Morocco new party elects its General Secretary

Morocco’s new political party, the Authenticity and Modernity Party (known in its French acronym, PAM), spearheaded by King Mohammed VI’s friend and former Interior Minister Fouad Ali Himma, picked out on Sunday its first secretary general.  Mohamed Cheikh Biadillah, who was Health Minister up to late 2007, was elected Secretary General by PAM’s 33 politburo members, who were elected earlier by 4,500 attendees of the freshly formed party’s first congress, held over the weekend under the banner “Towards Morocco’s Future With Confidence”.  PAM was set up in August 2008 by Fouad Ali Himma who resigned a year earlier from the cabinet to run as candidate (and win hands down) in the parliament elections of September 2007.  The setup of the party is aiming to “gather the conditions necessary to give back trust to the Moroccans in the loftiness of the political action and in the importance of adhering to the collective endeavor in order to face the challenge of development,” said the party congress organizers.  The party wants, thus, to succeed where other older and more experienced parties bitterly failed.  One of its major objectives is to incite and encourage more participation in the political scene by the Moroccans, who showed how skeptical they were of the country’s politics when 80 percent of them decided not to go to the polling booth in the legislative elections of 2007, a record-low turnout in the history of the north African kingdom, according to media reports.  

Source:Xinhua