L’Opinion

L’Opinion was founded in 1965, at a time when the tension between the National Movement and the regime was palpable. This French-language daily newspaper is the official outlet of the nationalist party Istiqlal (who also owns the Arabic-language daily Al Alam). L’Opinion remained a leader in the French-language print press landscape for a long time after its creation. As of 2016, l'Opinion has individual sales averaging 4 805. 

Mohamed Idrissi Kaitouni was named to lead this newspaper in 1977 and remained until his death in 2013. Previous to his involvement with L’Opinion, Idrissi Kaitouni was personal secretary to nationalist figure and founding President of the Istiqlal party, Allal El Fassi.

Throughout the years, L’Opinion’s editorial team was led by figures of the profession, including the editorialist Khalid Jamaï, Naïm Kamal (today director of the news website Quid.ma), Mounir Rahmouni (who passed away in September 2017 and had created the supplement L’Opinion des jeunes), as well as Najib Salmi (who turned L’Opinon’s Sports pages into a reference).

As an independent and private press started blooming in the early 1990’s, L’Opinion has slowly started facing fierce competition and lost its status as a paper of reference.

Istiqlal party’s new Secretary General, Nizar Baraka, announced his ambition to reform the newspaper as the party itself will be reformed.

It should be noted that when the MoM team started working on this project in August 2017, the OJD had not yet published L'Opinion's 2016 numbers. For unknown reasons, these were published in late October 2017 and backdated to May 2017.