Morocco's King: Arab Spring Survivor

As Arab rulers go, Mohammed VI, the 48-year-old king of Morocco, seems at times like the region’s most reluctant autocrat. When inheriting power from his repressive father 12 years ago, he refused to move to the royal palace, preferring his own private home. In the first years of his reign, he fired the regime’s most hated government figures and released high-profile dissidents. So when the king promised a new constitution earlier this year in response to protests, many Moroccans believed he might actually deliver what demonstrators were demanding: a real parliamentary democracy with a figurehead monarch, as in Spain or the U.K. “It felt like things were shifting,” says Ali Amar, a journalist and the author of an unsanctioned biography of Mohammed VI.