PJD Leader Benkirane Blames Party’s Election Loss on Straying from Core Values

"The principles of our party have been transgressed by the material and moral advantages offered by politics," said Abdelilalh Benkirane during a meeting with provincial secretaries, held last Saturday at the party’s headquarters, recalling that the PJD is a political party with a religious reference. He attributes the party’s crushing defeat in the last elections not only to the falsification of the vote, the distribution of money or the intervention of the administration, but to the fact that some activists have moved away from religion, in its broadest sense, to chase after the advantages of politics such as money, privileges and positions.

To avoid such an electoral debacle in the future, the party’s secretary general calls on activists to return to the party’s fundamentals. "If we want to correct the course and start over on the right foot, we must return to the source and our Islamic reference, because we must admit that we have a large share of responsibility in this failure," he said. "We must deal with essential issues as we did during the reform of the Family Code, support for the February 20 movement and opposition to the ’Movement of All Democrats’ and the PAM who tried to erase us from the political map in 2003," he added.

In other words, Abdelilalh Benkirane calls for firmly fighting anything that represents a danger to religion, to the country and to the monarchy, in particular the decriminalization of homosexuality, consensual sexual relations, the right to adultery and the abolition of the death penalty.