RABAT — Fatima Ezzahra El Mansouri, Morocco’s first woman to lead a government, saw her cabinet sworn in on Friday with the interior, foreign affairs and justice ministers unchanged and the economy and finance portfolio handed to the man who runs the national football federation.
King Mohammed VI presided over the ceremony at the Royal Palace in Rabat, Xinhua reported, citing the state news agency MAP. Anadolu Agency counted 32 members, ministers and ministers-delegate together, seven of them women, up from six in the outgoing government of Aziz Akhannouch. The finance post went to Fouzi Lekjaa, a former budget minister, as Morocco prepares to co-host the 2030 World Cup with Spain and Portugal.
The cabinet pairs a historic first with a finance minister who, a researcher told Al Jazeera in August, joined her party less than three months before the September 23 election, and with holdovers at interior, foreign affairs and justice.
The four parties behind her, the Authenticity and Modernity Party (PAM), Istiqlal, the Socialist Union of Popular Forces and the Party of Progress and Socialism, hold 207 of the 395 House seats, against 198 needed for a majority, according to Interior Ministry final results that Xinhua relayed. PAM itself won 97. The National Rally of Independents (RNI), which won 66 seats and finished second, is outside the coalition, though it governed alongside PAM and Istiqlal in the outgoing government. Al Jazeera’s election report said PAM and RNI spent the campaign “trading accusations,” and put turnout at 38.08 percent in provisional figures, down from 50.86 percent in 2021.
Lekjaa has headed the Royal Moroccan Football Federation since 2014 and held the budget portfolio as a nonpartisan minister before joining PAM’s Political Bureau, the same report said.
In an earlier Al Jazeera profile, the researcher, Mustafa Ahdar of Ibn Zohr University, said a man who heads the football federation while holding a senior ministerial post “cannot realistically be viewed in the same way as an ordinary citizen entering politics.” Nouh El Harmouzi, head of the Arab Center for Research, credited Lekjaa with experience in “public finance, institutional management and strategic planning” that few senior officials share. Commentators, the profile noted, were increasingly describing the incoming administration as Morocco’s “World Cup government.”
Neither Xinhua nor Anadolu says whether Lekjaa will keep the federation presidency while he runs the finance ministry, and neither quotes El Mansouri on why the interior, foreign affairs and justice ministers stayed. After Monday’s coalition announcement, Xinhua reported that the four parties would propose the candidates for ministerial posts. Who proposed the men who stayed is not on the record.
