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. 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.
FEW EVENTS have been a bigger indictment of King Muhammad VI’s rule than “Throne Day” on July 30th.
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. In any case, the real decision-makers do not appear on the ballot. Many Moroccans prefer to vote with their feet. In the vacuum, conspiracy theories multiply. 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. 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.
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. 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.
Security forces were diverted from their border duties to attend the elaborate Throne Day ceremonies, according to some. 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. Today they are so feeble that few Moroccans could say what a parliamentary election on September 23rd is about.
