Nabila Mounib, born in 1960 in Casablanca, is a Moroccan politician who currently serves as the General Secretary of the Unified Socialist Party. She is the first woman elected at the head of a Moroccan party.
Early life
Mounib is the daughter of Ahmed Mounib, a diplomat who served as the Moroccan consul in Oran during the 1970s where she spent part of her childhood, graduating from high school in Algeria in 1977. Her mother, Khadija Belmekki comes from a wealthy family of Fez. She later studied in the University in Rabat and briefly in Montpellier where she obtained a Ph.D. in endocrinology, after which she was a rewarded with a teaching position in the University of Ain Chok Casablanca, where she taught biology ever since.
Political career
In 1985, when she was preparing her doctoral thesis in France, she was active in the Youth of Democratic Students, then joined the Organization for Freedom of Information and Expression and the Organization of the popular Democratic Action which became, after merger with other formations of the left, the Unified Socialist Party. Mounib was affiliated with the Socialist Unified Party —under its various names— as early as the 2000, but only started actively engaging the media since the wave of Arab Spring protests of 2011. On 16 January 2012, she was elected, as lone candidate, General Secretary of her party and has been elected the first Moroccan woman elected to head a political party.
Political Action
During the constitutional referendum in 2011, she called on her political movement and the Democratic Left Alliance for a boycott, saying that the constitution was not democratic given that it maintains most of the powers in the hands of the sovereign and does not assure a real separation of powers. Questioned by the Moroccan magazine TelQuel in November 2012, she said that her short-term project is the unification of the left forces into a progressive democratic federalism. In August 2013, at the outbreak of the Daniel Galván scandal, she was among the first to react by openly criticizing the royal grace and considering that "the decision to grant it to the pedophile Daniel Galvan is unacceptable and should be revoked as soon as possible". During the political crisis between Morocco and Sweden, following a Swedish bill to recognize the Sahrawi Republic, Nabila Mounib chaired a Moroccan delegation in Stockholm, composed of left-wing parties, between 4 and 7 November 2015, with a view to finding a solution to the crisis. In January 2016, Swedish public television SVT announced that the Swedish government had renounced its plan to recognize the independent Sahara.
