Thierry Desrues is a researcher at the Spanish National Research Council at the Institute for Advanced Social Studies in Cordoba, Spain. He has published extensively on political processes and civic mobilizations in Morocco and Tunisia.

In an interview with Le Monde, he put into context the movement launched on September 27 by the GenZ 212 collective (212 is Morocco's area code), the Moroccan iteration of the global wave of protest from Gen Z (those born between 1997 and 2012), within the recent history of social movements in the kingdom.

The first distinctive feature is the youth of the protesters. Even compared to the "February 20 Movement" in 2011 [Morocco's version of the Arab Spring], which was already a movement of young people, this GenZ 212 brings together very young people − including minors. Secondly, we still do not know who started the movement, except that it originated on digital platforms – especially Discord – that allowed it to evade the authorities' control and surveillance.

In 2011, the movement − despite being composed of many independents unaffiliated with political parties or civil society organizations − chose spokespersons who were well-known young left-wing activists. Now, there are a few influencers involved in the movement, but it is unclear what role they played in the initial call to action, which emerged in mid-September following the outrage caused by the deaths of pregnant women at Agadir Hospital.

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