Last month, thousands of young Moroccans took to the streets in a dozen cities with two simple demands: better healthcare and education. The movement began following the deaths of eight women during childbirth at a public hospital now nicknamed the Hospital of Death. Unrenovated since 1967, the Hassan-II Regional Hospital Center lacks the resources to sufficiently care for the flow of patients coming from across the rural southern provinces. Yet just a few miles away, Adrar Stadium is undergoing significant renovations in preparation for the 2025 Africa Cup of Nations and the 2030 World Cup, to be jointly hosted by Morocco, Portugal, and Spain.
The disparity between inadequate public spending on basic human needs and lavish spending on prestige projects has outraged Moroccans, particularly members of Gen Z. For ten consecutive days, protesters filled the streets, organized anonymously on a now-200,000-plus-member Discord channel called “Gen Z 212,” after the country’s international phone code.
They chanted, “The youth don’t want the World Cup! Health! Education!” The protests paused in early October to regroup and give the king a chance to respond, before resuming on October 18 with the same demands.
Some have speculated whether the Gen Z 212 protests are a continuation of the Arab Spring, which originated in Tunisia in December 2010 and spread to nearly every Arab country within three months. But the Moroccan protests have more in common with the broader Gen Z protests that began in Sri Lanka in 2022 and have spread across Asia and Africa, most notably in Nepal and Madagascar this year. Although each of these protests has a localized set of demands, they have a shared focus on corruption, socioeconomic inequality, and poor governance outcomes.
The State of Health and Education
Moroccans report very low levels of satisfaction with health and education services in the country, where the government has failed to improve access, infrastructure, and outcomes—despite regular demands for change. The only alternative to Morocco’s free public hospitals are well-equipped private healthcare services—which are reserved for affluent Moroccans, as well as expatriates and tourists. This disparity further fuels discontent among the majority of Moroccans for whom private healthcare is out of reach. Across TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube, Gen Z has been posting content that gives audiences a striking view of Morocco’s reality, including donkeys and cats roaming empty hospital halls, elderly women sleeping on floors, and patients seeking emergency care only to find the hospital deserted. The protesters argue that Moroccans’ fundamental rights, including healthcare, have been abandoned by the government, which continues to pursue international glory at the cost of its own citizens’ lives.
The conditions of Morocco’s education system are similarly dismal. Videos on social media highlight inoperable bathrooms, underequipped classrooms packed with students, and impractical treks to schools (even to private universities). The results of Morocco’s education system mirror its crumbling infrastructure, as learning outcomes remain poor. This is one of the reasons that more than half of Moroccan youth consider emigrating, many in search of opportunities in Europe or the United States.
Additionally, protesters are angry that Morocco’s government has failed to follow through on promises of aid for its rural populations, some of whom have lived in tents for more than two years awaiting reconstruction of their towns demolished in the 2023 earthquake. Economically, Morocco is still recovering from the lingering impacts of COVID-19, small businesses struggle to stay afloat, and unemployment rates are the same as they were in 2011 when the Arab Spring swept across the region.
The Protests and State Repression
The demonstrations have made history as the largest mobilizations since the 2011 February 20 Movement (also known as M20), which was Morocco’s version of the Arab Spring, and as the most violently repressed since the Rif protest movement of 2016. Three Gen Z 212 protesters were killed by police, who are seen across hundreds of videos beating and even running over protesters with cars. More than 400 individuals have been arrested and held in inhumane conditions.
Out of fear of further repression, the movement has intentionally remained leaderless and anonymous, pointing to recent arrests as evidence that any leader would face immediate arrest and lengthy jail time. They are rightfully concerned. Nasser Zefzafi, a leader in the Rif movement, was not only sentenced to twenty years for his peaceful activism but has endured unyielding torture, including three months of solitary confinement, since his arrest in 2017. One Reddit user described Gen Z 212’s position quite clearly: “You don’t negotiate with a tiger while your head is in his mouth.”
An Arab Spring Redux?
Many of the Moroccan protesters’ grievances mirror those from the 2011 February 20 Movement, which managed to secure a set of constitutional reforms. However, those reforms were largely superficial and failed to address corruption or the relative socioeconomic disparities between the country’s urban centers and more far-flung rural regions that were the crux of the movement’s demands. The February 20 Movement also had an important cultural aspect: demanding (and securing) official recognition of the Amazigh language. Amazigh are the Indigenous people of North Africa who make up more than a quarter of the Moroccan population and who have suffered from decades of marginalization. Demonstrators in both 2011 and 2025 have stayed away from directly attacking the king, but the latest protests are far more focused on failed governance, manifested in the poor quality of the healthcare and education systems while the Moroccan government spends lavishly on stadiums and tourism infrastructure.
The methods of the Gen Z 212 movement also line up more with the global Gen Z protests than the Arab Spring, particularly the focus on the decentralized, leaderless, and anonymous nature of the movement and the use of private social media channels, such as Discord, to organize. The Arab Spring, often falsely portrayed as a series of Facebook or Twitter (now X) revolutions, was largely transmitted by satellite television and mobile phone video-sharing, as nearly half of Morocco’s population lacked internet access at the time.
Additionally, the Gen Z protests differ from the Arab Spring in their makeup. The Arab Spring was not solely a youth-led movement. While young people made up a large share of the protesters, the February 20 Movement organized individuals from across different generations and varying political groups, from leftists to Islamists to Amazigh nationalist groups. The Gen Z protests are almost entirely members of that generation, and their demands reflect their demographic makeup.
But most importantly, the Gen Z protest movement appears unlikely to spread to the rest of the Middle East and North Africa region to the same extent as the Arab Spring did, despite the fact that the Gen Z protests have occurred in multiple countries on multiple continents. Some protests have materialized in Algeria under the banner of Gen Z 213, but they have been relatively small and subdued. Traditionally, Morocco’s large protests have not spread across the region.
Prior to the Arab Spring, protests—and most civil society activities—were banned in neighboring Algeria as well as in Tunisia and Libya, and those who dared to speak out against their governments often faced severe repression. Morocco, conversely, has long allowed regular protests to occur, as long as they stay away from certain red lines, including the monarchy and Islam. Even today, the potential cost of protesting across North Africa is far greater than it is in Morocco, helping keep the protests contained in the kingdom. Additionally, the Moroccan monarchy has a different set of tools than the region’s republics to respond to mass protests: It can blame elected officials for citizens’ grievances while insulating the king and his allies. This provides both a less risky target for the protesters and an off-ramp for the king.
The Path Ahead
One of the main targets of the protests is Prime Minister Aziz Akhannouch, a billionaire who is close to the king and whose resignation is a demand of some protesters. In the past, the king could easily intervene in the face of an angry Moroccan populace by placing blame on the government, run by his political opponents, the Islamist Party of Justice and Development. With a friend of the monarchy in charge, however, the situation is more complicated.
Despite the hopes of protesters, the king has not publicly blamed Akhannouch for the country’s problems. Instead, his October 10 speech opening the parliament’s legislative year took a page from his normal playbook: chastising the legislators for failing to address the lack of economic development and regional disparities that he claims to have championed, despite little evidence to support his claims. The king spoke directly about the protests, which organizers briefly paused ahead of the speech: “There should be no inconsistency or competition between national flagship projects, on the one hand, and social programs, on the other, since the goal is to achieve the country’s development and improve the living conditions of citizens, wherever they may be.”
However, unlike in 2011, he failed to offer any solutions, instead providing only vague asks of the parliament—as well as the government, political parties, civil society, and the media—to help combat regional disparities and address social justice.
What his response to the protests fails to acknowledge is that Morocco is a constitutional monarchy whose governing document imbues nearly all power into the hands of the king. He alone can force the reforms that would address the protesters’ demands. As a result, the king’s speech is unlikely to satisfy the protesters. With health and education services deteriorating, youth unemployment over 35 percent, a government that has lost credibility in the eyes of the people, and a king who has grown increasingly absent from the country, protesters have little reason to feel as if they are being heard.
