RABAT, Morocco (AP) — Election results for the first 78 seats in Morocco's parliament announced by the state news agency early Saturday suggest a moderate Islamist party is taking about 36 percent of the seats. With just a fraction of the results for the 395-seat Parliament reported, the opposition Justice and Development Party looks to have dramatically increased its share. Party Secretary General Abdelilah Benkirane said late Friday that by its own estimates, his party had come in first. A coalition of eight liberal, pro-government parties led by Finance Minister Salaheddine Mezouar have amassed slightly more seats so far than the Islamists in the preliminary results, but according to the new constitution the party with the most seats gets first crack at forming a new government. If the trend continues, the Islamists must find coalition partners willing to work with them. In recent years Morocco's Islamists have cultivated an image as honest outsiders battling corruption and seeking to improve services, rather than focusing on moral issues such as the women's headscarf. Morocco, a close U.S. ally and popular European tourist destination suffers from high unemployment and widespread poverty. If the Islamists do end up winning the most seats, that would appear to confirm a trend of victories by Islamist parties in elections prompted by the Arab Spring, following Ennahda's win last month in Tunisia. With dozens of parties running and a complex system of proportional representation, Morocco's parliaments are typically divided up between many parties each with no more than a few dozen seats, requiring complex coalitions that are then dominated by the king. Like the rest of the region, Morocco was swept by pro-democracy protests decrying widespread corruption, which the king attempted to defuse over the summer by ordering the constitution modified to grant more powers to the Parliament and prime minister and then holding elections a year earlier. Activists, however, have called the moves insincere and clamored for a boycott. The government announced a 45-percent turnout in Friday's contest, slightly more than legislative elections in 2007, but still less than local elections in 2009 and the summer's constitutional referendum. The partial results dovetail with those witnessed by The Associated Press during the counting in a single polling station in an affluent neighborhood in Rabat. The PJD, as the Islamists are known by their French initials, took 40 percent of the vote, with the rest divided between another half dozen parties. At that polling station, at least 16 percent of the ballots were either blank or invalid, often because voters had crossed out every party in protest at the choice. In 2007, 19 percent of ballots were invalid. In the course of Friday's vote a number of Moroccans, both those voting and not, expressed dissatisfaction with the political process and the choice of politicians.
