AustralianInvestor, here is an article I found when doing some reseach on Morocco's political situation last year. I'm not certain of the source, but I think it's pretty accurate. The elections are due in September by the way.
Oct. 2006
Had elections been held last year 47 percent of Moroccans would have voted for the Justice and Development Party (PJD), the country’s only legal Islamist political movement. This year, just over 45 percent would vote in their favor. The crucial question, however, is how Moroccans will actually vote next year when legislative elections are held for the first time since 2002.
An idea as to what the answer might be has been provided by an opinion poll conducted at the beginning of the year and recently leaked to the press. The survey of 1,500 Moroccans by LMS-CSA Marketing and Sondages, a consultancy linked to the US Republican Party, shows that if the Moroccan elections next year are free and fair the Islamists will win hands down.
By taking just under half the vote, the PJD would easily defeat the governing Socialists, who would win 16.41 percent, and the historical nationalist Istiqlal party, which would take just 10.76 percent of ballots, according to the poll findings.
Though the poll has merely confirmed pre-existing suspicions that the Islamists are on track to take power next year if nothing is done to stop them, it has added new fuel to a debate that is alarming traditional politicians and the North African kingdom’s business elite. So much so, in fact, that Aboubakr Jamai, the director of the Le Journal weekly, warned recently that there is a risk of “other parties coming together to form a single block, or, worse still, that they will look the other way if the regime (of King Mohammed VI) decides to rig the elections.”
That is what happened in 2002, at least in the view of Jamaa Moatssim, who was at that time the Islamist party’s campaign chief. In an article in the At Tajdid newspaper, which is closely connected to the PJD, he alleged that the list of women candidates from the PJD had been the most voted nationwide but ultimately ended up obtaining less seats than their rivals. And, he said, the injustices did not end there.
In the last elections, the Interior Ministry had prevented the PJD from running in 45 percent of constituencies, severely crippling their chances of winning the election. They nonetheless came in third, behind the Socialists and Istiqlal, and in the areas where they were permitted to run they often took by far the largest number of votes.
There are signs that a repeat of the irregularities that surrounded the 2002 elections could be in store next year. Morocco recently held a partial election to the Senate in which the PJD did not win a single seat. “The Interior Ministry pressured us to prevent us from presenting candidates in all constituencies,” the PJD’s leader, Saad el Othmani, declared.
An Islamist victory is probably less of a concern than a rigged election - remember Algeria in 1992?
