige of its glory days. Benkirane, in his late 60s, remains a major political figure, and the last chapter of his career is very much left to be written. His fate, in turn, will also contribute to settling the larger question of whether Islamism in the decade since 2011 has gone from ascendant to marginal, or whether we are going to be seeing a very uneven picture for some time to come in North Africa and beyond.
*Tawhid is a theological concept referring to the oneness of God in Islam; the word is difficult to translate with a single English word.