In the Moroccan political scene, some insist on repeating the same mistakes, deluded into believing that rearranging the cards will change the rules of the game. Fouad Abdelmoumeni, who presents himself as one of the voices advocating for change, is, in reality, merely recycling failure into new rhetorical forms, manipulating concepts and alignments in search of a magical formula that pleases everyone without offering any actionable substance.
In his latest writings, Abdelmoumeni attempts to convince the audience that the fall of the Justice and Development Party (PJD) in 2021 was not merely a result of Saadeddine Othmani signing the normalization agreement but rather an extension of a trajectory that began during Benkirane’s era. However, this argument is nothing more than an effort to soften the blow of defeat by introducing a more abstract interpretation that transcends the immediate political moment, placing the party in a larger context than its actual responsibility. Conversely, it propagates a more dangerous idea: that the problem lies not in the party’s failure per se but in its choice of the “change through the authority’s approval” strategy, as if change could only be feasible through a different approach that remains grounded in the same illusions.
Yet, the core of the discourse does not stop at criticizing the experience of the PJD; it further attempts to reshape a hybrid political equation, centered on an alliance between Islamic, leftist, Amazigh forces, and the regime itself. This proposition, which at first glance appears as a call to build a historical bloc, is in reality merely an expression of an intellectual crisis that fails to provide a clear vision, settling instead for attempts to gather contradictions in the hope that this mixture will yield a project with distinct characteristics. Fundamentally, it does not differ much from the discourse promoted by figures like Hamid El Mahdaoui or Hicham Girandu, where the goal becomes convincing everyone that change is possible by aggregating forces, regardless of the fundamental contradictions that separate them and cementing the concept of conflicts within the ruling square!
In the end, what Abdelmoumeni presents is not a genuine political project but rather an attempt to recycle a discourse that has lost its validity. It is an exploitative use of the idea of a “critical mass,” without a precise understanding of what this mass means or how it can be realized in a reality dominated by considerations of interests and delicate balances. Between a discourse that reproduces the errors of Islamists, a leftist ambition that can no longer provide alternatives, and opportunism that seeks to involve the regime in an absurd equation, the result remains the same: the reproduction of failure, but with a more ornate style.
