Rabat – Scrutinizing the language of several parties campaigning for the September 4, 2015 local and regional elections, one wonders whether it is the political register that has shrunk to a dramatically shallow scope or it is imagination and innovation that have thinned to a severe tragic deficit. One also wonders whether words still refer to the same concepts and hold the same meanings for everyone or their semantic tenure changes according to who is saying them and when they are saying them. In fact, unless one admits that most parties are but copies and clones of each other, one would have difficulties explaining the overlap and close similarity of their discourse. The political gentry in Morocco seems to have lost imagination, specificity and eloquence.
The recurring terms in most so-called programs are reform, recovery and protection of dignity, fighting corruption and protecting citizens from it, improving the quality of governance, local and sustainable development, extending services to the protection of the environment, creating cultural and sports opportunities to youth, tending to the concerns of youth and promoting cultural activities for the jobless and the handicapped, introducing and reinforcing participative management and decision making approaches, selecting the most competent, dedicated and honest candidates, favoring candidacies of conscious young men and women, promoting transparency. Except from offering training sessions to candidates in case they are elected, hardly does any of the parties explain how exactly it intends to carry out what it promises or how to fund its actions.
In addition to the TV appearances scheduled for all running parties and their own newspapers for those who have one, most parties have websites to relay their messages. PJD has launched an electronic online audio visual service through their website to broadcast the campaign events of the party in real time. Anyone with a laptop, a mobile phone or a tablet can thus attend their events virtually wherever they are. The websites of the other parties are more classical, of a rather conservative design and much less engaging. The same can be said about other social media in which PJD is more aggressive.
Overall, discourse remains too general and too flat to provide sufficient arguments for the criticism each party levels against the others to be convincing or to exclude any of them from its catchment. While they indulge in mutual accusations of poor probity and earnestness, those who have already had an experience running cities brag about their experience and promise they have learnt to do better, as to those who never have, they boast about being clean handed and about bringing new experiences and new projects.
The major difference is, therefore, not in the propositions or in the programs nor is it in the choice of words or arguments but in the communication packages. Parties such as Istiqlal, USFP, PAM, and PJD, perhaps also because of their financial capacities, their acute awareness and skillful use of the power of advanced information and communication technology and their internal electoral mechanisms, have produced campaign audio visuals in which the presence of figures of the nationalist movement, militant chants from the resistance era and quotations of charismatic leaders of the decolonization struggle are used to confirm a heritage, link to a tradition and establish a stock of trust. Parties which deal in religion or with a deeper anchor in Islamic ideologies put forward speakers with prayer marks on their foreheads and a more intense and higher frequency use of religious words and theologically overloaded figures of speech.
A unifying thread of all the electoral campaigns is the systematic explicit referencing of all arguments with royal statements, all propositions with the renewal of the indefectible allegiance to the monarchy and all promises with the binding principles of the constitution.
The literature disseminated by FDG, however, seems to stand out as analytical, more measured and more modernist. Unlike the long lists of promises not meant to be honored presented by most parties, FDG proposes a program that seems to be grounded in a systematic rational analysis of the socioeconomic and political situation of the country. This is certainly no coincidence. In fact, the Federation of the Democratic Left – which groups three former political organizations, namely PADS – The Party of the Democratic and Socialist avant-garde, CNI – the Ittihadi National Congress , and PSU – The Unified Socialist Party speaks the language of its leadership and its membership. In fact, FDG is a crucible of individuals with scientific, engineering, business, economics, law, political science and arts backgrounds whose minds are used to the analysis of complex systems, team work, evaluation, planning, optimizing resources, problem solving and implementation of optimal solutions. A huge disadvantage of this party is paradoxically what makes its strength, specifically, its discourse is not populistic and may not be appealing to the vast majority of voters used to the comfort of simplistic language and dreamlike promises that commit neither those who make them nor those who buy them. Another disadvantage of this party is that it is of a too recent creation to be widely known and to have contingents of militants comparable to those of its adversaries.
This is only day two of the official life span of the campaign, it will certainly have changed features over and over again by the time it expires.
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Morocco World News’ editorial policy
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