King Mohammed VI succeeded to the throne in July when his father, Hassan II, died after reigning for 38 years. As crown prince, Mohammed had been dismissed by some as a bachelor playboy.

But in only three months, the 36-year-old king has emerged as a powerful advocate of social change in a region that is witnessing a generational shift in monarchies from Morocco to Jordan.

Already popular among this country's 30 million people, Mohammed VI, close-cropped and unshaven, looks more like a movie star than a monarch. On a recent 10-day tour through the country's north, hundreds of thousands lined the streets to cheer him. Schools closed, ancient markets shut down and entire families trooped to the roadsides to see the young king, who arrived, wearing a white suit and a black tie, standing up in a white Cadillac stretch limousine with a sunroof.

Diplomats here in the capital and ordinary people encountered in cities and desert outposts from Marrakesh to Fez say the king has quickly begun shaking up entrenched bureaucratic habits and ways of doing things in his strategically situated country.

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''He kept two lists while he was watching his father,'' one diplomat said of the new king. ''There are some things he wants to do the same way as his father, but there are clearly other things he intends to do very differently.''

[On Nov. 9, the king dismissed his father's longtime minister of the interior, Driss Basri, in a move diplomats and officials saw as signaling further change in political direction. Many people in Morocco and abroad considered Mr. Basri the power behind the throne when Hassan II was king.]

The king himself keeps saying that he wants to promote ''a new concept of authority.'' He has done this with early, popular calls to improve the lot of the majority of Moroccans, who live in poverty, scratching an existence out of the rocky desert, and with a series of conciliatory gestures that appear to signal new openness toward political opponents and estranged parts of the country.

''He is a good man, he helps crippled people, and he will help us, too,'' said Abdourrazak Abdelfadel as he boiled a pot of water for tea over a propane gas cylinder in a mud hut in the oasis of Tinerhir, at the edge of the vast Sahara.

But popular expectations of the new king seem almost unrealistically high, in a country where unemployment is above 20 percent. Bringing it down, officials say, will require nearly tripling economic growth, to 7 percent a year, not an easy task in an agricultural economy where the rainy season often produces only shimmering mirages in the sand.

Years of drought have driven so many people to cities like Rabat, Fez and Marrakesh that about half the population lives in urban areas, where those without much education have little chance of finding work. Even 117,000 of Morocco's university graduates, by official count, could not find jobs.

From abroad, much is expected of the king as well. When King Mohammed's father died, President Clinton and scores of other Western leaders came to the funeral. And like his father before him, the new king is regarded by some Western leaders as a bridge to the Muslim world.

President Jacques Chirac and Prime Minister Lionel Jospin of France are already courting the king with personal visits to Morocco, a French protectorate from 1912 to 1956.

One of the new king's first official acts was to send an emissary to France to negotiate terms for the return of one of the kingdom's most famous political exiles: Abraham Serfaty, a Moroccan Jew sentenced to life imprisonment for opposition activities and expelled by Hassan II in 1991.

Mr. Serfaty, 73, flew back home on Sept. 30. Then, in mid-October, the king gave permission to return from France to the exiled family of Mehdi Ben Barka, another opposition figure kidnapped under mysterious circumstances in Paris in 1965 and believed tortured to death at Hassan II's orders.

Asked whether he had been muzzled as a condition of his return, Mr. Serfaty told the French daily Le Monde, ''My positions are well known, and I have not been asked to change them.'' He continued to support autonomy for the Western Sahara territory, formerly under Spanish rule, that was claimed by Hassan II for Morocco in 1975, Mr. Serfaty said, but he had agreed ''not to hinder Moroccan diplomacy.''

The dispute over Western Sahara is one reason for continuing tension between Morocco and Algeria, which supports the Polisario Front independence movement in the territory.

Though Morocco is officially committed to letting the people of Western Sahara decide the territory's future in a referendum next year, the prospect is now fading, some diplomats believe, because of fears by Moroccan officials that the vote could go against them and produce a majority for independence.

Closer to home, the king has also made changes at a level where ordinary Moroccans can see them. One of the most dramatic was his attempt to heal a rift with the country's north, where the mountainous Rif region long resented his father for having led a military expedition to put down a revolt there in 1956.

''The King Rehabilitates the Rif,'' read the headline in the French-language weekly Le Journal, which like other newspapers noted that the region's main economic activity -- lacking modern roads and other infrastructure the king now promises to provide -- has consisted of smuggling locally grown marijuana and hashish, nearly 2,000 tons of it last year, into Western Europe.

Outside of China, few places these days can mobilize millions of people to spend hours waiting in the hot sun for their leader to pass by, as this kingdom did. But hundreds of thousands of people in Fez, where Mohammed VI came after visiting the Rif region, seemed happy to be waiting for him on his visit on Oct. 19.

''I wanted to be in the front row,'' said Lhoul Nezhro, a woman who stood four hours before the king finally arrived, in the dark, at one of the main squares outside the amber ramparts of the city. The square, like the others he passed through, had been covered end-to-end with red, purple and saffron hand-woven carpets -- at state expense, according to officials.

''He will help students find jobs after they graduate,'' said a 14-year-old student, Mohammed Yassin el-Jazadi, who was lucky enough to actually touch the king's hand after he got out of the limousine inside the Fez city walls and briskly strode up and down at the edges of the crowd, bodyguards pushing away anybody who tried to take his arm. At every stop, people in wheelchairs got a personal greeting and a handshake.

For a moment, hope seemed as abundant as Morocco's problems. Despite the presence of elementary schools even in desert villages far from any road, 43 percent of the male population is illiterate. Female illiteracy is even higher, since many rural families do not send their daughters to school.

In a break with tradition, Mohammed VI did not marry before succeeding to the throne, according to government officials. Yet such are the power of old ways here that many of his subjects believe he must have taken a wife secretly.

The status of women here is not as restricted as in some other Islamic countries, and Morocco has also kept a tight lid on Islamic militancy, given the example of Algeria next door where 100,000 people have died over the last decade in civil conflict between the Socialist government and fundamentalist opponents.

''Social action, mobilizing all available resources to bring the underprivileged classes back into the fold of society,'' Mohammed VI told authorities here, ''have priority importance.''

His spokesman, a young academic and former diplomat named Hassan Aourid, said the king would work closely with the Socialist government led by Abderrahman Youssoufi, a former political prisoner twice Mohammed VI's age, in declaring a war on poverty.

''The aim,'' Mr. Aourid said, ''is modernity.''

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