The reality of Morocco is not what its regime sells

BarcelonaThe Moroccan regime sells itself as a success story, a country that has become a regional power, with a privileged dialogue with the EU, the United States, and Israel, and capable of organizing major sporting events such as the 2030 World Cup, together with Spain, for which it is building what will be the largest stadium in the world, with 115,000 seats. Seen from the outside, in recent years Morocco has made a great leap in infrastructure, with the high-speed train between Tangier and Casablanca as its spearhead, and has experienced strong economic growth thanks to foreign investment in strategic sectors such as green hydrogen or fertilizers (thanks to the phosphates of the Western Sahara). But this prosperity is not reaching the population. Salaries are low and jobs are precarious, and in no way is the country capable of absorbing the workforce represented by the youth, as World Bank reports state. This is even affecting the fertility rate, which has dropped to 1.97 children per woman (in the 60s it was 7.2, and in the 90s 3.3), which, even so, is practically double that of Spain (1.1).

If we add to this the effects of political repression, the cocktail that pushes young people to emigrate is served. The journalist Ali Lmrabet dissects in his article the functioning of the Alawite regime and the feared makhzen, which is the deep state that occupies the structures of power beyond the government of the day and which is directly connected to the monarchy of Mohammed VI. These state apparatuses, an authentic "patriotic police," in the words of Lmrabet, have perfected over the last decades the capacity for population control thanks to powerful intelligence services and the massive use of technology that often comes from Israel, as is the case with the Pegasus program, with which they supposedly infected the mobile phone of the Spanish Prime Minister, Pedro Sánchez, and other ministers. The social protests of recent years have been dismantled either by buying off their leaders or by imprisoning them. When the demonstrations of young Moroccans broke out last year, the movement called GenZ 212, at least 6,000 people were arrested, of whom 2,000 remain in prison. The feeling in Morocco is that there is no alternative to the regime and that the parties that run in the elections do not have any real capacity to change things.

This reality must make us reflect in two directions. On one hand, to better understand the motives that push so many young and not-so-young Moroccans to want to leave their country. And on the other, to rethink what relationship we want to have with this country in which the EU has outsourced the control of the southern border. There are no magic solutions, but what must be clear is that what has been done so far has served to shore up the regime and enrich a caste at the expense of the majority of the population. Contrary to what one might think, and as the expert Hein de Haas explained in Saturday's newspaper, the improvement of economic conditions alone does not stop migratory flows. People, and even more so if they have minimal education, will always fight to try to have a better life.