An Election Can Change the Government Without Touching Power

Morocco has held an election.

That sentence is true. It is not yet the whole truth.

On September 23, Moroccans voted for 395 members of parliament. Twenty-seven parties competed. They argued about jobs, wages, housing, education and healthcare—the ordinary matters through which politics either serves people or rehearses speeches at them.

Yet Morocco is a constitutional monarchy in which the king still holds significant political, military and religious authority. The winning party can form a government. It does not inherit the entire house.

The ballot can rearrange the furniture while someone else keeps several important keys.

This does not make voting useless. Parliament legislates. Governments administer public services. Elections can widen representation, punish incompetence and force neglected problems into public view.

But democracy should not be measured only by whether citizens were given paper, ink and a queue.

It should also be measured by how much power enters the polling station with them.

Before this election, only 15.8 million of Morocco’s 26.7 million voting-age citizens were registered. Reuters reported that merely three percent of people aged 18 to 24 were registered, despite young Moroccans carrying much of the country’s frustration over unemployment and limited opportunity.

That gap cannot be blamed on one cause. Registration hurdles matter. Disillusionment matters. So does the suspicion that changing officeholders may not change the boundaries within which office can act.

Political apathy is often condemned as laziness. Sometimes it is a diagnosis.

Morocco is hardly alone. Across the world, republics and monarchies conduct elections while unelected institutions, wealthy patrons, party godfathers, security establishments and foreign interests quietly determine what elected leaders may touch.

Democracy can be properly dressed and still be underfed.

The answer is not to abandon the ballot. Empty polling stations rarely frighten entrenched power; they simply make its arithmetic easier.

The answer is to demand that representation carry authority, responsibility and consequences. Whoever exercises power should be visible enough to question, limited enough to restrain and removable enough to fear failure.

An election is not democracy’s graduation ceremony.

It is merely the day democracy is asked to show how much power it actually possesses.

Abraham Ikongshul Ashindortiang

Sources

Associated Press: Morocco’s 2026 parliamentary election

Reuters: Moroccan parties confront youth disenchantment