Mohammed VI of Morocco
Mohammed VI has been King of Morocco since his father Hassan II died in July 1999, a reign that began with the sacking of his father's interior minister Basri, the release of prisoners, the return of exiles and a truth commission on the years of lead, that gave women a new family code in 2004, weathered the Arab Spring in 2011 with a constitution conceded in a speech and approved in a referendum within four months, which left the king in command of the army, the religion and the essentials. It has since been the reign of the Tangier port, the high-speed train, the phosphate and car-assembly economy, the recognition of Moroccan sovereignty over Western Sahara by the United States in 2020 in exchange for relations with Israel and by France in 2024, and of a king seen less and less, in Paris and Gabon, with a heart condition and a reputation for the friends he keeps. He was born in 1963, the first son of Hassan II, and was educated at the royal college and in law at Rabat and Nice, with a thesis on the European Community and the Maghreb; the father, who had survived two coups, kept him at a distance and the son kept his own counsel. The first years were called the king of the poor. There was the human rights commission of 2004 that paid compensation to twenty thousand victims of his father's prisons, the Mudawana that raised the marriage age to eighteen and gave women the right to divorce, and the national human development initiative. The Casablanca bombings of May 2003 by fourteen young men from the shanty towns hardened the security state again. The 20 February movement of 2011 asked for a parliamentary monarchy and got, on 9 March, the king's promise of a constitution that made the prime minister the head of government and the leader of the largest party, and the Islamist PJD governed for ten years under a king who chaired the council of ministers. The Rif protests of 2016 and 2017, over a fish seller crushed in a rubbish lorry, were met with prison sentences of twenty years. He divorced his wife Salma in 2018, and his son Moulay Hassan, born in 2003, takes the public duties his father's absences leave. The earthquake of September 2023 in the High Atlas killed three thousand and the king appeared after three days.
- Lived: 1963 CE – ?
- Nationality: Moroccan
- Roles: king, monarch
