Laaraibi’s “The Fortune of Votes”: Corruption, Complicity, and the Soul on the Ballot.

J.J. Richardson

There is a moment near the end of Brahim Laaraibi’s “The Fortune of Votes” when Salem, freshly elected, rises before his guests to speak and finds that his voice has gone. Not hoarseness, not nerves: a dry rasp, like sand pouring down his throat, and by the window, half-veiled in the curtain’s folds, the fortune-teller watches, smiles faintly, and slips into the night. The victory is real. The man is gone. In that single image, Laaraibi compresses the entire logic of his story: in a society where political power is purchased rather than earned, the price is never only money. It is the self.

“The Fortune of Votes” is a short story of considerable ambition. On its surface, it is a local satire of electoral corruption in a Saharan North African city, complete with vote-buying, party vehicles, campaign parades, and the open secret that ballots are won with banknotes rather than programmes. Beneath that surface, it operates as a moral fable, a Faustian allegory in which the failure of civic institutions creates a vacuum that superstition, materialism, and occult bargaining rush to fill. The story is compact, tightly controlled, and devastating in exact proportions to what it beholds.

A Title That Deals in Double Currency

The title condenses the story’s central irony with the economy of a well-placed blade. “Fortune” operates simultaneously on two registers: it is the fortune-teller’s domain, the realm of unseen forces, hidden bargains, and occult guarantees, and it is the material reward that flows to those who win elections: cars, land, apartments, social elevation, the sudden prosperity Salem has watched rivals acquire for years. The “fortune of votes” is therefore never simply a democratic outcome. It is engineered, purchased, and, in the story’s darkest register, conjured.

Holding these two meanings in a single title, Laaraibi implies from the outset that the ballot box and the fortune-teller’s table are not opposites but mirrors, two surfaces reflecting the same transaction. Salem’s fortune is double-edged in the most precise sense: he gains the tally, the name above his rivals, the city erupting in drums and convoys, but loses the only thing that might have allowed him to use that mandate for anything beyond himself: his independent voice. What the votes give, the fortune takes back.

In this way, “The Fortune of Votes” announces itself from its title as more than a story of one man’s fall. It is a parable of systems in which power is purchased twice: first with money, and second with the soul. The reader who understands this before the first page has already grasped the story’s verdict. Everything that follows is the evidence.

Architecture of Descent: Structure and Narrative Technique

“The Fortune of Votes” is a story that knows exactly where it is going from its opening line, and the craft lies in making the reader believe, for as long as possible, that Salem might yet turn back. Laaraibi constructs his narrative around a single question—will this man cross a line he has already crossed in his imagination—and the plot’s architecture is the slow, inevitable answer.

The story opens with an inciting incident that is domestic rather than dramatic, which is precisely its strength. Najla’s announcement, “I visited the fortune-teller this morning,” lands not as a revelation but as a resumption of an old argument, and that familiarity is the first signal that Salem is already closer to the edge than he appears. The inciting incident does not introduce a new danger; it names a pressure that has been building for years. Salem’s two prior electoral defeats, his smuggling conviction, his failed businesses, his dependence on a state grant—all of this precedes the story’s first line, and Laaraibi delivers it in compressed retrospection that reads less like backstory and more like a charge sheet. By the time the fortune-teller is first mentioned, the reader understands that Salem is not a man being tempted for the first time. He is a man being offered the last in a long series of shortcuts.

What follows is a sequence of progressive complications engineered with clockmaker’s precision. Salem’s initial refusal is not a moral stance but a preference: “There’s no witchcraft, Najla. Everyone knows how these elections are won. It’s not spirits—it’s cash.” He dismisses one form of corruption in favour of another he finds more legible. The campaign vehicle scene then raises the stakes of winning by showing what victory would mean for Najla, and through her, for their household identity. Her hands moving across the leather dashboard, her imagined gold bangles, her eyes briefly closed against the air conditioner—these are not comic details. They are the human cost of losing, rendered as the human cost of wanting, and they tighten the noose around Salem’s resistance. Then comes the complication that genuinely breaks him: seeing his rival Isaac leave the fortune-teller’s house. And then, the one that makes her feel inescapable: finding her name on the voters’ list, as if the city’s entire architecture is funnelling him towards a single door. Each complication does not simply add pressure; it removes an exit.

The crisis arrives not in action but in sleeplessness. Salem lies stiff beside Najla, “his eyes open to the dark,” and the internal rationalisation that follows is the story’s most psychologically precise passage. “Visiting does not mean believing — only taking care. What harm in listening?” This is the voice of a man who has already decided and is now constructing the language that will allow him to live with the decision. The crisis, in narrative terms, is the moment of irreversible internal shift, and Laaraibi locates it correctly in the mind rather than the street. When Salem grabs the keys at dawn, the story has already ended in one sense. The drive to the fortune-teller is the body honouring what the soul has already conceded.

The climax—Salem’s acceptance of the bargain in the fortune-teller’s room—is the story’s most formally ambitious passage. The crimson cloth, the triangle, the all-seeing eye, the demand for “your will, your voice, your soul”: these are rendered without ironic distance, without the narrator winking at the reader. The occult is taken at its word, which is the correct choice. To have Salem dismiss the ritual and win anyway would reduce the story to a satire of superstition. To have him accept it and win, and then lose his voice, is to commit to allegory without abandoning realism. The fortune-teller’s room is the logical terminus of everything that preceded it: a world in which institutions have been so thoroughly corrupted that a man seeking power has nowhere left to go but here.

The resolution delivers victory and devastation in the same breath. Salem is elected. The city erupts. The house fills with guests. And then he opens his mouth and nothing comes. This convergence of triumph and erasure is the story’s structural masterstroke: the resolution does not follow the climax, it contains it. The winning and the losing are simultaneous, which is precisely how the bargain was framed. He was never promised a voice. He was promised a name on a ballot.

Viewed through Dan Harmon’s Story Circle, the structural logic deepens further. Salem begins in his zone of comfort—failed, yes, but stable; humiliated, but known to himself. He wants something beyond that stability. He is pulled into the unfamiliar world of the campaign, the party machine, the fortune-teller’s room. He adapts, calculating and bargaining. He gets what he wanted. He pays the price. He returns—and this is the circle’s most devastating turn —to the same room, the same house, the same people, but as someone who no longer exists in any meaningful sense. The circle closes not on transformation but on substitution. A different thing wearing Salem’s face has come back from the journey, and the watching eye by the curtain is the only witness who knows the difference.

What makes the story formally coherent is that both frameworks, the five-stage dramatic arc and the character circle, arrive at the same conclusion by different roads. The plot resolves. The man does not. Laaraibi’s greatest technical achievement here is holding those two trajectories in the same frame, so that the reader experiences the victory and the loss as a single event, indistinguishable from each other, which is, finally, the story’s darkest argument: that in a system built on corruption, winning and being destroyed are not opposites. They are the same transaction, dressed for a celebration. Salem is fictional. The bargain is not.

Political and Social Corruption

The story’s portrait of electoral politics is unflinching and precise. Laaraibi does not construct a villain, an opposing candidate who represents evil while Salem represents good. Both Salem and his rival Isaac are operating within the same system: buying votes, courting elders with promises, visiting the fortune-teller in the night. “Amounts promised to each neighbourhood turned into the city’s freshest gossip, traded like market prices.” This single sentence captures the normalisation of corruption with devastating efficiency. Vote-buying is not a secret. It is the market.

Salem’s past further contextualises his political ambitions. He “stumbled through school, hardly passing, and dropped out before finishing.” He tried smuggling, was caught, bribed his way to a suspended sentence, and has since lived on a state grant supplemented by Najla’s small trade. His desire for elected office is not civic in any meaningful sense. It is the last available shortcut in a life that has been built on shortcuts. The community board seat is not a platform; it is, as he has observed in rivals, a mechanism for acquiring land, construction funds, and apartment blocks. Power, in this world, is a redistribution of resources to the connected, and Salem wants to be connected.

This portrait resonates with broader analyses of political culture in transitional and post-colonial North African states. Scholars of governance in the MENA region have noted how formal democratic structures, elections, parties, local councils, can function as facades behind which clientelist networks and patronage systems operate. When Salem reflects that “winners acquired plots of land, received funds for houses, and even built apartment blocks,” he is describing a system of institutionalised rent-seeking that has been documented across the region. Laaraibi does not cite this scholarship; he dramatises it in a kitchen argument between a husband and wife, which is the more powerful choice.

The story is also alert to how corruption reproduces itself generationally. Najla’s most pointed line is not about money or magic but about their son: “Do you want our son growing up thinking we’ll never matter?” The question is devastating precisely because it is understandable. She is not asking Salem to be corrupt for personal greed alone; she is asking him to be corrupt so that their child inherits a different starting position. The system has made corruption feel like parenting.

Symbolism: Salem, Najla, and the Fortune-Teller

Salem is the story’s most carefully constructed symbol, and his name is where the irony is sharpest. Salem, Arabic for “safe,” “unharmed,” “whole” — a name that carries the promise of a man who arrives intact and leaves the same way. Yet from the story’s first page, Salem is anything but whole. He has been chipped at steadily by failure: the school years barely survived, the smuggling conviction, the suspended sentence purchased through bribes, the businesses that collapsed before they began, the state grant that covers survival but never dignity. His name promises preservation. His life has been a slow erosion. By the time the fortune-teller takes what remains, there is a bitter precision to the transaction: the man named “unharmed” has been so thoroughly damaged by the world around him that surrendering the last of himself feels less like destruction and more like completing what was already underway.

But Salem is not only a portrait of individual failure. He embodies a broader and increasingly visible social pathology: the failing youth who has abandoned the slow architecture of honest labour, patience, and gradual wealth-building in favour of the shortcut, the scheme, the sudden windfall. His trajectory, from contraband smuggling across the desert to electoral corruption, is not random. It follows the internal logic of a man for whom legitimate accumulation has come to feel not merely difficult but naive, a fool’s bargain in a world where the visibly prosperous have clearly played by different rules. The winners he watches acquire land, construction funds, and apartment blocks not through industry but through proximity to power. Salem does not want to work his way up. He wants to arrive. And in wanting that, he mirrors a generation increasingly seduced by the idea that wealth is something seized rather than built, that patience is a consolation for those without connections, and that the only real question is which door to knock on and what to offer when it opens. This is the story’s most socially urgent observation: that corruption is not only a political disease but a cultural one, hollowing out the values of hard work and deferred reward that hold communities together, replacing them with the worship of sudden fortune by whatever means available. And it is precisely this hollowing out that makes Salem’s eventual capitulation not a surprise but a conclusion: a man who has spent years dismantling his own moral architecture arrives, in the end, at a room with nothing left to protect.

This is what separates Salem from a simple cautionary figure. He is not a good man undone by a single catastrophic choice. He is a man whose choices have been narrowing for years, each one closing off an exit, each one extracting a cost he could not afford but paid anyway. The smuggling cost him his reputation. The bribes cost him whatever remained of his civic standing. The vote-buying will cost him his integrity. The fortune-teller costs him his voice, which is to say, his self. The trajectory is not a fall. It is a series of small surrenders so gradual that the final one, the one on the crimson cloth beneath the all-seeing eye, arrives with the exhausted logic of inevitability rather than the drama of damnation.

His rationalisation on the night before he goes is the story’s most psychologically precise passage, and the one that universalises him most completely. “Visiting does not mean believing — only taking care. What harm in listening?” It is the voice of every person who has ever told themselves that this one compromise will be the last, that crossing this particular line does not count as crossing it, that strategy and superstition are different things even when they lead to the same room. Salem is fictional. But that voice is not. It has been heard in every century, in every culture, by every person who has stood at the threshold of a bargain they already know they will accept.

Najla symbolises the materialism that corruption feeds and requires, and her name is where that irony is most precisely lodged. Najla, Arabic for a wide-eyed beauty, a woman whose gaze is open and luminous, carries a meaning the story dismantles from its first scene. For Najla is anything but wide-eyed. She is narrow, tactical, and unsentimental, a woman who sees exactly what she wants and closes in on it with the patience of someone who has been waiting a very long time. Twelve years, to be precise: twelve years of carrying the household on her back through small trade and informal sales whilst Salem nursed a dream that repeatedly collapsed. Her longing is not shallow vanity. It is the accumulated frustration of a woman who has been economically invisible for over a decade, and who has watched others rise through the same system that keeps her counting coins at a market stall.

Where her name promises an open, wondering gaze on the world, the character delivers its opposite: eyes fixed on the leather seats of a borrowed car, on gold bangles, on the city bending aside as she passes. The breadth suggested by her name has contracted, under years of domestic labour and deferred hope, into a single tunnelled line of sight: upward mobility, by whatever means available. The campaign vehicle scene is the story’s most precise portrait of this contraction. Najla climbs in, runs her hands across the dashboard “as if caressing a treasure,” reclines her seat, and imagines herself as one of the wealthy wives she has spent years envying. The borrowed car becomes a borrowed life, tried on for the length of a campaign and destined to be returned when the party no longer needs it. That the car belongs to the party, not to Salem, and must go back, is the story’s coldest irony about political patronage: it lends, it never gives.

The campaign parade deepens this portrait further. Najla dresses elaborately, claims the front car, waves like royalty, and basks in the crowd’s attention. Yet the sentence that places her most precisely in the story’s moral architecture is this: she was not Najla the trinket seller, but Najla the wife of someone who mattered. Her public identity is entirely derivative. She matters only through proximity to a man who might matter, and even that proximity is conditional on an election result. In a society that has offered her no independent avenue to public recognition, borrowed glory is the only kind available, which is why she pursues it with such unguarded hunger. Laaraibi does not satirise this. He renders it with enough interiority that the reader understands why the hunger is so fierce, even as its object is so fragile.

Her relationship with the fortune-teller is, in this context, more than superstition. It is a displaced political instinct. Najla cannot vote meaningfully, cannot stand as a candidate, cannot buy votes with her own money. The fortune-teller represents a parallel power structure, one coded as female, occult, and outside the formal political system, and Najla’s faith in it is the faith of a woman who has correctly sensed that something beyond money decides outcomes, even if she is wrong about what that something is. This naming irony mirrors Salem’s with structural precision. Salem, “the unharmed,” is destroyed by the very victory he pursues. Najla, “the wide-eyed,” is the story’s most wilfully blind character, unable or unwilling to see what the fortune-teller’s bargain will cost, or perhaps simply choosing not to look. She is, in that sense, the system’s most effective enforcer: she does not need to be corrupt herself to perpetuate corruption. She only needs to want things, and to keep her eyes trained on them, wide open, seeing everything except the price.

The fortune-teller is the story’s most ambitious symbolic construction. On one level, she is a local satirical figure, the charlatan who preys on desperate candidates during election season. All the candidates go. How else do you think they win every election? Najla’s line establishes her as a feature of the political landscape, as normalised as the vote-buying itself. On a deeper level, however, the fortune-teller represents what Laaraibi explicitly evokes through the triangle and the all-seeing eye: the secret society, the hidden power that guarantees fortune and fame in exchange for the surrender of individual will. The all-seeing eye on the crimson cloth is one of the most globally recognised symbols of occult power structures, from Freemasonry to conspiracy discourse, and its placement in a story set in a North African city is not accidental. Laaraibi is making a claim that goes beyond local satire: that the mechanisms by which political power is secretly guaranteed and individual agency surrendered are universal, wearing different costumes in different cultures but always extracting the same price.

The fortune-teller’s final demand, “your will, your voice, your soul,” is not merely dramatic. It is a precise description of what political systems that operate through corruption actually require of their participants. Salem loses his voice, literally, at the moment of his triumph. He can win but he cannot speak. The elected man is a hollow vessel for the interests that elected him. This is not supernatural horror; it is a fairly accurate description of how clientelist political systems work.

Style: Lyrical Realism and Charged Detail

Laaraibi’s prose in “The Fortune of Votes” operates in a lower register than in “An Innocent Desire,” which suits the subject. Where the migration story is lyrical and intimate, this story is sharper, more satirical, its sentences doing the work of social observation as much as emotional rendering. Yet lyrical realism persists throughout, particularly in the moments of heightened desire.

The description of Najla in the campaign car is one example: her hands moving “slowly across the dashboard as if caressing a treasure,” the cold air from the conditioner, the imagined gold bangles, the city bending aside. The sensory detail carries the scene beyond social commentary into genuine interiority. Similarly, the fortune-teller’s room is rendered with precision: the incense, the tapestries woven with strange signs, the crimson cloth, the polished slab, the eye that “seemed to follow him as he stepped closer.” These are not generic descriptions of atmosphere but specific, charged images that accumulate meaning.

The dialogue is consistently functional and socially revealing. Exchanges between Salem and Najla have the texture of a long marriage: the shorthand, the unfinished arguments, the silences that do more work than the words. “She knew better than to push” appears twice, and the repetition is not careless. It shows Najla’s tactical patience, her understanding that Salem is already turning even as he resists, and her willingness to wait for the moment when resistance collapses of its own weight. This is characterisation through restraint, arguably the harder craft choice.

The story’s most stylistically confident move is its final image. Salem grips the glass. The fortune-teller watches from the curtain and slips away. He cannot speak. “His victory stood certain, but no longer his. His silence sealed the bargain, proof that he now belonged elsewhere.” The sentence “proof that he now belonged elsewhere” is the story’s irreducible perfect closing note. It does not over-explain the allegory or reach for sentiment. It states, with flat precision, the cost of what was purchased on the crimson cloth. The reader is left to sit with the weight of it.

From Local Satire to Universal Allegory

What distinguishes “The Fortune of Votes” from mere political satire is its insistence on the universal beneath the local. The surface elements are immediately recognisable to any reader familiar with North African electoral politics: the party vehicle distributed as patronage, the vote-buying, the community board as a vehicle for personal enrichment, the fortune-teller as a standard feature of the campaign season. For readers within that context, the story reads as sharp, knowing documentation of a familiar reality.

For readers outside it, the same elements map onto a broader argument about power, secret societies, and the surrender of individual will in exchange for institutional protection. The triangle and the all-seeing eye are not local symbols. They belong to a global lexicon of occult power that spans from African traditional belief systems to Western esoteric traditions, and their presence in the story transforms a Saharan community board election into an instance of a universal transaction: the one in which a person trades autonomy for advancement and discovers, too late, that the trade cannot be reversed.

This is Laaraibi’s most significant formal achievement in the story. He does not abandon local specificity for the sake of universality, nor does he use universality as a way of avoiding the local political critique. Both registers operate simultaneously. Salem buying votes is a Moroccan electoral story. Salem surrendering his voice to a secret power that guaranteed his election is every story, in every century, about what it costs to rise through systems that do not believe in the people they claim to serve.

Conclusion: A Fable for the Post-Truth Age

“The Fortune of Votes” is, ultimately, a fable about what happens when civic institutions fail the people they are meant to represent. When formal channels of political participation are corrupted, when elections are markets and offices are prizes, citizens do not simply disengage. They seek other power structures, other guarantees, other rooms lit by candles and furnished with watching eyes. The fortune-teller exists because the ballot box has been emptied of meaning. The occult bargain is available because no legitimate bargain is.

Salem’s silence at his own victory celebration is the story’s most potent image of contemporary political life. He has won. He cannot speak. Just another puppet on strings. What he has gained is a title. What he has lost is the only thing that could have made the title mean anything. This is the transaction the story is really about: not the exchange of cash for votes, but the exchange of self for power, of moral integrity for material ascent. Salem is fictional. The bargain is not.

To read the story click on the link below:

The Fortune of Votes