Rabat – Nabila Mounib, the Secretary-General of the United Socialist Party (PSU), said on Thursday her party aims to be part of the opposition, rather than the government, when the October elections come to an end.
In her interview with CNN Arabic, she added that the Federation of the Democratic Left (FGD), of which the PSU is a member, has been and will be working towards amending the constitution in ways that are critical for Morocco’s political development.
“[The constitution in its current form] is not democratic, despite the benefits of its creation,” Mounib said to CNN’s inquiry on the FGD’s goal revise the 5-year-old constitution that was approved by a referendum of the Moroccan people.
“It did not outline a clear separation of powers, it did not truly stipulate the characteristics of the parliamentary monarchy, and it did not link responsibility to accountability,” she said.
The FGD efforts in the opposition will “build the next station in Morocco, consisting of clearer conditions for democracy and will increase pressure until a huge political front for these revisions is formed,” Mounib explained.
The secretary-general added that the federation will fight efforts by officials to squander state funds on luxury cars and expensive retirement funds for ministers and legislators.
To criticism of the leftist parties that accuse them of being utopian or encouraging of political outbidding, Mounib says “the rest of the parties are the ones who adopt utopian programs, and then abandon them. The greatest example is of the current government, which did not achieve the level of development it had promised.”
“The left’s platform consists of reforms larger than numbers, because it is not possible to achieve the numbers without political change.”
In Article I, the constitution states that the Kingdom has been established on the separation and balance of powers and supports “good governance and the correlation between the responsibility for and the rendering of accounts.”
In 2011, the PSU boycotted the parliamentary elections. Since then, Mounib, who is also a professor of endocrinology at the University of Hassan II in Casablanca, has gained recognition for heading a delegation to Stockholm that successfully convinced Sweden to abandon plans to recognize the Polisario-led Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic.
The PSU’s work within the federation, which includes the leftist Socialist Democratic Vanguard Party (PADS) and the National Ittihadi Congress (CNI), will not mandate that all policy efforts be stopped as the needed constitutional reforms are carried out, according to the party’s leader.
