Youth Frustration and Migration Shadow Morocco’s Election

Migration and the frustrations of young people hang over elections in Morocco on Wednesday.

In the last year, young people have been at the center of two major national crises: the 2025 Gen Z protests and the sudden, deadly mass crossing this summer into Ceuta, a sliver of the European Union on Morocco’s northern coast.

The issues that drove those crises are at the forefront of the legislative elections in the North African country, a constitutional monarchy. Unemployment is high, schools and hospitals are crumbling, and the space for public expression is shrinking.

On Wednesday, 27 parties are on the ballot, with candidates competing for 395 seats in the lower house of Parliament. Voting centers opened at 8 a.m. local time and will close at 7 p.m., with the first results expected on Thursday.

Two centrist parties that have been part of the governing coalition since 2021, the National Rally of Independents, and the Authenticity and Modernity Party, are the front-runners, according to an analysis by the Moroccan Institute for Policy Analysis. The parties have made jobs and the economy the central themes of their campaign, but there has been little enthusiasm about their pitch.

Will young people vote?

King Mohammed VI and Morocco’s government are betting that co-hosting the 2030 soccer World Cup, along with Spain and Portugal, will inject investment and vigor into the economy, but that possibility appears to have done little to lessen popular disenchantment.

Young Moroccans have had an ambivalent relationship both with electoral politics and with the World Cup. People aged 18 to 24 make up 12 percent of the population but just 4 percent of the 15.8 million registered voters.

In October last year, thousands of young people protested the deaths of eight women at a dilapidated hospital in Agadir, a city on the Atlantic coast. Their slogans contrasted the millions that the government was spending on the World Cup with the dire state of public services.

The protests, inspired by similar youth movements in Nepal and in Madagascar, began after a loosely organized group known as Gen Z 212 demanded that Prime Minister Aziz Akhannouch step down.

Instead, the government responded with a crackdown that left at least three people dead and produced hundreds of arrests. In the wake of the protests, the space for public expression shrank even more, with the arrests of popular musicians and artists who critiqued the government.

The protests “clearly exposed the extent of the gap between some young people and political institutions,” said Mohamed Al Ghafri, a Moroccan human-rights activist. There is, he added, “an accumulated sense that political participation is futile.”

What is the role of the economy?

Morocco’s economy grew by a fairly robust 4.9 percent last year, driven in part by World Cup spending, according to figures from the World Bank.

But unemployment is high — 13 percent last year — and about one-third of young Moroccans are jobless. About one-fifth of the work force is considered underemployed, in jobs that do not match their qualifications.

“This campaign is fought almost entirely on economic ground: jobs, unemployment, health, education and purchasing power,” said Rachid Aourraz, co-founder of the Moroccan Institute for Policy Analysis. “Parties and voters now care more about the cost of living than political questions.”

While headlines trumpet lower inflation, consumer prices remain high after increases over several years, and energy prices are expected to rise, according to figures from the International Monetary Fund.

Successive years of drought and extreme weather have added further strain.

What about migration?

While parties have made promises to fix the broad issues driving migration, few address it head-on.

More than 70,000 migrants rushed into Ceuta — a tiny Spanish exclave squeezed between Morocco and the Mediterranean — over a couple of days in July. The authorities were overwhelmed at the usually heavily guarded border, setting off a humanitarian crisis. More than 141 people died, most of them Moroccans.

The surge caused a political crisis in Spain, but Moroccan politicians have largely avoided talking about it. No party has raised any questions about accountability or demanded an inquiry into the deaths, said Myriam Cherti, a researcher at the Center on Migration, Policy and Society at the University of Oxford.

“It has become kind of an emotional reference point of the campaign without producing direct or distinct policy debates around migration,” Ms. Cherti said.

Remittances from émigrés are an important part of Morocco’s economy, representing for many people the possibility of a more promising life abroad.

“Migration is the emotion of the campaign, but never directly part of its substance,” Ms. Cherti said.