The Islamic saying “a people who entrust their affairs to a woman will never succeed” has resurfaced in Morocco since King Mohammed VI named Fatima Zahra El Mansouri as the country’s first female prime minister.
Mustafa Ramid, a former justice minister in an Islamist-led government, cited the saying earlier this month, in a lengthy Facebook post questioning whether a woman should hold the country’s highest political office.
He argued that Morocco, a Muslim majority country, had found a balance between equality and the responsibilities of state leadership, as the highest office – that of the king – continued to be reserved for men.
Morocco operates as a constitutional monarchy. Yet executive power remains in the hands of the 63-year-old monarch.
El Mansouri’s Authenticity and Modernity Party (Pam) won the most seats in September’s parliamentary election and has since announced a coalition with three other parties. Together, they hold 207 of the 395 seats in parliament.
El Mansouri’s royal appointment was historic but it exposed persistent reservations about women in positions of power.
The day after her appointment, local broadcaster Chouf TV took to the streets to ask Moroccan men “what they thought” of a woman heading the government.
Several men, mostly middle-aged or older, hesitated before answering. Some said they accepted the decision because it was the king’s choice.
One grey-haired man, who did not give his name or age, said: “It feels strange to have a woman as head of government. I’m not sure if it sits well with me.”
Criticism of the monarchy carries legal risks in Morocco. The penal code criminalises certain forms of offence or insult against the king, the royal family and the monarchy.
Online, the appointment became fodder for political satire.
A video showing two women pulling each other’s hair was widely shared, with captions suggesting that this is what parliamentary disagreements between El Mansouri and her colleagues might look like.
However, many younger Moroccans, especially women, welcomed her appointment.
While attitudes are changing in Morocco, conservative, religious views still hold great weight.
Some of the country’s most contentious debates over gender equality centre on family law, including inheritance, marriage and divorce.
Under existing inheritance rules, a daughter typically receives half the share of a son in comparable circumstances.
The Higher Council of Ulemas, the country’s body of religious scholars, has resisted calls for equal inheritance, citing Islamic jurisprudence.
It has also rejected proposals to abolish taasib, a rule that can require female orphans without brothers to share their inheritance with male relatives, including distant ones.
In a 2022 report, Morocco’s National Human Rights Council said unequal inheritance rules contributed to poverty among women.
Polygamy is also legal under certain conditions. Proposed changes to the family code have included allowing women to stipulate in their marriage contracts that their husbands cannot take another wife.
But exceptions remain, including provisions relating to a first wife’s infertility or illness, which women’s rights groups have criticised on grounds of privacy and medical confidentiality.
These issues are at the heart of proposals to reform the Moudawana, Morocco’s family code, which governs marriage, divorce and child custody.
A package of changes was announced in 2024, but the reforms have yet to become law.
In addition to family law, some young women hope the new prime minister will try to improve education for girls.
Morocco’s High Commission for Planning, the country’s official national statistics agency, found in 2025 that only 55% of girls aged 15–17 were attending school in rural areas, where poverty, early marriage, and dropping out of school remain key barriers. In urban areas, it was 100%.
“Many girls in rural Morocco drop out of school early because schools are far away, transport is unsafe or unavailable, and families with limited means often keep their daughters at home,” Chifae Laazouzi, a young Moroccan woman, tells the BBC.
She says one reason is that many girls in poor and rural areas cannot afford menstrual sanitary products.
“Menstrual health is still treated as a taboo… I would like to see free menstrual products in schools,” Laazouzi says.
El Mansouri is no newcomer to politics. Over more than two decades in public life, she has served as mayor of Marrakech, held government posts and sat in parliament.
For the past five years, she served as minister for national territory planning, urban planning, housing and city policy under the previous Prime Minister Aziz Akhannouch.
After her appointment, El Mansouri presented the moment as a milestone for Moroccan women.
“Being the first female head of government is not just a source of pride for me, but for all the women of the kingdom,” she said.
Since her appointment, she has not indicated whether she plans to try to push through the reforms to the family code.
In her political career so far, she has not made any prominent public statements about women’s rights, even while changes to inheritance rules, polygamy and the family code were being widely debated.
Dr Irene Fernandez-Molina, an expert on the Global South at the University of Exeter in the UK, sees the appointment in the context of the monarchy’s broader political interests.
“Two headlines have dominated coverage of [September’s] parliamentary election in Morocco: a two-decade low turnout and King Mohammed VI’s appointment of a woman as prime minister for the first time in this country’s history,” she tells the BBC.
“The latter cannot be understood without the former.”
Official figures put turnout at just 38% of registered voters, while the proportion of all eligible voters who cast a ballot was even lower.
Fernandez-Molina describes the appointment as an example of “authoritarian state feminism, a top-down, selective instrumentalisation of the struggle for women’s rights for regime legitimation purposes”.
She argues that promoting a woman to the highest government office might be intended to project an image of modernisation and progress, even when the political system and the pace of social reform remain largely unchanged.
For Moroccan women’s rights advocate Yasmina Benslimane, the appointment breaks a longstanding barrier, but says El Mansouri’s background is also important.
“It does challenge stereotypes, because it finally breaks a ceiling that was never broken,” she says. “But it matters how she got there.”
El Mansouri’s late father was a pasha, a senior local official, and a diplomat. Benslimane argues that her privileged background and access to political networks distinguish her from many Moroccan women who have fewer opportunities to enter public life.
For Benslimane, like many women’s rights groups in the country, reform of the Moudawana remains a key test of the new government.
However, El Mansouri’s room for manoeuvre is shaped by the country’s political system.
The king retains extensive powers over key areas, including defence and foreign affairs, while the head of government operates within a system where authority is shared.
When it comes to Moudawana reform, she would have to face the country’s religious scholars, who are mostly men.
While some Moroccan women welcome her appointment, they say it is what she does as prime minister that really counts.
“I don’t think El Mansouri should be judged by the fact that she is a woman. Being a woman in power doesn’t automatically make someone a champion of women’s rights,” Sara Zouiten, a young Moroccan woman, tells the BBC.
“Her party presents itself as a modernising political force, so I want to see whether that translates into actual change.”