Union Nationale des Forces Populaires

The National Union of People's Forces ( Arabic الاتحاد الوطني للقوات الشعبية, DMG al-Ittiḥād al-Waṭanī li-l-quwwāt aš-šaʿbiyya ; French Union Nationale des Forces Populaires , UNFP ) was a Moroccan national liberation movement .

history

It was founded in January 1959 by a group around Mehdi Ben Barka , who did not consider the leading Istiqlal in the struggle for independence to be sufficiently radical.

As an advocate of socialist politics, the party strongly criticized the ruling monarchy and as a result found itself exposed to rigorous police repression under Interior Minister General Mohammed Oufkir . The leadership of the UNFP changed many times: while Abderrahim Bouabid and Abderrahmane Youssoufi were considered moderate, Mohamed Basri promoted the armed struggle, and Ben Barka himself decided to confront the state power from exile. When the Tindouf War broke out between Morocco and Algeria in 1963 , Ben Barka officially took a place in Ahmed Ben Bella's FLN government on the Algerian side . The Moroccan government rated this as high treason and sentenced Ben Barka to death " in absentia ". On October 29, 1965, while in exile in Paris, with the assistance of French police officers, he was kidnapped and murdered, possibly at the instigation of Oufkir, and thus remained a symbol of the democratic struggle in Morocco. Secretary-General of the UNFP was ex-Prime Minister Abdallah Ibrahim from 1959 to 1972 .

The UNFP broke up again in 1972 into a Casablanca group and a Rabat group. The Rabat wing re-formed the Socialist Union of People's Forces (Union Socialiste des Forces Populaires, USFP) in 1974 , which still exists today as a center-left party. In the 1993 elections, the USFP and Istiqlal worked together as opposition parties . As the most important coalition party, the USFP has been tipping the scales of a Moroccan government in terms of rocking politics since 1998 .

Abderrahmane Youssoufi , co-founder of the UNFP and later chairman of the USFP, politically imprisoned and sentenced to death, was elected head of government in 1998. This election of a head of government from among the ranks of the opposition was a novelty in the history of Arab democracy and was seen as the major breakthrough in the Moroccan reform process.