"Pourquoi les partis marocains ne parlent-ils pas d'énergie ?" — Hespress
I published an opinion piece in Hespress (in French), in its Opinions section: “Why don’t Moroccan parties talk about energy?”
The starting point is a construction site. On 19 July, a fifty-kilometre power line was energised at Lamharza Essahel, in the El Jadida province: 486 million dirhams, a new substation, built by ONEE to supply the Casablanca desalination plant, due to come online on 1 February 2027 and to be operated by a consortium for thirty years. The next government will inherit all of it without having decided any of it.
Morocco does not improvise: its energy strategy dates from 2009 and has survived three parliamentary majorities untouched. Installed renewable capacity doubled in ten years (2,417 MW in 2016, 4,851 MW at the end of 2025, per IRENA), and last November the Climate Change Performance Index ranked the country sixth worldwide. On 28 April 2025, during the Iberian blackout, ONEE reopened the cables across the strait and sent a few hundred megawatts towards Andalusia.
And yet energy is absent from the campaign opening on 10 September. I offer three explanations: a consensus produced from above and handed to the parties rather than negotiated among them; an asymmetry that is cognitive rather than political, between institutions staffed with high-level specialists and parties with no unit able to challenge a tariff methodology or review a power purchase agreement; and nothing to inaugurate — law 82-21 on self-generation, passed in 2023, only received its implementing decree in March 2026.
The stakes are concrete: the tariff overhaul due on 1 March 2027 is meant to bring prices closer to real costs, the desalination programme will eventually absorb some 15% of national electricity consumption, and the price per kilowatt-hour weighs on industrial investment decisions. I set out three footholds for parliament: debate the tariff methodology before it applies rather than after, impose a deadline for publishing implementing decrees, and scrutinise interconnection agreements before they are signed.