Voters in Laâyoune, the largest city in the Moroccan Sahara, turned out in exceptional numbers on Wednesday for Morocco’s September 23 legislative elections, posting one of the highest participation rates recorded anywhere in the kingdom. Official figures released as polling stations closed put turnout in the Laâyoune prefecture at 79.52 percent, a result that placed the southern region firmly among the country’s top performers.
The final hours of voting told the real story. As of 5 p.m., turnout stood at an already-solid 71 percent. But a late surge in the closing two hours pushed participation close to the 80 percent mark, a pace election officials described as unusually intense even by the standards of a competitive national vote.
The contrast with the nationwide figure is striking. Morocco’s Interior Ministry confirmed that overall turnout across the kingdom reached 38.02 percent once all polling stations had closed at 7 p.m. That leaves a gap of more than forty percentage points between the national average and the numbers coming out of Laâyoune — a gap that officials and commentators alike were quick to frame as evidence of the depth of civic engagement in the Moroccan Sahara.
The vote comes nearly a year after the United Nations Security Council adopted Resolution 2797 in October 2025, widely seen as a turning point toward a final settlement of the Sahara dispute along the lines of Morocco’s autonomy proposal. Since then, the southern provinces have seen a steady deepening of institutional and electoral life, and Wednesday’s turnout in Laâyoune reads as a tangible expression of that trend: residents of the region are not merely bystanders in Morocco’s democratic process but active participants in shaping it.
Local authorities described the vote as having unfolded smoothly, with no major incidents reported at polling stations across the prefecture. Ballot counting is now underway at the local level, ahead of the regional tabulation that will feed into the national results expected in the coming hours, following the same two-stage process used across the country.
For a region whose political status remains the subject of an ongoing United Nations process, a turnout this high sends its own message — one that domestic observers say speaks louder than any diplomatic statement. It suggests that, whatever unfolds in New York or Geneva, the population of the Moroccan Sahara continues to invest, ballot by ballot, in its place within the Moroccan state.
