Renowned straightforward and audacious, Abdellatif Ouahbi, the new secretary-general of the Authenticity and Modernity Party (PAM) may reorient the line of the party that has been in crisis for several months.
Was it the lawyer or the politician speaking? No sooner had Abdellatif Ouahbi taken the helm of the PAM on February 9 he again called for the release of the Hirak detainees. This demand, he had placed it at the heart of his campaign. “He is an atypical character, he stands out,” enthuses former MP Mehdi Bensaïd.
The calm after the storm: the campaign for the post of secretary-general was not easy …
A veteran of Moroccan politics, Member of Parliament for Taroudant, where he was born, in 1961, he chaired the PAM group in the House of Representatives. If he was able to win, it is also because he managed to get valuable support, including that of Fatima Zahra Mansouri, the former president of the municipality of Marrakech, who heads the National Council of the party and is very popular within the party’s base. Is the duo called upon to embody the renewal of the party?
Skilful lawyer
PAM activists wonder: Could Ouahbi turn to the Islamists of the Justice and Development Party (PJD)? “There is no longer a red line,” reply the organisation’s hierarchy. However, the idea is far from meeting unanimity as the opposition between the two parties has dominated the political life of the kingdom for a decade.
A reorientation of the party, this would correspond well to the “Ouahbi style”. The man is known to be direct and frank, even audacious. A few days before the PAM congress, he did not hesitate to severely criticise its direction in an interview with Médias24: “As soon as I joined the political bureau, I began to fight for it to win its independence from the Makhzen. “
At the same time, he types on Ilyas El Omari, the former leader of the PAM: “The state was pulling the strings behind his person. On Ouahbi, one of his supporters says that “he is an iconoclast”. Instead, others accuse him of being demagogic and of being “ideologized”. “He is an Islamo-leftist,” blurted out a detractor.
In fact, the PAM has aggregated three types of profiles: liberal technocrats, notables and former progressives, who have moved from opposition to the regime to opposition to Islamists. Ouahbi belongs to the third category. Coming from a left-wing family, he joined the social democratic movement, then got closer to Ahmed Benjelloun, the brother of a martyr of the Moroccan left, Omar Benjelloun, assassinated by Islamists in the 1970s. But will he succeed in establishing his authority on a party which draws its strength from the notables? A savvy politician, he knows he must now have to adapt his speech. A week after his election, rumours of defection are already being heard.
At the head of a law firm in Rabat for twenty years or so, the man is also a skilled lawyer who does not shy away from sensitive cases. He was the one who defended businessmen Anas Houir Alami and Mohamed Ali Ghannam, sentenced in February to prison terms and fines in connection with the Madinat Badès real estate project affair in Al Hoceima. He also knows the security apparatus for having pleaded in sensitive cases (he has defended Salafist detainees who fell under anti-terrorism laws). And he represented the state when the family of one of the two Scandinavian tourists murdered in December 2018 demanded compensation from the public authorities.
His new hobbyhorse? The return of Moroccans from Syria, in particular the children of detainees in Syria and Iraq. Ouahbi wants a parliamentary commission to be created and to meet them.
In other words, this man, who has years of experience and expertise and who proposes to legalize abortion, is not afraid of anything.
*Article published in French by “Jeune Afrique”