King Hassan II

The late King Hassan II had financial problems in the 1980s and ‘90s since when the royal fortunes have been remade making the family big business players...

Born in 1956 in Inezgane Othmani holds doctorates in medicine and psychiatry from Hassan II University of Casablanca and degrees in Islamic studies...

Like others in the inner circle El Himma graduated from the Collège Royal founded by the late King Hassan II in Rabat to educate his sons alongside brilliant young students from all over Morocco...

He has pursued a more tolerant political line than his father the late King Hassan II...

He has pursued a more tolerant political line than his father the late King Hassan II...

The Palace is still the pre-eminent institution though it is more prepared to share power than under the late King Hassan II...

Complicating any single party's chance of forming a government is that some of the electorate still dominated by localised influences will stay with what remains of the 'loyalist' parties created during Hassan II's reign...

The Moroccan political system has matured considerably under Mohammed VI – emphasised by a wide-ranging truth and reconciliation process intended to draw a line under the excesses of the late King Hassan II...

Under a truth and reconciliation forum Moroccans have been coming to terms with the worst excesses of the late King Hassan II's rule known as the 'années du plomb' (leaden years a reference also to bullets)...

Moroccans look forward to political changes that were inconceivable even when the late King Hassan II was liberalising in the 1990s and his Interior Minister Driss Basri (now exiled in France an embarrassment to the Palace) ran the tough security services...

Morocco has not been coup-prone since the 1970s when King Hassan II used the Saharan issue to save his throne but rebellious sentiments could rise especially in the junior ranks were troops told to withdraw; l the 200 000 or so Moroccans who have moved from the north to settle in the Sahara...