In Morocco, scandal is weakening the king’s shaky rule

FEW EVENTS have been a bigger indictment of King Muhammad VI’s rule than “Throne Day” on July 30th. The Moroccan king’s motorcade sped along an empty highway from his beach hideaway at Mdiq, in the north of the country, to a ceremony where members of the elite kissed his hand. Heading in the opposite direction, the poor flocked to Ceuta, the nearby Spanish enclave, as news spread on social media that the gates were open to Europe. By foot, road, rail and dinghy they came, until more than 70,000, most of them Moroccans oblivious to the annual oath of allegiance to their monarch, had risked their lives to flee Muhammad’s realm. About 100 died trying.King Muhammad VI (Facebook/Tetouan Regional Council)On paper, Muhammad’s kingdom is a rare Arab model of stability and modernisation. It boasts a thriving car industry, is expanding its high-speed railway and has built the Mediterranean’s largest port. It attracts foreign investment, cultivates close relations with Europe and America and has developed a growing arms industry thanks to its ties with Israel. Morocco’s monarchy has endured for four centuries. The succession is settled. A good number of Moroccans still believe the king, who bears the title Commander of the Faithful, is endowed with sacred authority.But after 27 years, many more of his 36m subjects have lost faith in their future under his rule. The king invests in showpieces such as football stadia for the 2030 World Cup, but neglects hospitals and schools. Morocco ranked near the bottom of a recent global survey of schooling for 15-year-olds. Nearly a third of young Moroccans are unemployed. And increasingly the king’s security chiefs resort to repression. They have neutered a once-critical press. Critics are prosecuted for alleged sex crimes and hauled off to jail. Political parties once promised change. Today they are so feeble that few Moroccans could say what a parliamentary election on September 23rd is about. In any case, the real decision-makers do not appear on the ballot. Many Moroccans prefer to vote with their feet.The king is part of the problem. Muhammad was always a recluse. He fled years ago with his kickboxing friend, Aboubakr Abu Azaitar, to Morocco’s north to escape his father’s old court in the capital. He is only 63 years old but is ailing and absent. Those who have met him recently describe a visibly unwell monarch: blue hands, clubbed fingers, puffy eyes concealed behind sunglasses. He labours over short speeches and rarely travels within his kingdom, let alone abroad. As crises multiply—the uprising in the north in 2016, the earthquake that left hundreds of thousands homeless in 2023 and the recent exodus towards Ceuta—officials wait for a lead from the palace but are met with silence. After Ceuta, no senior official offered condolences or an explanation.In the vacuum, conspiracy theories multiply. According to some, security forces were diverted from their border duties to attend the elaborate Throne Day ceremonies. Others claim that Donald Trump and Binyamin Netanyahu are using Morocco to punish Spain for opposing their wars on Iran and Gaza. The more fanciful say Moroccan nationalists, emboldened by American and Israeli support, are preparing to confront Spain over its enclaves in the north. Pundits wonder whether Morocco might be using migration to put pressure on the EU to increase its subsidies. But the theory that carries most weight among insiders is that the king’s security chiefs are punishing Spain for harbouring a whistleblower who possesses some of the state’s darkest secrets.The claims are hard to verify. But according to published accounts and sources within the makhzen (storehouse), as the state calls itself, a mole working inside the General Directorate of Territorial Surveillance (DGST, to use its French acronym), Morocco’s internal-intelligence agency fled with a roster of suspects that Morocco’s goons used Israeli spyware to track. From an operations room known as Bureau 21, which apparently included Israeli agents, they hacked mobile phones and CCTV cameras, spying on prominent figures in Morocco and in Europe. Some say their target bank included the king himself. After fleeing to Tunisia, then France, the whistleblower—codenamed Safir, or diplomat—arrived in Spain, which offered him protection.Moroccan officials feel betrayed by the help Spain offered Safir. But defections to Europe have been mounting as the ailing king’s hold weakens and Morocco’s security agencies jostle for position ahead of the succession. The deepest rift is between the old guard under Fouad Ali el-Himma, the king’s childhood friend, chief adviser and gatekeeper, and the king’s son and designated successor, Hassan, and his mother, Salma. After the king and Salma divorced in 2018, Mr Himma—at the king’s instigation—kept Salma under quasi-house arrest. When her son becomes king, Salma will be queen mother, and, Mr Himma fears, exact her revenge by chasing him out of Morocco. Tensions are likely to build as the moment of reckoning with the succession nears.