How safe are Arab monarchies? The fact that this year’s revolutionary turmoil has so far been focused on the republics at the centre of the Arab world has led to some brave assumptions about the stability of the kingdoms on its eastern and western fringes.
Protests in the sultanate of Oman and in the kingdoms of Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Jordan and Morocco have shown that monarchies are not immune to the winds of change, even if their rulers are ostensibly not as despised by their subjects as the current and former authoritarian rulers of Libya, Tunisia and Egypt.
But in Morocco at least, there is still a misguided hope among royalists and some foreign observers that traditional regal and Muslim religious credentials, an Arab version of the “divine right of kings”, will indefinitely protect King Mohammed VI from popular outrage at economic injustice and the absence of real democracy.
“Of course things are different in Morocco. It’s a country that has undertaken reforms,” was the verdict of José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, prime minister of Spain, the Arab world’s nearest neighbour in the European Union.
The argument that the hereditary Moroccan king automatically commands respect, in part because he is said to be descended from the Prophet Mohammed and styles himself “commander of the faithful”, is not entirely baseless. It is also true that Morocco is, or was until the recent revolutions, less oppressive than most of its Arab partners.
Many Moroccans – from immigrants in Spain to hotel workers in Tangiers and professionals in the capital Rabat – reflexively and respectfully refer to their king when seeking to explain the differences between Morocco and revolutionary Libya or Tunisia. Demonstrations across Morocco on February 20 were not so much a day of rage, according to one foreign diplomat, as “a day of mild annoyance”.
Demands for radical change are nevertheless multiplying at a speed that must be frightening for a 47-year-old king who was praised as a reformist after he inherited the throne from his father Hassan II in 1999 but is now accused – in the heady climate of freedom prevailing in the Middle East – of repression and delay.
The February demonstrations marked the first time that people could recall in which Moroccan marchers failed to carry pictures of the king to show their loyalty. Ominously echoing the complaints of Tunisians against the now deposed Zein al-Abidine Ben Ali and the greed of his family, the protesters criticised the palace’s business dealings, singling out Mohammed Mounir Majidi, the head of the king’s private secretariat, and mocking the royal holding company.
“For Morocco, the usual message is that it is not like other countries,” says Mohammed Salmi, a university professor and senior member of the influential Islamist “Justice and Charity” movement. “But they said the same in Egypt about Tunisia. Dictatorship is everywhere, human rights are suppressed everywhere in the Arab world ... Morocco is not an exception.”
He complains of prisoner torture, arbitrary detention, curbs on the media, economic difficulties and the fact that Moroccans are subject to the “medieval concepts” on which the current constitution is based.
It turns out that Arab monarchs, like Arab dictators, face the dangerous combination of an urban underclass of unemployed young men and of middle-class professionals dissatisfied with the infantile nature of pseudo-democratic politics in which parliaments have no real power. They also confront two formidable organising powers open to a regime’s opponents: the Islamist movement and the internet.
It was on Facebook, the social networking site, that young Moroccans organised last month’s rally. Said Benjebli, a 32-year-old blogger and chairman of the Moroccan Bloggers’ Association, says he had despaired of change and given up writing for six months when the Tunisian revolution erupted and gave him “new life”.
For Mr Benjebli, Morocco’s future depends on whether the king can bring himself to talk directly to his 31m people about the reforms they want. “If he stays aloof, the level of demands will increase and then people will want a republic. There is not much time to save the monarchy.”
Opponents of the Moroccan regime – the current Alawite dynasty goes back to the 17th century – sometimes say they have nothing against the person of the king; they just want him to agree to a constitutional monarchy like those of the UK or Spain.
Yet, the abandonment of near-absolute power by the monarch of the westernmost Arab land would constitute a revolution as dramatic as those happening to the east. And the king has given no sign that he is ready to take the plunge into full democracy.
>Victor Mallet / ft.com
