Something changes when a woman occupies an office men have treated as their natural inheritance. Fatima Ezzahra El Mansouri’s appointment on 29 September 2026 makes that change visible in Morocco. For women whose competence is routinely scrutinised, the pleasure is neither naïve nor trivial.
But the woman forming a government and the woman labouring in the fields, raising children without pay and denied an equal share of her inheritance encounter power differently. Representation changes who governs; emancipation changes what all women have the power to do. That distinction shifts our attention from PM Mansouri’s gender to the politics of the centre-right Party of Authenticity and Modernity (PAM), which she leads. Will its programme redistribute the resources and rights on which women’s freedom depends?
The history beneath the headline
Calling women’s leadership foreign to Morocco requires forgetting its history. Historian Osire Glacier documents women’s authority long before the contemporary premiership. Kenza al Awrabiya, the Amazigh mother of Idris II, helped secure the Idrisid dynasty, founded in the late eighth century in what is now Morocco. Zaynab al Nafzawiyya influenced eleventh-century Almoravid politics around Aghmat, near Marrakech. Sayyida al Hurra governed Tétouan, a city in northern Morocco, during the sixteenth century. Khnata bint Bakkar intervened in eighteenth-century dynastic politics.
Across the region, Dihya is remembered as an Amazigh queen who led resistance to the Arab conquest in the Aurès, in present-day Algeria, during the late seventh century. Tuareg oral tradition remembers Tin Hinan as a queen and founding ancestress of noble lineages in the Ahaggar, in present-day southern Algeria.
These histories expose how male authority is made to appear natural. Fatima Mernissi’s The Forgotten Queens of Islam challenges that selective memory. Colonialism also reorganised authority: French Protectorate administrators reshaped customary courts around imperial priorities. What survives as tradition can carry the history of political intervention.
Religious interpretation can give exclusion another claim to permanence. Islamist and other conservative opponents invoke this hadith against women’s political authority:
«لَنْ يُفْلِحَ قَوْمٌ وَلَّوْا أَمْرَهُمُ امْرَأَةً»
Usually translated as saying that a people governed by a woman will not prosper, it becomes a prohibition irrespective of her competence. Asma Lamrabet, a Moroccan Islamic feminist thinker, questions turning a narration linked to Persia’s dynastic succession into a universal ban. She reads it against the Qur’anic Queen of Sheba, whose judgement demonstrates capable leadership. Her argument contests male authority’s claim to divine necessity.
PAM’s promises and its record
Women have long contested how authority is distributed within the family. Fatima Sadiqi documents the Union de l’Action Féminine’s 1992 million-signature campaign to reform the Moudawana, Morocco’s family code. The 2004 reform abolished wives’ duty of obedience but retained unequal inheritance and exceptions to the marriage age of eighteen. Proposals announced in December 2024 left fundamental equality demands unresolved. In October 2025, more than sixty civil society organisations and public figures joined to call for comprehensive reform. Rights in Morocco have advanced through organised demands, not the gender of an officeholder.
PAM, a centre-right party founded in 2008, advocates social modernisation and positions itself against the Islamist Justice and Development Party (PJD). It entered government in 2021 alongside the National Rally of Independents and conservative nationalist Istiqlal. Opposition to Islamist conservatism, however, does not itself entail reforming the laws and economic conditions that subordinate women.
PAM’s 2026 programme promises improved widow pensions, childcare, safe transport, a women’s enterprise fund and labour inspection. The commitments leave inheritance equality, abortion reform and decriminalisation of consensual same sex relations unaddressed. Mansouri called for banning child marriage without exceptions in 2024, yet PAM’s electoral programme omits that commitment. Employment can support independence, but a wage does not cancel criminalisation or unequal property rights. The programme leaves those constraints intact.
Even PAM’s narrow promise to increase women’s access to paid work confronts a record of failure. The government promised to raise women’s economic activity rate above 30 per cent. Morocco’s statistics agency, HCP, recorded 20.9 percent in 2021 and 19 percent in 2025. That leaves 81 per cent of women aged 15 and over outside the labour force, compared with 31.5 per cent of men. Women’s unpaid work nevertheless sustains households. As a governing coalition since 2021, PAM shares responsibility for the policies that failed to reverse this decline. Promising 21.2 percent by 2031 requires explaining what will change beyond the deadline.
Mansouri’s housing record reveals the distance between reconstruction and recovery. As Marrakech mayor and national housing minister, her portfolio included earthquake reconstruction. Yet in June 2026, Al Haouz survivors protesting in Marrakech reported still living in damaged homes at risk of collapse, nearly three years after the earthquake devastated the High Atlas. For women managing care in unsafe housing, delay narrows possibilities for work or study. An unfinished house can become an unfinished independence.
Moreover, PAM must form a coalition government because it lacks a parliamentary majority. Istiqlal’s conditions for joining the PAM-led government include defending a socially conservative conception of the family and its values. Such alliances protect established family hierarchies. Protection must include a woman’s ability to leave a marriage, raise children independently or refuse the family’s expectations. Support must not entrench dependence. PAM could also govern with parties from the established left, including the Socialist Union of Popular Forces (USFP) and the Party of Progress and Socialism (PPS). Both have participated in previous governments. Their participation would not itself guarantee a feminist programme: the question is which commitments Mansouri’s government would adopt
Within Morocco’s political landscape, the Alliance de la Gauche offers a substantive point of comparison because of its explicit commitments to legal equality and social justice. The Alliance brings together the Unified Socialist Party (PSU) and the Federation of the Democratic Left. Its programme pledges to abolish child marriage without exceptions, eliminate ta’sib (which can assign residual inheritance to male relatives) and comprehensively reform inheritance law. These commitments would challenge legal mechanisms that sustain women’s dependence. Whatever coalition Mansouri forms, advancing equality requires confronting those mechanisms, rather than merely broadening the government’s political composition.
For left parties to make a substantive difference, their commitments must extend to how care is funded and shared. Nancy Fraser’s analysis of capitalism’s care contradiction shows how economies depend on care while undermining the resources sustaining it. Cuts and inadequate services transfer obligations into households, often onto women. A feminist left must confront that transfer and defend bodily autonomy, rather than expect class justice automatically to produce it.
When representation preserves hierarchy
Morocco’s first female prime minister follows earlier examples of women’s leadership in other Muslim-majority countries, including Pakistan, Bangladesh and Tunisia. Their experience challenges religious arguments against women’s leadership, but also the assumption that representation guarantees emancipation. In 2025, women’s labour force participation in Pakistan stood at 24 percent and 38.6 percent in Bangladesh, against roughly 80 percent for men. In Tunisia, Najla Bouden’s 2021 appointment accompanied an authoritarian concentration of power. Patriarchy can accommodate a woman at the summit while preserving the laws, economic dependencies and hierarchies that subordinate women below.
Emancipation requires changing how power is organised, exercised and distributed.
Women’s leadership can also lend credibility to conservative projects. Italy’s Giorgia Meloni government allowed anti-abortion groups access to counselling centres. This risks exposing women seeking abortions to pressure against their decision. Japan’s Sanae Takaichi defends compulsory shared marital surnames and male imperial succession. Their ascent to power leaves those constraints on other women intact.
And the rise of Germany’s Alice Weidel, who raises two sons with a Sri Lankan-born female partner while leading the far-right AfD, which opposes same sex marriage and expanded adoption rights and demands tighter immigration restrictions, is another example. Her presence makes the party appear more open than the freedoms it would extend to others. Rwanda’s former Minister of Family and Women’s Development under the interim government in 1994, Pauline Nyiramasuhuko, was convicted of genocidal crimes, including responsibility for rape. Together, these cases expose the danger of treating gender as a guarantee of solidarity.
Patriarchy survives through the incentives and penalties that organise social life.
Feminist sociologist Deniz Kandiyoti’s concept of “patriarchal bargains” explains how women seek security within patriarchal systems, sometimes enforcing the restrictions they navigate. A mother may limit her daughter’s choices because she fears the consequences of disobedience. For women in political office, the question is whether they use their authority to dismantle the conditions that make obedience a price of security.
What freedom requires
Which women are recognised as entitled to freedom? Kimberlé Crenshaw’s intersectionality challenges separating gender from racialisation. Class, disability, sexuality and citizenship shape whether a woman can exercise a right. A professional’s independence may depend on another woman’s underpaid domestic labour.
Feminism must confront that unequal distribution of freedom.
Poverty makes institutional failure harder to escape. In 2025, nine maternal deaths at Agadir’s Hassan II Regional Hospital prompted demands for accountability. Women unable to purchase private care depend on public provision. In Morocco, rural Amazigh women face barriers to services and information in their language; agricultural workers have described low pay and sexual violence. Celebrating Amazigh queens means little if living Amazigh women cannot reach a hospital or work safely.
Dependence is also enforced through law. Morocco’s article 490 criminalises sex outside marriage, exposing sexually active unmarried women, including single mothers, to prosecution. Single and divorced mothers need independent parental rights, children born outside marriage can be denied paternal maintenance and inheritance. Article 489 criminalises same sex relations, threatening lesbian, bisexual and queer women’s intimacy. Transgender women lack legal gender recognition and face policing of their gender expression under Article 483, whose prohibition of public indecency can be applied even when no nudity is involved.
Safety requires rights that survive disapproval.
Rights also require that institutions be accessible for women. In its 2017 review of Morocco, the UN disability committee identified inaccessible courts and healthcare, and restrictions on legal capacity. Disabled and neurodivergent women need accessible services, bodily autonomy and the means to live independently with dignity.
Migration status creates another fault line in women’s access to protection. Political theorist Françoise Vergès’s A Decolonial Feminism insists that feminism must confront racism and capitalism together. This shifts the question from whether women gain power to which women that acquired power protect. A 2023 study of 151 migrant women attending healthcare facilities in Rabat found that 76.2 per cent reported gender based violence during migration, while only 9 per cent of survivors had filed a complaint. Pan-African feminism must make access to protection a measure of political progress.
Women’s advancement cannot be measured only among those the nation recognises as its own.
I want equality that dismantles the arrangements through which patriarchy makes obedience a condition of survival. A woman needs a home she can keep, an income she controls and laws that recognise her authority over her own body. Inheritance, abortion, housing, the right to love and collective labour rights belong together because freedom requires power over the conditions of one’s life.
For girls, that begins with accessible schools, protection against violence and child marriage, and a future they can choose. A right that poverty renders unusable remains, in practice, a privilege.
PM Mansouri’s appointment enlarges what women can imagine. Its feminist significance depends on whether power becomes less concentrated and freedom more accessible to women still impoverished, marginalised or criminalised. Patriarchy can accommodate exceptional women; emancipation must reach those it keeps expendable. Women’s liberation cannot rest on the hierarchies that decide which women can be sacrificed.
Ayah Kareem is a Moroccan feminist researcher, writer and activist whose work connects political analysis with collective organising. She has an academic background in political science and human rights and is a Thomson Reuters Foundation mentee. Drawing on decolonial and intersectional feminism, she examines the patriarchal institutions that make inequality ordinary and the struggles that make it contestable.
Feature photo: A woman walks along El Badi Palace, Marrakesh, Morocco by Hubert Buratynski (@hubatxz/Unsplash)