Morocco Names Fatima Zahra Mansouri as First Woman Prime Minister
King Mohammed VI appointed Fatima Zahra Mansouri to form Morocco’s next government after PAM led the election results, setting up coalition talks and a policy agenda tied to jobs, wages, inflation and 2030 World Cup investment.
Morocco’s King Mohammed VI has named Urban Planning Minister Fatima Zahra Mansouri as prime minister, Arab News reported, giving the kingdom its first woman in the role after parliamentary elections put her party in front.
The appointment moves Mansouri from a senior municipal and ministerial profile into the task of forming a national government.
She was mayor of Marrakech when the nomination was announced and had also been serving as urban planning minister, placing a politician associated with city development at the center of Morocco’s next coalition talks.
The Royal Palace tasked Mansouri with building that government four days after election results were announced.
Her Authenticity and Modernity Party, known as PAM, emerged as the highest vote-getter, but Morocco’s electoral system makes a single-party absolute majority difficult.
The next stage is therefore less a handover than a negotiation over governing partners and portfolios.
Mansouri’s selection is significant beyond party arithmetic.
At 50, the attorney becomes the first woman to serve as Morocco’s prime minister and the second woman to hold a prime minister’s office in the Arab world, after Tunisia’s Najla Bouden.
That milestone puts representation into a position that also carries immediate economic and administrative demands.
Those demands are large.
The next government is expected to manage World Cup-related investment worth billions of dollars and to act on bread-and-butter pledges around prices, pay and employment.
That combination gives the coalition talks an infrastructure and delivery dimension from the start, because the next cabinet will inherit both public expectations and project deadlines.
Morocco’s constitution defines the appointment pathway.
The king remains the country’s highest authority and appoints the prime minister, yet the post has to go to a figure from the election’s leading party.
That restriction was adopted after Arab Spring protests in 2011, replacing a system in which the monarch could name a prime minister without the same electoral condition.
Mansouri’s political rise has been closely tied to PAM.
The party was launched in 2008 by Fouad Ali El Himma, who has long been linked to the palace as a close adviser to the monarch, and Mansouri became one of its top leaders in 2024.
Her résumé also includes a law degree from the University of Montpellier in France, two terms as mayor of Marrakech and service as a member of parliament.
The appointment leaves the composition of the next cabinet unresolved.
Mansouri’s immediate test is to assemble a coalition capable of passing from electoral victory to governing authority, with World Cup investment, inflation, wages and employment already waiting on the policy calendar.
