The Fassi Century Is Ending. Here's What's Taking Its Place.

In 2025, Moroccans living abroad sent home MAD 122 billion (roughly $13.4 billion), more than 8% of GDP and larger than either tourism receipts or foreign direct investment. A substantial share of that money landed in rural and southern Morocco, outside the Casa-Rabat-Fes capital circuits entirely. That flow, alongside the displacement of French by English as the aspirational second language for Moroccans under thirty, is slowly doing what seventy years of political turnover had not: it is ending the class position of a small cluster of families from the old city of Fes who have dominated Moroccan banking, industry, and government since independence.

The cluster is real and fairly specific. Roughly thirty to forty intermarried Fes-origin family names (Benjelloun, Berrada, Bennani, Tazi, Fassi-Fihri, Kadiri, Sebti, Bennouna, Alami, and perhaps twenty others) have, for two full generations, controlled a disproportionate share of Casablanca Stock Exchange-listed capital, the senior ranks of the banking sector, much of the judiciary, and the ministerial pipelines through which economic policy gets made. Their position rested on a concrete stack of advantages: French fluency acquired inside a closed circuit of lycées, marriage networks that kept capital and information circulating within the group, and privileged access to the credit and hiring decisions those networks mediated. That stack is depreciating.

The Fassi century, which began when independence in 1956 effectively transferred the French Protectorate’s economic apparatus to this tightly closed group, is not ending cleanly. The very top families still control real capital and will continue to reproduce it regardless of cultural shifts. But the operating system that made the formation durable across three generations is being replaced, and three competing elite formations are rising in its place.

The Triple Base

The Fassi formation was never a simple elite. Three overlapping inheritances gave it its staying power. First, Andalusian refugee descent: waves of Muslim and Jewish families expelled from Spain between the 13th and 17th centuries settled in Fes, bringing urban crafts, Iberian cultural capital, and a Mediterranean commercial network the country did not otherwise have. Second, proximity to the ulama institutions of Qarawiyyin, which gave certain families centuries of religious prestige and, equally importantly, the literacy infrastructure required to run an administration. Third, merchant capital that controlled the long-distance trade routes connecting Morocco to Europe and sub-Saharan Africa.

When the French Protectorate arrived in 1912, these families were already positioned as the natural intermediaries: educated, multilingual, and commercially networked. The colonial moment strengthened that position rather than weakening it. Fassi sons went to French lycées and Paris universities while the traditional networks stayed intact. After independence in 1956, the intermarried cluster most observers refer to (Benjelloun, Berrada, Bennani, Lahlou, Sqalli, Tazi, Fassi-Fihri, Kadiri, Sebti, Bennouna, Alami, and perhaps twenty others) inherited banking, industry, government ministries, and a substantial share of the judiciary. A significant share of Casablanca Stock Exchange-listed firms still traces to Fassi family capital.

None of this amounts to a conspiracy theory. It reflects the normal pattern of post-colonial elite reproduction across the region, documented at length in Pierre Vermeren’s La formation des élites marocaines and Béatrice Hibou’s La force de l’obéissance. What made the Moroccan case unusually durable was how tightly the elite closed its marriage market, and how effectively it controlled the downstream institutions (schools, banks, ministries) that its own children were predestined to enter.

Five Moats, Five Erosions

What held the formation in place for two generations was a set of information and network asymmetries the internet has now systematically dismantled. Each deserves naming precisely, because the aggregate effect is not marginal.

1. The linguistic moat

French fluency was the master key. Lycée Lyautey, Lycée Descartes, and their peers transmitted a specific French-literary, French-institutional formation the public-system student could not replicate and could not acquire elsewhere in the country. For eighty years, a particular French accent and the right set of cultural references opened doors nothing else could.

The Language Gap Is Closing

EF English Proficiency Index scores, Morocco vs. France, 2016–2025

Source: EF EPI annual reports 2016–2025. Morocco gained 26 points and climbed 8 ranks over the decade while France lost 42 points and slid from rank 29 to rank 49. The gap narrowed from 91 points in 2019 to 25 in 2025.

Since roughly 2015, the key has been changing locks. English has displaced French as the aspirational second language for under-30 Moroccans. On the EF English Proficiency Index, Morocco’s score rose from 466 in 2016 to 492 in 2025, with the country climbing eight ranks (to 68 of 123) in a single year on the 2024-to-2025 comparison. France’s score, in the same window, drifted from 511 to 517 after peaking at 559 in 2019. The gap has narrowed from 91 points to 25. English-primary content (on YouTube, on Coursera, on remote-job boards) is where the highest-return skills are now acquired. A seventeen-year-old from Khouribga or Beni Mellal with passable English and a laptop can compete for a dollar-denominated remote contract that a Fassi lycéen with perfect French cannot.

2. The school moat

The old assumption, that the mission française delivered you to Sciences Po or HEC and that this delivery was itself the point, has weakened. Fassi families are increasingly sending children to the American School of Casablanca, George Washington Academy, Rabat American School, and the British International School, not because French education has deteriorated but because the return on a French credential has. George Washington Academy in particular is instructive: founded in 1998 with 52 students, it now enrolls roughly 900 across 40 nationalities, explicitly targeting families that would once have defaulted to Lycée Lyautey. American and British universities now top the aspirational list for Fassi high-schoolers in a way that would have been unthinkable in 2000.

The state itself has formalised the shift. Loi-cadre 51-17, promulgated by Dahir No. 1-19-113 on 9 August 2019, authorised alternance linguistique (instruction of scientific and technical subjects in French and increasingly English rather than Arabic), ending three decades of Arabisation in sciences. The bill did not cause the language shift; it was an official acknowledgement that the ground had already moved.

3. The banking moat

The Fassi advantage in capital allocation depended on implicit trust running through kin networks. You knew the person who knew the person at the bank. Outsiders waited; cousins got the loan. That moat is being eroded from two directions. Upward, by institutional modernization: Moroccan banks increasingly operate on algorithmic credit scoring that is harder to override for purely relational reasons. Downward, by fintech and dollar-denominated remote income: a Moroccan engineer earning thirty or forty thousand dollars a year remotely does not need a cousin to co-sign a mortgage.

The Diaspora Dividend

Annual remittances from Moroccans abroad (MRE), billions MAD

Sources: Bank Al-Maghrib; Office des Changes. Remittances roughly doubled between 2019 and 2025 and now exceed 8% of GDP — more than tourism receipts and more than total foreign direct investment combined.

The remittance numbers are the quietest but possibly the most consequential data point in Moroccan class analysis. Diaspora transfers reached MAD 122 billion in 2025 (~$13.4 billion), up from roughly MAD 65 billion in 2019, nearly doubling in six years. At more than 8% of GDP, remittances now exceed tourism receipts and exceed foreign direct investment. Roughly a third of the flow lands in rural and small-urban Morocco (the Rif, the Souss, the Oriental), outside the traditional Fassi capital circuits entirely. That capital funds land purchases, small businesses, and the kind of second-generation university tuition that used to be the preserve of the old bourgeoisie.

4. The marriage moat

Endogamy within the Fassi circle is still remarkably strong, but its predictive power over economic outcomes has weakened. For three generations, marrying inside the network was among the highest-return financial decisions a young Fassi could make. Today, a Fassi surname on a spouse’s carte nationale is no guarantee the household will out-earn a cross-class marriage where one partner holds a strong English-language technical career. The math has changed without anyone redrafting the family expectations.

5. The media moat

The Moroccan media ecosystem of 1995 was run out of Casablanca and Rabat newsrooms whose editors and reporters came overwhelmingly from Fassi or Fassi-adjacent backgrounds. The 2026 ecosystem is run out of YouTube, TikTok, and a few dozen independent Darija-first publications. Internet penetration reached 90.7% in January 2024 (DataReportal), with 21.3 million active social-media users by January 2025, some 55.5% of the total population and nearly 80% of adults. The most-followed Moroccan cultural figures (ElGrandeToto from Salé, Dystinct of Moroccan-Belgian working-class roots, Manal, Stormy, Issam) are overwhelmingly not Fassi and do not code Fassi. These are the voices Moroccans under 35 actually listen to, and the audience sorting is structural rather than generational.

The Soussi Ascendance

The competing elite formation most observers watch is the Soussi / Chleuh business class: Amazigh families from the Souss valley and Anti-Atlas who built fortunes first through the hanout grocery trade (the Soussi migrant corner-store network is its own continent-spanning phenomenon) and then through industrial, retail, and hydrocarbon empires. Akwa Group, founded in 1932 and today spanning petroleum (Afriquia), gas (the CSE-listed Afriquia Gaz), retail, media, real estate, and chemicals, with 50,000+ employees, is the exemplar. Forbes put Akhannouch’s personal net worth at $1.5 billion in 2025. The Fassi-Soussi tension has structured Moroccan politics and business for seventy years without being stated openly in the national press.

The 2021 Inflection

Seats won by party in Chamber of Representatives, 2002–2021

Source: Moroccan Ministry of Interior & Chamber of Representatives published results. RNI = Rassemblement National des Indépendants; PJD = Parti de la Justice et du Développement.

The 2021 legislative elections were the first visible political manifestation of the slower realignment. The Rassemblement National des Indépendants, the party most closely associated with the Amazigh-Soussi business class, won 102 seats and delivered the premiership to Aziz Akhannouch. The Istiqlal Party, historically the Fassi bourgeoisie’s vehicle, finished third at 81 seats. The Justice and Development Party (PJD), which had governed Morocco for a decade, collapsed from 125 seats to 13, the deepest electoral reversal in modern Moroccan history. For the first time since independence, formal political power concentrated in a bloc explicitly outside the Fassi patronage structure.

That outcome did not happen in a vacuum. Mohammed VI’s reign has deliberately cultivated non-Fassi elites (Soussi, Sahrawi, technocratic) to reduce the state’s dependence on the old families. Major infrastructure contracts, ministerial portfolios, and regulatory agencies have been reallocated toward a counter-elite the previous reign kept at arm’s length. The three competing elite clusters now visible are roughly: the residual Fassi bourgeoisie (still dominant in banking and old-industrial capital), the Soussi-technocratic bloc (dominant in the current government and in new-economy verticals), and a third emerging formation of American- and Gulf-formed diaspora returnees whose relationship to the traditional networks is genuinely novel.

The Compression, Not the Collapse

None of this amounts to a Fassi collapse. At the very top (the families running banks, listed industrials, and large agri-food groups), capital still reproduces itself regardless of cultural shifts. The compression is happening one tier down: the doctor-lawyer-mid-tier-business Fassi families whose return depended on the information and network asymmetries the internet has eroded. Their position is decaying rather than collapsing, at a rate gentle enough to feel like stability in any given quarter and consequential only across a generation.

The class-compression happening in Morocco is real but partial. The top Fassi families remain durable. It is the upper-middle tier that is being slowly rebalanced, and the tier below that (arriving via English, the remote economy, and diaspora remittances) that is rising.

There is a well-documented pattern for how hereditary elite formations behave when their underlying advantages depreciate. The Prussian junkers after 1918, the Anglo-Indian commercial families after 1947, the Beiruti Christian bourgeoisie after the civil war: the trajectories differ in severity but not in shape. Some families adapt, converting cultural capital into new forms, while others deny and spend down the inherited stock. A smaller number exit entirely, usually by diaspora.

The adapters are those who recognise early that the old credentials (French fluency, lycée network, Paris summers) are depreciating assets, and who aggressively reallocate their children’s formation toward what the new economy actually values: English, technical skill, international networks outside the Paris–Casablanca corridor, and an entrepreneurial rather than rentier orientation. Those who deny run the 1985 playbook on 2026 terrain and watch their relative position decline by two or three percent per year. The ones who exit preserve the family’s economic position at the cost of its social one.

The Fassi version of the pattern is unusually gentle because Morocco is politically stable and the families still control real capital. No one is being dispossessed. But the shape is recognisable, and the choices being made inside Fassi households today will determine which branches of the family tree are ascendant in 2050.

What the New Grammar Looks Like

The emerging Moroccan elite does not look like the receding one. It is plurilingual with English leading French, more religiously observant (or at least less self-consciously secular), geographically broader (rooted in Souss, the Rif, the Oriental, and southern Morocco as much as in the Casa-Rabat-Fes-Marrakech corridor), and more entrepreneurial than rentier. Its wealth is funded at least in part by MAD 122 billion in annual diaspora transfers rather than by colonial-era industrial concessions. Its cultural production happens in Darija and English rather than in the francophone idiom the old bourgeoisie taught its children to perfect.

None of this guarantees a more egalitarian Morocco. New elites produce new inequalities, and the gap between the English-fluent remote-work cohort and the genuinely poor is widening faster than anyone is tracking. But it does mean that the specific grammar of class (the surname radar, the accent calibration, the arroubi epithet casually deployed to mark distance) is becoming a less reliable predictor of who is rising and who is slowing.

The families whose grandchildren will still be ascendant in fifty years are the ones who have already noticed and adapted. Those still running the old playbook are, without realising it, in a different story.

Sources & further reading

• Pierre Vermeren, La formation des élites marocaines et tunisiennes (La Découverte, 2002) and École, élite et pouvoir au Maroc et en Tunisie au XXe siècle.
• Béatrice Hibou, La force de l’obéissance: Économie politique de la répression en Tunisie (La Découverte, 2006), essential for understanding the political economy of Maghrebi patronage structures.
• Abdellah Hammoudi, Master and Disciple: The Cultural Foundations of Moroccan Authoritarianism (Chicago, 1997).
• Mohamed Tozy, Monarchie et islam politique au Maroc (Presses de Sciences Po, 1999).
• EF English Proficiency Index, annual reports 2016–2025 (ef.com/epi).
• Bank Al-Maghrib, Rapport annuel 2024; Office des Changes, remittances series.
• DataReportal, Digital 2025: Morocco.
• Loi-cadre n° 51-17 relative à l’éducation, la formation et la recherche scientifique, Dahir n° 1-19-113 du 9 août 2019.
• IPU Parline, Morocco Chamber of Representatives 2002, 2007, 2011, 2016, 2021 electoral results; Moroccan Ministry of Interior.

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