Delicate Balance

In the rambling, yellow-walled palace at Rabat, red-liveried Negro bandsmen of the royal "Black Guard" beat a tattoo and blared fanfares. Eleven men filed through the palace courtyard, up a marble staircase and into an ornate chamber reeking of incense. There, seated on his gilt and brocaded throne, King Mohammed V last week welcomed the members of Morocco's fourth government in less than three years of independence.

In the month since the fall of Premier Ahmed Balafrej's conservative government, the King had been forced to shop intensively for a Cabinet that would somehow maintain his nation's delicate balance between extremes. Twice the King rejected Cabinets that he considered too far to the left, but last week he agreed to a government headed by slight, shy Abdallah Ibrahim, who is as left as they come.

A onetime Minister of Labor, Ibrahim, 40, has the right to the title Moulay, which is applied to descendants of the Prophet, but he is widely known as the Red Sherif. Before independence, the French jailed Sorbonne-educated Abdallah Ibrahim five times, once for an eight-year stretch. Since independence, backed by the powerful (600,000 members) Union Marocaine du Travail, the nation's only trade union, Ibrahim has ranted against foreigners, talked of nationalizing foreign interests and demanded the ouster of U.S., French and Spanish troops from their bases in Morocco. "Independence is not liberty," he declared recently. "Our economy remains in the hands of others, our vital installations are at the disposition of foreigners, our social standards fall daily while foreign troops continue to occupy the country."

Leftists also got the ministries of Interior, Agriculture and Economics. But the King saw to it that a number of middle-roaders were included in the Cabinet, and that his own nominee became Defense Minister. The post went to 36-year-old Mohammed Aoud, who is reportedly destined to marry Princess Lalla Aisha (TIME, Nov. 11, 1957), thus keeping the army in the family.

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