Moroccans go to the polls on Friday to vote for a new parliament in an election in which the ruling Islamists seek to
\nrepeat a landmark win they scored five years ago.<\/p>\n
Around 6,990 contenders from political parties and independents are vying for the 395-seat House of Representatives, the lower house of parliament in the North African country.<\/p>\n
The moderate Islamist Justice and Development Party has been leading a governing coalition since November 2011.<\/p>\n
The party, known by the French acronym PJD, is seen as facing a strong rivalry at the ballot box from the liberal Authenticity and Modernity Party and the conservative Istiqlal (Independence) Party.<\/p>\n
The polls are Morocco\u2019s second legislative vote since the kingdom adopted constitutional reforms to quell the street protests that erupted during the 2011 Arab Spring uprisings.<\/p>\n
About 15.7 million Moroccans, 45 per cent of them women, are eligible to vote, according to official figures.<\/p>\n
Polling stations across Morocco are open for 12 hours starting from 0700 GMT.<\/p>\n
Official results are expected by Saturday.<\/p>\n
The legislature has a five-year mandate.<\/p>\n
The Justice and Development Party came first in the 2011 election with 107 seats, bringing Islamists to power for the first time in Morocco\u2019s modern history.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Moroccans go to the polls on Friday to vote for a new parliament in an election in which the ruling Islamists seek to repeat a landmark win they scored five years ago. Around 6,990 contenders from political parties and independents are vying for the 395-seat House of Representatives, the lower house of parliament in the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":188473,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"tdm_status":"","tdm_grid_status":"","fifu_image_url":"","fifu_image_alt":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[5608],"tags":[3119,565,5611,5609,5610],"class_list":["post-6789","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-morocco","tag-election","tag-islamists","tag-moroccan-electionn","tag-morocco","tag-morocco-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/southafricatoday.net\/africa-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6789","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/southafricatoday.net\/africa-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/southafricatoday.net\/africa-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/southafricatoday.net\/africa-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/southafricatoday.net\/africa-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6789"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/southafricatoday.net\/africa-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6789\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/southafricatoday.net\/africa-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/188473"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/southafricatoday.net\/africa-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6789"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/southafricatoday.net\/africa-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6789"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/southafricatoday.net\/africa-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6789"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}