From the Marrakech Bar to public life: a lawyer’s path

Before becoming Mayor of Marrakech, a minister and then Head of Government, Fatima Ezzahra El Mansouri was a lawyer. Registered at the Marrakech Bar since 22 March 2005 and specialising in land and real-estate law, she built her public career on legal training acquired in Morocco, France and the United States.

Marrakech roots

Fatima Ezzahra El Mansouri was born on 3 January 1976 in Marrakech, into a family from the Rehamna region. Her father, Abderrahmane El Mansouri, practised law and served as pasha of Marrakech. It was from him, her campaign website recalls, that she drew her sense of public responsibility from an early age.

She was educated in the French school system in Marrakech and earned her baccalaureate at the city’s Lycée Victor Hugo in 1994. Her biography traces the milestones that followed.

Rabat, Montpellier, New York

Her law studies first took her to Mohammed V University in Rabat, where she obtained a bachelor’s degree (licence) in private law. She went on to the University of Montpellier in France for a postgraduate diploma (DEA) in business-contract law, then completed her training in the United States, in New York, with a certificate in Anglo-Saxon business law.

Her studies thus span three traditions: Moroccan law, French contract law and Anglo-Saxon common law. According to her campaign website, this breadth of training gave her a strong legal and economic grounding and opened the way to the bar.

A land and real-estate lawyer

Her experience includes a spell at a Casablanca law firm, Cabinet Naciri. Registered at the Marrakech Bar on 22 March 2005, she specialised in land and real-estate law and founded her own practice, devoted to real-estate and commercial transactions.

Land and real-estate law deals with very concrete matters for families and businesses alike: ownership, sales, contracts and building projects. These are precisely the issues she would later meet again on the scale of a city, then of a ministry.

From the bar to public service

In 2008 she entered politics with the Movement for All Democrats and became a founding member of the Authenticity and Modernity Party. On 22 June 2009, aged 33, she was elected Mayor of Marrakech by 54 votes to 35, becoming the first woman to lead the city. Elected to the House of Representatives in 2011, then re-elected in 2016, in 2021 and on 23 September 2026, the lawyer has also taken part in legislative work.

Law in the service of urban planning and housing

Appointed on 7 October 2021 as Minister of National Territory Planning, Urban Planning, Housing and City Policy, she returned, on a national scale, to the land and real-estate questions she had handled as a lawyer. Her campaign website notes that the post allowed her to bring her legal expertise and local-government experience to a field where strategic vision meets citizens’ needs.

Several projects of her term were legal in nature:

• the National Dialogue on Urbanism and Housing, launched on 16 September 2022, whose conclusions informed the reorganisation of the ministry (decree 2-23-751 of 21 December 2023) and new laws;
• direct housing aid, in force since 2 January 2024, for Moroccans living in Morocco or abroad who own no home in Morocco and have never received housing aid, for a first sale and a main residence; the 2026 Finance Law opened it to co-owners and set the main-residence obligation at five years;
• Law 34.21, which amends Law 25.90 on subdivisions, housing groups and land parcelling: permit validity scaled to project size, up to 15 years for projects over 400 hectares; deadlines suspended when work stops for reasons beyond the developer’s control; and a framework for regularising irregular subdivisions;
• Law 64.23, which creates twelve regional urban planning and housing agencies, one per region.

Both laws were adopted unanimously at second reading by the House of Representatives on 7 July 2026 and published in Official Bulletin no. 7533 of 10 August 2026. They are covered in detail in the article on Laws 64.23 and 34.21.

From the lawyer’s robe to public office, the same demand for results runs through her career. She put it this way in her campaign address:

“The years have taught me that listening alone is not enough, and that good intentions do not make up for a lack of delivery.”

Fatima Ezzahra El Mansouri, from her campaign address, September 2026