Washington Post cites IRI Morocco Poll

After an introduction, Othmani reaches out to shake a woman’s hand — a quick reflex that marks him as a moderate Muslim man.

Asked this week about how strict a view his Justice and Development Party takes of Islam’s role in daily life, a party official simply pointed to campaign ads featuring the party’s dozens of female candidates, many of them without the head scarf increasingly being worn by women in some parts of the Muslim world.

“We are not a religious party. We are a political party,” said Othmani, 51, a slight, bespectacled man who was a psychiatrist before he entered politics.

Othmani acknowledges that his political inspiration — like his aspirations — comes from Turkey, where an Islamic-based party last month gained control of Turkey’s presidency, in addition to the parliament and the prime minister’s post. The Turkish organization, also called the Justice and Development Party, retained power by playing down religion while proving itself capable of the basics of government, including boosting the economy and tamping down corruption.

Bridging black sub-Saharan Africa and the continent’s Arab north, Morocco is far less developed than Turkey. About 40 percent of its almost 34 million people live in poverty, and the economy waxes and wanes in large part depending on the success of each year’s crops.

The country, a sultanate that became a kingdom, lags far behind Turkey politically, as well. Campaign events for Turkey’s Islamic-guided party are massive affairs with laser light shows. By contrast, one of Othmani’s final campaign rallies this week took place in a dark vacant lot in the heart of Casablanca. Sand and trash blew among the audience — men in shabby clothes cradling young boys on one side, veiled women on the other, cuddling girls. Plainclothes government security officials lurked on the fringes of the crowd.

Perhaps fittingly, Turkey’s Islamic-based party has a light bulb as its symbol, while Morocco’s has an oil lamp.

If Friday’s election goes as leaders of Morocco’s Justice and Development Party predict, Othmani hopes to see his party move into the government for the first time.

Whether it does — and what might happen next — is crucial, and not just for Morocco. Morocco was the birthplace of the Islamic extremists behind the 2004 Madrid train bombings, which killed 191 people. Bombings in 2003 and this year killed at least 40 people in Casablanca, an Atlantic coastal city where concrete-block development sprawls into the countryside.

For Morocco and other Muslim countries, the key issue in the rise of Islamic political parties is whether their success will defuse extremism or only give it a role in government. In 1992, Morocco’s neighbor Algeria canceled elections that an armed, extremist Islamic party was poised to win. The thwarted extremists retaliated by launching a full-scale, decade-long civil war that left 150,000 people dead.

For Othmani, the need to give moderate Islam a political voice is clear. In an interview at a Casablanca hotel Thursday, the last day of campaigning, Othmani faulted the Bush administration for backing away from its calls for democratization in the Middle East after the fundamentalist Islamic party Hamas won parliamentary elections in the Palestinian territories and the Muslim Brotherhood gained ground in elections in Egypt. By “supporting the dictatorial states and regimes in countries that are counter to democracy,” U.S. policy “nourishes terrorism” in the Middle East and other Muslim regions, said Othmani, who was wearing a suit and tie after a day of canvassing Casablanca’s markets in his shirtsleeves.

Othmani’s party won 42 of Parliament’s 325 seats in 2002 elections, making it the third-largest group in the legislature. Supporters and detractors alike acknowledge that it could have won more seats that year if it had tried. But leaders said they feared that an Islamic party victory so soon after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks in the United States would bring a backlash and only fielded candidates in slightly more than half of Morocco’s electoral districts.

After that election, King Mohammed VI refused to offer the post of prime minister to any of the winning parties, instead choosing an independent technocrat. And some members of his government called for the Islamic party to be banned after the 2003 bombings in Casablanca.

Othmani projects that his party will win 70 seats in Friday’s vote. Although polling here is not generally scientifically rigorous, a 2006 survey by the U.S.-based International Republican Institute showed 47 percent of Moroccans backing the Justice and Development Party.

More than 30 parties are competing Friday under an electoral system that makes it virtually impossible for any one of them to win an absolute majority in Parliament.

Parliament, in any case, has only a limited say in the king’s running of the country. Many Moroccans have grown cynical, believing that politicians seek office merely for financial gain. Only about half of the country’s eligible voters bothered to cast ballots in the 2002 elections, and the poor are among the most disenfranchised.

“I’m not voting for them. I just wanted the money,” one young man said Thursday in Casablanca’s Carriere Thomas neighborhood, explaining why he was wearing one party’s new T-shirt while canvassing fellow residents.

Carriere Thomas is a warren of huts built out of rocks, with more rocks holding down roofs made from scraps of tin. Mosques have been built the same way, distinguished only by loudspeakers propped on the tin roofs to blare prayers. On Thursday, residents clustered around a communal well where women washed clothes, families drew drinking water in bins and a horse drank.

The district was the home of the extremists behind the 2003 bombings. The king toured the district afterward and promised to raze the shacks and build decent housing.

Now, some of the stone and tin huts lie empty, their occupants having moved elsewhere with government help. New apartment buildings rise among the hovels, but residents complain that rich outsiders have taken control of them, renting the rooms for profit.

It was clear enough why the bombers came from Carriere Thomas, young men of the neighborhood said.

“No jobs, no work. That’s why we’re doing it,” said one man in his 20s. He laughed when asked which party he’d be voting for. “No parties! No one!” And he disappeared into the crowd.