Fátima Ezahara el Mansouri becomes the first female prime minister of Morocco

Fátima Ezahara el Mansouri, Minister of Urban Planning and Housing and mayor of Marrakesh, at the age of 50, has become the first woman to occupy the head of the Government in Morocco. On Tuesday afternoon, King Mohamed VI appointed Al Mansouri as prime minister, coordinator of the collegiate leadership of the Party of Authenticity and Modernity (PAM), a center-right party that won the legislative elections held last Wednesday with 97 of the 395 seats up for grabs.

The new head of the Executive must form a coalition government with a majority. Predictably, it will have its partners in the previous legislature: the National Rally of Independents (RNI, conservative) of the outgoing prime minister, Aziz Ajanuch, and the historic Istiqlal Party (Independence, conservative nationalist). The RNI has been relegated to second place, with 66 seats (36 less than five years ago), and Istiqlal will have 65 deputies, but also with a decline of 16 seats in the House of Representatives, the only elected Parliament.

The monarch of the Alawite dynasty has opted for the leader with the greatest political weight of the PAM, backed by two terms as mayor of the fifth most populated city in the Maghreb country and by a ministerial mandate on areas of citizen interest. On the other hand, he has ruled out Fouzi Lekjaa, a candidate presented in the campaign as the PAM favorite. Lekjaa, Minister of Budgets in the previous coalition, president of the Moroccan Football Federation and national coordinator for the 2030 World Cup (co-organized with Spain and Portugal), entered party politics just two months ago to participate in the elections.

A woman will thus be at the head of the so-called World Cup Government, responsible for managing an investment program of around 20 billion euros in sports facilities and transport infrastructure. The jurist Mansouri, who practiced law after graduating in Law in her country and pursuing postgraduate studies in France, comes from a family of notables from Marrakech. It has real estate interests in the former imperial city that have been tainted by accusations of influence peddling launched from the opposition by the Justice and Development Party (moderate Islamist).

The new prime minister made herself known in politics by winning the mayoralty of her hometown for the PAM between 2009 and 2015, a position she regained in 2021. For two years she has coordinated the collegiate leadership of her party with a profile of determined character that does not shy away from political debate in Parliament. Divorced and with two children, she maintains great secrecy about her private life. She marks a milestone after being appointed as the first head of Government in the history of Morocco, and the second in the Maghreb countries after Najla Boudem, who held that position in Tunisia between 2021 and 2023.

Fátima Mansouri has assured that her party is open to dialogue “without red lines” with all political forces, although she maintains a frontal confrontation with the Islamist leader of the PJD, Abdelilá Benkirán, prime minister between 2011 and 2016, in the dispute for the center-right political space from a secular perspective.