Panorama Geographical Overview | Maghreb IEMed. Mediterranean Yearbook 2017 187 Geographical Overview | Maghreb The Limits of Morocco’s “Exceptional” Stability: Post-election Deadlock, Contestation on the Periphery and Foreign Policy Dilemmas Irene Fernández Molina Lecturer in International Relations University of Exeter Moroccan politics in 2016 were marked at the insti- tutional level by developments leading up to and fol- lowing the 7 October legislative elections, the last quarter, therefore, seeing the year’s most decisive events. The deadlock in negotiations to form a gov- ernment after the country had gone to the ballot boxes coincided with another two crises with far- reaching consequences and potentially long trajec- tories. The first was connected with the country’s territorial governance and relations between the centre and the periphery, and the second, with the balance between the two structural priorities of Ra- bat’s foreign policy, managing the Western Sahara conflict on the international level and maintaining privileged relations with the European Union (EU). There was a certain sense of ratification about the October 2016 elections, as the second legislative elections after the region was shaken by the “Arab Spring” and the accelerated constitutional reform pushed through by King Mohammed VI in 2011 to deactivate the Moroccan version of this protest wave, led by the February 20 Movement. The previ- ous legislative elections in November 2011 brought the Islamist Justice and Development Party (PJD) and its leader Abdelilah Benkirane to power for the first time, a result of the new constitution’s provision to assign a representative from the largest party as the head of the cabinet, together with the “spring” tide sweeping through the region at the time. Five years later, however, the winds of regional and do- mestic politics were blowing in a very different direc- tion. With the Islamists ousted from power in Tunisia and Egypt, and politics in Rabat thrown into disarray by rifts between government coalition members and Benkirane’s shifting compliance with the palace, the King and his entourage felt that the PJD had served its subordinate function – to help contain political discontent by staging change – and reached the end of its line. It was now time for life to settle back to normal with an election victory for the official Au- thenticity and Modernity Party (PAM), which had lagged behind the PJD in second place in the Sep- tember 2015 local and regional elections. Bipolarization and Unintended Consequences From the end of 2015, political debate had been dominated by the idea – or rather the question or at- tempted self-fulfilling prophecy – of the “bipolariza- tion” of Morocco’s historically crowded party sys- tem, in light of the PJD and PAM’s growing dominance over the other parties. Most pundits connected this bipolarization with political fractures regarding terri- tory (cities vs the rural world) and ideology (con- servatism vs social, not economic, liberalism), the PJD and PAM embodying the first and second of these two poles respectively. The PJD preferred to talk about bipolarization between the parties with long-established “democratic” credentials, such as itself and the successors of the old opposition (Is- tiqlal Party [PI], Socialist Union of Popular Forces [USFP], Party of Progress and Socialism [PPS]), and the palace-friendly “administration parties” set up at different times in history (Popular Movement [MP], National Rally of Independents [RNI]), of which the PAM would be the most recent embodiment (Desrues, 2016). In any case, bipolarization was the premise for Mo- rocco’s different political actors ahead of the new