Partial results indicate dominant showing by Justice & Development Party in Morocco elections
RABAT,(SANA): The Justice and Development Party is on track to become the largest party in Morocco's new parliament with a dominant showing after two-thirds of the seats were announced by the Interior Ministry Saturday.
The Justice and Development Party has taken over 100 seats, almost twice as many as the next most powerful party, with 282 seats announced out of the 395 up for grabs in the nationwide vote a day earlier.
The opposition Justice and Development Party headed by Abdelillah Benkirane, has already claimed victory in the poll, although the final result has yet to be officially announced.
The second place finisher, Istiqlal, was far behind with 45 seats. The elections were brought forward a year in response to a wave of pro-democracy protests known as the Arab Spring. Morocco's government said 45 percent of registered voters participated in the election, a slight increase over the previous contest in 2007.
Observers from Czech and Council of Europe look at the president of the polling station who show a Ballot as he and Officials and political party's representatives count the ballots in a polling station in Rabat, Morocco, Friday. Moroccans voted for a new parliament Friday in Arab Spring-inspired elections that are facing a boycott by democracy campaigners who say the ruling monarchy isn't committed to real change.
Last month, Morocco's Ennahda Party took 40 percent of the seats in Tunisian elections, the country that started a wave of pro-democracy uprisings across the Middle East after its people overthrew their long-serving dictator.
Like the rest of the region, Morocco was swept by pro-democracy protests decrying widespread corruption, which the king attempted to defuse over the summer by ordering the constitution modified to grant more powers to the Parliament and prime minister and then holding elections a year earlier. Activists, however, have called the moves insincere and clamored for a boycott.
The Islamic party's biggest rivals in Morocco's elections is a coalition of eight liberal, pro-government parties led by Finance Minister Salaheddine Mezouar, which has amassed more than 110 seats, but under the new constitution the party with the most seats gets first crack at forming a new government.
The Islamic party would have to find coalition partners willing to work with them.
In recent years Morocco's Islamists have cultivated an image as honest outsiders battling corruption and seeking to improve services, rather than focusing on moral issues such as whether women wear the Islamic headscarf.
Morocco, a close U.S. ally and popular European tourist destination suffers from high unemployment and widespread poverty.
With dozens of parties running and a complex system of proportional representation, Morocco's parliaments are typically divided up between many parties each with no more than a few dozen seats, requiring complex coalitions that are then dominated by the king.
There are almost 13.5 million registered voters in this North African kingdom of 32 million, though it is estimated that there are 22 million people of voting age.
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