For years, Morocco’s Generation Z has been characterised as disengaged, with studies consistently showing them to be sceptical of politics and institutions.
Fewer than one-third of 18- to 24-year-olds registered to vote in the 2021 elections, while around 70 percent say they distrust elected officials.
With youth unemployment hovering near 37 percent, observers have often interpreted this detachment as apathy, a silent withdrawal from the public sphere rather than open confrontation.
The protests that began in late September challenged that assumption. What appeared to be a disconnected generation instead revealed a new, hybrid form of engagement that merged online discourse with street mobilisation.
Unlike earlier movements coordinated through parties or unions, this one grew from digital communities. On Discord servers and social-media platforms, young Moroccans debated the deterioration of hospitals, the cost of living, and the state of education, transforming social frustration into political awareness.
“We didn’t go out for politics,” Salma, a 22-year-old student from Casablanca, told The New Arab.
“We went out because we felt invisible: no jobs, no quality schools, no healthcare. It’s not about parties; it’s about being heard.”
This shift suggests not indifference but a redefinition of participation. Morocco’s Gen Z is constructing a civic identity outside formal channels, one that values immediacy, visibility, and collective experience over institutional mediation.
Their digital networks act as informal political arenas where ideas circulate faster than the ability of official communications to control them, signalling the emergence of a parallel public sphere that the state and traditional actors have yet to understand.
From empathy to fear
The initial public reaction to the Gen Z protests was remarkably sympathetic. For a brief moment, citizens across generations and social classes applauded the young demonstrators. Their discipline and civic language, which calls for dignity, education, and healthcare, rather than partisan slogans, resonated with ordinary frustrations.
“For the first time, people were with us,” Yassine, one of the participants of the protests, told TNA. “They clapped, they encouraged us. But when the violence started, not from us, but from others, everything changed overnight.”
That solidarity proved fragile. It began to erode the moment isolated acts of vandalism appeared in some cities, committed not by the core organisers but by unaffiliated individuals who joined the crowds on the margins.
In a country where collective memory still carries the trauma of the Arab Spring, even limited disorder can trigger deep anxiety. Since 2011, public discourse has reinforced a moral equation: stability equals safety; protest equals risk.
This has produced what sociologists call ‘learned fear’, a reflexive caution that treats any sign of chaos as a threat to cohesion.
A coffee owner in Agadir captured this mindset: “Everyone agrees with the youth, but nobody wants chaos. We’ve seen what happened in other countries, we prefer calm.”
When videos of burning bins and broken windows flooded social media, nuance collapsed. Accounts and media outlets replayed the images endlessly, framing them as proof of looming disorder.
Within hours, peaceful demonstrators were associated with vandals. The absence of trusted mediators, unions, civic leaders, or independent outlets able to clarify what really happened accelerated the collapse of trust.
This episode exposes a deeper paradox of Moroccan political culture: citizens often agree with protesters’ grievances but prioritise tranquillity above confrontation. Security is not merely a state narrative; it is a social value that defines legitimacy.
Once that boundary feels threatened, even by outsiders, empathy gives way to fear. In this moral economy of order, the state retains authority not only through control but by embodying stability itself, leaving little space for movements that challenge it without being perceived as dangerous.
Violence rewrites the narrative
The loss of momentum within Morocco’s Gen Z movement cannot be understood without considering how quickly public perception shifted once violence entered the picture.
The protests began with rare public sympathy: many citizens and civic groups saw in the youth’s demands a reflection of their own frustrations over healthcare, education, and living costs. Yet this solidarity collapsed as soon as clashes and acts of vandalism were reported.
In the public eye, the distinction disappeared. Peaceful demonstrators and disruptive elements merged into a single image of disorder. For much of civil society, the moral boundary had been crossed.
Organisations and opinion leaders that initially expressed support shifted toward calls for calm. Their reaction reflected a deeper collective instinct: Moroccans value security as a social good above nearly everything else. Any situation that appears to threaten that order, even symbolically, risks immediate rejection.
“Public solidarity in Morocco always has an invisible ceiling,” explains a Moroccan political sociologist. “The moment an image of violence circulates, it activates a collective memory of chaos, from 1981 to the Arab Spring. People don’t distinguish actors; they just want stability back.”
Once this perception took hold, a new equation emerged. The same citizens who had empathised with protesters now accepted, or at least understood, firm responses from the authorities.
Episodes of police intervention that might once have provoked criticism were instead met with resignation. Stability was perceived as the greater necessity. Analysts call this the normalisation of control , when fear of chaos legitimises firm measures.
This dynamic connects directly to Morocco’s broader pattern of protest containment. Since the early 2000s, successive mobilisations, from the 20 February Movement to the Hirak al-Rif demonstrations and teachers’ strikes, have followed a familiar arc: mobilisation, sympathy, isolation, fatigue, and decline. Rather than confrontation, the system relies on absorption.
A Moroccan political researcher noted that the system “relies less on repression than on reabsorption. It listens just enough to defuse anger, but not enough to transform it into participation”.
Fragmentation compounds this outcome. Mobilisations are often local or sector-based, with little coordination among students, unions, or regional networks.
Without shared leadership or sustained organisation, movements become vulnerable to isolation, a vulnerability intensified whenever any hint of disorder alienates the public and civil society.
These intertwined mechanisms explain why the Gen Z protests, despite their creativity and moral clarity, encountered a familiar ceiling. Morocco’s resilience rests less on repression than on its ability to reframe dissent as instability and to transform protest into dialogue, and dialogue into delay.
Each managed crisis restores calm but deepens scepticism among the young, who increasingly question whether peaceful mobilisation can ever lead to genuine change.
The cost of disillusionment
The fate of Morocco’s Gen Z protests echoes earlier chapters of the country’s modern history. As in 2011 and during the Hirak al-Rif movement, the hope of renewal has given way to quieter disillusionment.
When dialogue stalls and trust erodes, young people rarely turn to confrontation; they turn away. Some retreat into digital spaces or local initiatives; many more look beyond the country’s borders for opportunity and dignity.
“We still love this country,” said Amine, 25, from Tetouan. “But we no longer believe it loves us back. You study, you work, and still you have to leave to live with dignity.”
From Europe, Nabil, a former activist from the Rif region who participated in the Hirak demonstrations, describes a similar feeling of resignation, describes a similar feeling of resignation.
“After 2017, I realised that change was not possible from within,” he said. “When you see your friends detained or silenced, you start to think about survival first. Leaving wasn’t a choice; it was the only way to keep believing in something.”
This steady outflow of energy and ambition is perhaps the most significant legacy of Morocco’s repeated protest cycles. Each wave of mobilisation broadens civic awareness but also deepens the belief that meaningful change must be sought elsewhere.
The country retains stability, but at the cost of its most vital resource: the conviction among its youth that their future can still be built at home.
Calm has returned to the streets, yet beneath it lies a generation measuring its distance from public life, not out of indifference, but as a form of self-preservation. Their silence is not apathy; it is the sound of a social contract quietly losing its heirs.