Morocco is about to elect a government: Why some of what the parties now promising isn’t fully theirs to give

RNI is campaigning on raising Morocco’s minimum wage to 5,000 dirhams a month. It’s a good headline number, and it landed as a real jab in the RNI-PAM feud we covered in Part 1. PAM’s Fouzi Lekjaa turned around and endorsed it, then needled RNI for not doing it already, since RNI already runs the government.

But what the exchange skipped over is that RNI’s government already raised the minimum wage this year. As of January 1, the SMIG, Morocco’s legal wage floor for non-agricultural work, rose to 17.92 dirhams an hour, about 3,423 dirhams a month, the final phase of a deal signed in April 2024.

That deal, like the one before it in 2022, wasn’t a government decision alone. It was negotiated among the government, the CGEM employers’ federation, and the country’s labor unions, and only became law once all three sides had signed. Getting to 5,000 dirhams means going back to that same table and doing it again, and winning the most seats on September 23 doesn’t change who else has to be sitting there.

That’s a small, concrete version of a much bigger question this election raises: what does winning actually hand a party the power to do on its own, and what does it just earn them a seat at a larger table?

More than one house, and only one of them is on the ballot

Morocco’s legislature has two chambers, and only the one up for election on September 23 is directly voted on. The House of Representatives, the 395 seats Part 1 covered, is elected by the public.

The House of Councillors, 120 seats, is filled entirely by indirect election: local councils choose some members, employers’ associations and professional chambers choose others, labor unions choose the rest. Its members serve six-year terms rather than five, so its composition won’t reset alongside this election at all and will keep running on the electoral college chosen back in 2021 for a while yet.

Ordinary legislation has to pass both chambers in a back-and-forth process before it becomes law, and certain organic laws, the ones governing how regions and local authorities actually operate, require the Councillors’ agreement specifically.

The clearest recent example involves adouls, the religious notaries who certify marriages, property sales and other civil contracts in Morocco. The government sent the Councillors a bill overhauling how the profession works, including entry requirements, oversight, discipline. The Councillors rewrote large parts of it, and when the bill went back to the Representatives for a second reading, the lower house restored most of its original language and gave final approval in April 2026.

But that was not the end of it. Ninety-three opposition lawmakers took the law to the Constitutional Court, which in June struck down a block of articles and said several others were incomplete. The government had to write a new bill, submitted in July, just to bring the law into compliance.

What the government proposes, and what still needs a second signature

Morocco’s executive runs through two bodies with almost identical names, and the difference between them is most of what an election actually decides. The Council of Government, chaired by the head of government, handles sectoral policy, ordinary legislation, and the first pass at the budget before it goes to parliament, but it does not control the country’s strategic direction, its territorial administration, or its money.

The Council of Ministers, chaired by the King, sits above it. It sets the state’s broad strategic direction, reviews constitutional and organic legislation, and appoints a defined set of senior officials.

The budget shows how the split works in practice. Each year, before the finance bill even reaches the Council of Government, the economy minister presents its broad direction to the King. Only afterward does the elected government take up the full text and send it to parliament.

The government’s economic agenda also operates inside a target it didn’t choose. In 2022, King Mohammed VI called for 550 billion dirhams in private investment and 500,000 new jobs by 2026. Every budget since has been built to hit that number.

Monetary policy sits furthest outside cabinet reach. Bank Al-Maghrib sets interest rates independently, and its governor is a royal appointment, not a political one, which is how Abdellatif Jouahri ran the bank for over two decades, across several governments that had no say in the matter.

What the outgoing parliament actually did with five years

Many of the people asking for votes on September 23 are the same lawmakers who’ve spent the last five years in the chamber they’re campaigning to return to, and the House of Representatives has already published its own tally of that term.

Over 128 sessions, it processed 237 bills, more than 60% of them with support crossing party lines. Members proposed roughly 14,000 amendments; about 19%, a bit under 2,700, were adopted. On oversight, MPs put close to 4,000 oral questions and more than 32,000 written ones to the government, which answered around 62% of them.

One number in that tally is worth sitting with: lawmakers introduced more than 400 bills of their own, separate from the government’s own legislative agenda. Only 65 were formally advanced into the legislative process, a measure of an individual MP’s actual power to legislate. Most member-initiated bills simply don’t move, regardless of which party proposed them.

A short way to read what you’re hearing this month

None of this means campaign promises are empty, but it does mean they come in different categories. A pledge to create a million jobs assumes private employers will do the hiring; nothing in a legislative session obliges them to. Landing a Moroccan university in the world’s top 500, or climbing a global corruption index, hands the outcome to outside institutions applying their own criteria.

Run any pledge between now and September 23 through the same three questions. Does the party promising this already hold the lever, or does it need a second chamber, or an outside partner to agree? Has this parliament tried it before, and what happened? And if it runs through a negotiation, wages, pensions, subsidies, who else sits at that table, and what reason do they have to say yes?