It's politics, stupid

A lot of commentators on the recent wave of protests in the region have pointed to socioeconomic factors such as poverty and unemployment. High food prices have been a particular favourite of the more wonkish pundits out there, who have liked to point out that food makes up a very high proportion of household expenditure in Egypt by global standards.

As an aside, to me this is less interesting than it first sounds. Saying that food makes up a large proportion of household expenditure in a given country is to a large degree simply saying that said country is poor. Of course it's a little more complicated than that as other factors such as subsidies, taxes, the degree of national food self-sufficiency and transport costs for imports also affect food prices and how much expenditure they account for. But at the same time, a lot of it boils down to the fact that the poorer a people are, the higher percentage of their income they'll have to spend on basic items such as food and the less they'll have for non-essential items. For example FT Tilt recently published a fancy graph by Goldman Sachs showing that food expenditures in Egypt were the second highest in the region as a proportion of the inflation basket out of 14 countries in the region. But then, based on GDP per capita levels, Egypt is also the third poorest of the 14 countries, so that's not particularly surprising or interesting.

And yet, it's not the poorest countries in the world, or even in the region (eg Mauritania), that have seen the most significant uprisings; nor is it clear why Tunisia should have seen the first major revolt when it's substantially wealthier and exposed to food-price changes (according to the GM graph) than say Syria, which has barely seen a peep. Conversely according to another chart published by the WSJ, Moroccans are even more exposed to food price rises, yet it's been quiet so far too. (That could change given plans for demonstrations in a few days, though I very much doubt it will see an Egyptian-scale uprising).    


Obviously a lot of factors are playing into this, but I think the nail in the coffin for the econo-determinists is the eruption of major unrest in Bahrain and Libya. Libya is by far the wealthiest North African country on a per capita basis. While the GM graph shows it has having a fairly high vulnerability to food price changes (though still lower than say Syria), presumably because it's heavily import-dependent, that still leaves a lot of money in absolute terms to spend on other things given its high per capita GDP. Meanwhile Bahrain is one of the wealthiest countries in the region (and in the non-Western world), as well as (according the GS chart) one of the three regional countries least exposed to food price changes (accounting for less than 20% of expenditure, vs more than 40% in Egypt). Now clearly in spite of overall wealth, there are problems such as uneven distribution of wealth in these countries and other socioeconomic problems such as high unemployment (especially in Libya), but let's be clear that there are also much quieter countries in the region with much more severe overall socioeconomic problems. The King of Bahrain has just announced that he's making a donation to all Bahraini families of an amount greater than the GDP per capita of some other countries in the region. It makes little sense if food prices and the like are the driver of unrest for it to break out in Bahrain while Mauritania and Morocco both stay fairly quiet.

To me, what these protests are about is first and foremost politics, not economics. In particular, what they're about is regime legitimacy, something Presidents-for-life like Ben Ali and Mubarak - and Qadhafi and Ali Abdullah Saleh of Yemen, which has seen significant protests - are particularly lacking in, as are minority-dominated regimes such as Bahrain.

At the same time, I think several other factors affect whether people are willing to come out to protest en masse.

One is  extreme domestic ethno-sectarian or political divisions, which for example make seriously divided countries like Iraq and Lebanon unlikely candidates for national-level uprisings.

Another is fear of renewed violence and instability making people just want to get on with their lives and keep their heads down - lowering the chances of any mass uprising in Iraq and Lebanon again, as well as in an Algeria still traumatised by civil war (as the Moor Next Door has noted, Algeria had a popular uprising in 1988, which set off a chain of events that ended in catastrophe). This also might be a factor in the two countries most affected by the fallout of Iraq (in terms of refugee inflows, Syria - mitigating factors such as its rule by a minority sect - and Jordan.

Given these factors, I think Issandr El Amrani nails it when he says that

the most important protests now taking place in North Africa are those in Libya. [...] Libya shares something important with Egypt and Tunisia: an aging leader (41 years in power) faces a looming succession crisis in which the leading candidates are his own sons. I simply don't think that's an acceptable outcome for any republic in the 21st century, and was a key aspect to the revolt against Hosni Mubarak in Egypt, and to a lesser extent in Tunisia (with the rumored heir apparent being his nephew).

 Qadhafi doesn't have a lot going for him based on these factors. He's the longest-serving ruler in the region (and is a complete clown to boot, something I think is more important than people might think given that it can undermine nationalist legitimacy; I reckon Ahmadinejad's embarrassing outbursts did a lot to help inspire the degree of antipathy shown towards him by many Iranians when he won a second term in 2009, and that increasing publicity surrounding Ben Ali's family's corruption helped undermine him too). He rules over a country that is ethnically and religiously relatively homogenous (though there are important tribal and regional divisions) and that has no recent history of major instability or violence. All he has going for him is oil wealth - which didn't help the Shah of Iran for example - and a particularly repressive and brutal security apparatus. This didn't much help Ben Ali (Tunisia was more open and less violently repressive than Libya, but it was still a very repressive and closed regime) and can backfire by galvanising protests instead of successfully repressing them.

Iranian repression vs Egypt and Tunisia

Recently a lot of pundits have been making the point that renewed protests in Iran are unlikely to bring the government down, something with which I agree. However one reason a lot of them have been giving is that the Iranians are more willing to ruthlessly use force to stay in power, as demonstrated by the events of summer 2009.

The Iranian regime has an atrocious human rights record, let there be no doubt about that. It's a record that is in many ways worse than a lot of the pro-Western regimes in the region. But the events of 2009 do not at all point to it being more willing to kill vasts amount of people to stay in power. Stephen Walt also challenges the WSJ on this topic, but by saying that the Mubarak regime didn't brutally repress protestors "this time round" I think he misses a key point.

According to Green movement leaders themselves, 72 people died in the post-election protests in Iran (the Iranian government said around 36). That compares to at least 360 in Egypt and over 200 in Tunisia. The contrast to Tunisia is particularly strong, given that the Iranian population is around seven or eight times larger, and given also that, based on reports of the protests, vastly more people in Iran took to the streets than in Egypt or Tunisia (there were reports that one march in Tehran was three million strong alone; the Tunisian marches were tens of thousands strong and the highest estimate I heard for a Cairo demonstration was two million).

That makes the per capita death toll of demonstrators vastly higher in Egypt and Tunisia than in Iran. Based on these figures, Western-backed regimes' security forces seem to have shown far greater willingness to kill than the Basij did in 2009. Indeed one of the lessons the regime likely drew from the fall of the Shah in 1979 was that massacring people is a great way to stiffen their determination to overthrow them, something Mubarak and Ben Ali  and their police forces (though possibly not their armies) seem to have missed.

Some interesting Egypt statistics

One of the questions asked by Pew Global Attitudes Project in their 2009 survey was "how satisfied are you with your life overall?" (As far as I can tell they didn't ask the same question in their 2010 survey).

Of the 25 nationalities surveyed, Egyptians were by some way the least satisfied with their lives. 60% of Egyptians surveyed, more than any other nationality, said they were dissatisfied with their lives. Of these, 34% said they were very dissatisfied with their lives, again higher than in any other country. Bear in mind the survey included countries such as India, Kenya and Nigeria, which are substantially poorer than Egypt. Such high levels of dissatisfaction perhaps help explain the degree of anger shown by anti-Mubarak demonstrators in recent days. (Unfortunately, Tunisia wasn't included in the survey).

Perhaps ominously, Jordan was the next most unhappy country (56% dissatisfied, including 30% very dissatisfied).  Perhaps surprisingly, the other two Arab countries surveyed, Lebanon and the Palestinian Territories, were much happier (as were Israel and Turkey, the other two Middle Eastern countries surveyed).

Egyptians were also the least satisfied with their household income (again Jordan was the second least satisfied country), with their jobs (Jordan the third least satisfied this time), and with their personal economic situation (Jordan did a bit better here, coming in as fourth most dissatisfied, with Lebanon just behind Egypt as second most dissatisfied). Indians were most satisfied with their personal economic situation, suggesting that absolute income levels have little to do with levels of satisfaction (especially as the poll includes numerous developed western countries). I should be clear that I'm cherry-picking to an extent here - the survey asked tons of questions, and Egyptians weren't the most negative in anything like all of them - but they were in most of the questions about personal circumstances.

One final point worth making is that Egyptians were amongst the less likely to say that they were sometimes unable to afford food - only 16% said that had been the case during the previous year, less than (shockingly) the US, where the figure was 23%. (However, Egyptians were up there with some of the worse countries in terms of being unable to afford health care). This seems to suggest that pure economic and food inflation-based explanations of the Egyptian uprising  are off the mark; Egyptians are clearly unhappy for a number of reasons, but being amongst the poorest or hungriest people in the world isn't one of them. I wonder if things like comparing their own situation to that in Gulf Arab countries for example, or even just watching a lot  foreign TV, plays a role. At any rate, that inability to buy food doesn't seem be a comparatively big problem in Egypt seems to suggest that the explanation for the unrest is at least is more about political frustrations (frustration with a leader who just won't go away, hatred of the police and so on) than socioeconomic ones,  a view I lean towards already.

The full report is here: CONFIDENCE IN OBAMA LIFTS U.S. IMAGE AROUND THE WORLD - 25-Nation Pew Global Attitudes Survey.

Misrepresenting Saeb Erekat

I think this post goes a long way to demonstrate my not-very-positive opinions of Fatah and the Palestinian Authority. Revelations in the "Palestine Papers" that Washington "wouldn't stand for" (not a direct quote - the quotation marks are to indicate the outrageousness of it dictating this kind of thing) any change in the PA leadership, democratic or not, further point to its rising status as yet another US-backed police state in the region. I'll also say that I'm more or less a fan of Al-Jazeera, and the Guardian is my daily paper. AJ and the Guardian published the papers, and have played a major role in spinning them. A lot of their spin is justified - in particular regarding the jaw-dropping pro-Israeli bias of US figures, even including Obama and George Mitchell.

However I do think that Palestinian negotiator Saeb Erekat has been rather unfairly portrayed in some of this coverage. In particular, it's been widely reported that Erekat privately promised to recognise Israel as  a Jewish state while publicly vociferously rejecting such demands. I may not be on totally solid ground here, but from my understanding is that this is far from accurate.

Firstly this shouldn't be confused with the fact that Netanyahu and the Israelis have recently been pushing the Palestinians to recognise Israel as a Jewish state now, as a precondition for talks or Israeli "concessions" (ie international legal and Roadmap obligations, such as freezing settlements). Neither Erekat nor anyone else in the PA have ever made that concession (which would be meaningless unless it was a public one).

As for claims that he privately agreed to recognise Israel as a Jewish state as part of a peace deal, these seem to rest on two sources. The first is a transcript of a November 2007 discussion in which Erekat said  "If you want to call your state the Jewish state of Israel you can call it what you want." As far as I can tell, the document containing this quote hasn't been posted yet, so there is no evidence that Erekat is doing anything beyond saying it was none of the PA's business what Israel defined itself as.This isn't at all inconsistent with what Erekat and co have been saying publicly. Here is Abbas saying in July last year, six months before the release of the Palestine Papers, that "Israel can call itself whatever it wants. We don't have to recognize those definitions." The other document cited is this one, notes of an internal PA negotiating unit meeting, in which Erekat says in response to a warning that the US will back Israel on the matter: "This is a non-issue. I dare the Israelis to write to the UN and change their name to the 'Great Eternal Historic State of Israel'. This is their issue, not mine." Again, there is nothing here to indicate that Erekat is promising the Israelis anything, as opposed to simply refusing to engage Israel on the issue or be drawn on it, on the basis that it's not a matter for Palestinians to decide; and this meeting was an internal one, and involved no promises to the Israelis or the US. Loathe as I am to agree with the vile Tony Blair, I think he was right today to say that at least in this case semi-flippant remarks for private consumption have been taken entirely out of context. And again it's not inconsistent with what PA figures have said in public, as far as I can see. Any comments or information that would shed further light on this is welcome.

Mubarak pulls a Ben Pahlavi?

Update: Al Jazeera reporting on Saturday morning that at least 23 people have been killed in Alexandria and 15 people in Suez, and another correspondent saw 15 bodies with bullet wounds in one Cairo morgue alone. Unfortunately it's a bloodbath after all.



Obviously the Egyptian regime is in massive, massive trouble. I've been watching pundits on Al Jazeera predict all day that Mubarak is finished. The burning of the ruling party headquarters makes it look particularly screwed.

All of that said, regional governments have survived significantly worse unrest. Possibly three million people took to the streets of Tehran  in 2009 (vastly more than Egypt, on both an absolute and per capita basis), and around 500 people died in riots in Algeria in 1988; in both cases the government survived. Numerous regimes saw out enormous bread riots in the 1960s and 1970s.

Furthermore I thought until a few hours ago that the Egyptian regime was largely doing - from its own point of view - the smart thing if it wanted to stay in power. It seemed to be avoiding the mistakes of Ben Ali, who as a few commentators have pointed out looked in turn to be doing his best to emulate the mistakes of the Shah of Iran in 1979 - in particular enraging people by killing large numbers of protestors early on, and then going into full retreat mode, encouraging demonstrators with each successive concession. The Egyptians on the other hand appeared to be both trying to avoid a bloodbath (using brutal but mostly non-lethal force like tear gas to break up protests, though putting the army on the streets will makeit harder to avoid massacres) while standing firm and dismissing opposition demands.

When Mubarak went on TV an hour or so ago, at first I was more confident still that he had a shot at seeing this through, especially as the delays in his appearance had been sparking growing rumours that he'd already fled. He didn't look a picture of health, to be sure (except maybe for a vampire), but for an 82 year-old supposedly suffering from cancer and facing a potential imminent Ceaucasecu moment, just weeks after his pro-Western anti-Islamist tourist-dependent oil-poor homologue a few hundred miles away had to flee in panic, I thought he seemed remarkably composed and confident.

But as his speech went on, he sounded increasingly like he'd be racking up the frequent flier miles in the very near future. Some of his words sounded very like, if not identical to, the "I have heard the voice of your revolution" statements that Ben Ali and Pahlavi came out with shortly before they also felt its kick in the goolies. More importantly, firing the government hit the mega-jackpot of looking both desperate and out of touch at the same time; noone really cares about the cabinet, but sacking it will only embolden demonstrators.

So is Mubarak toast? I'm still not entirely sure (and of course we'll know soon enough, but futurology can be fun). It will depend on things like how much he's prepared himself and the likes of the security forces leaders for this kind of thing, and whether or not they panic in the face of events. A military commander gave a TV interview that suggested the military remained behind the regime. Simply being united and prepared to wait things out goes a long way - protests can't go on for ever, as Iran in 2009 showed. Mubarak didn't look quite as desperate as Ben Ali (yet) - he didn't promise to step down soon or call early elections. But he looks a lot more like seeing out his days as a tax exile than he did just a few hours ago.

Where were the Tunisian Islamists? Hint: in jail

A lot of commentators have been highlighting - often approvingly - the absence of a significant Islamist role in the Tunisian protests so far. See for example here, here and here. Many of them have been arguing that, thanks to the repression of political Islam in Tunisia, its high rates of education and the large middle class, political Islam is not and will not become a significant political force in the country, and that this is a positive thing as Islamism is a bad thing and/or inhibits democratic development, whether because Islamists are undemocratic or anti-Islamist foreign powers interfere to block democratically-elected Islamist governments.

I don't want to get into the argument of whether this would necessarily be a good or bad thing in this post. However, I will argue that it's much too soon to count Tunisia's Islamists out. No, they don't seem to have played a major role in the protests, though it's not really clear that any party or major organisation did either. The UGTT trades union was fairly prominent, but then the UGTT trades union, unlike the main Islamist movement Ennahda, wasn't banned under Ben Ali, and its members weren't largely in jail, exile or under constant police surveillance. From what I understand the largest component of the thousands of Tunisian political prisoners under Ben Ali were Islamists; I'm not sure why he would have gone to the bother of repressing and jailing them if they were a marginal force.


Leila Ouardani argues that the 1989 elections - the most free in recent decades - demonstrates the lack of support for Islamism in Tunisia because Ennahda only won 14% of the votes cast. I'm not sure how relevant elections from over 20 years ago are to the situation today, but I would argue that the 1989 results looked at in their full context suggest,  if anything, that the Tunisian Islamists were at least at that time a serious force to contend with. Firstly, the elections may have been the fairest in some time but they were still held under conditions that greatly benefited the RCD while disadvantaging opposition parties (see Chapter 2 of Christopher Alexander's recent book for more details), suggesting that the opposition parties' vote would have been higher in fair elections. Secondly, the Islamists were particularly at a particular disadvantage, as Ben Ali refused to legalise their party before the elections, meaning they had to run as independents.

Despite this significant additional disadvantage,which undoubtedly damaged their ability to campaign and organise, the Islamists still won vastly more votes than any other party than the RCD; the next most successful party took 4% of the vote. At the very least they were the most important opposition force by far, and possibly the most popular political force in the country.

Of course, having been so comprehensively repressed in the years since, they're starting from a much weaker positions than movements with intact organisational structures. Still though, from what Prime Minister Ghannoushi is saying, they may have six months to organise a campaign for the parliamentary elections (they've said they won't put forward a candidate in the Presidential elections), and they are much less tainted by involvement in the Ben Ali system than most established parties in movements; many of the legal "opposition" parties effectively acquiesced in its rule, and often defended it from criticism, as the price for being allowed legal status and occasionally a few token seats in parliament. Furthermore, if there's one thing that Islamists have demonstrated across the Middle East and North Africa, it's that they often tend to be the best organised and most highly motivated of all parties and movements, and that they have the ability to massively outperform expectations and win crushing surprise victories (eg Hamas in 2006), sometimes seemingly out of nowhere (most notably the Front Islamique du Salut in the 1990 elections in Algeria). Those who argue that Tunisia is too "middle class" to vote Islamist might want to look to Turkey for example, where the AKP derives much of its support from a newish commercial middle class, sometimes termed the "Islamist bourgeoisie."

I don't mean to argue that the Islamists will inevitably win, or even do particularly well, in any free and fair Tunisian elections, should they take place (a big if). If there's one thing that people (and above all professional commentators) should take home from the events of Tunisia, it's that noone knew what is that Tunisians want. Prior to Ben Ali's overthrow it was a truism that Tunisians were willing to trade off their civil and political freedoms in return for prosperity and stability (again see Tunisia specialist Christopher Alexander's book, in which he makes this argument), something that in my view clearly turned out to be untrue. While some commentators and journalists have suggested that the bargain was real but went sour because of recent economic troubles, these haven't been anywhere near drastic enough to prompt a sudden about-turn in the national mood; despite all the commentary the economy about inflation and a lack of jobs, the econoymhas continued to grow in recent times, including in per capita terms, while inflation and unemployment aren't particularly high by either regional or recent historical Tunisian standards, meaning they fail to explain why such a turn of events should have happened in Tunisia now. Rather, the clear explanation is the the "bargain" explanation was wrong all along, that Ben Ali and his family have been widely despised for some time and that people were simply too afraid to articulate their feelings until a sort of tipping point occurred.

So I don't pretend to know what Tunisians really want; noone can know what millions of people want and believe without solid research and evidence in the form of things like reliable opinion polls, which don't yet exist in Tunisia. But given the evidence of Tunisian history and regional precedent, counting the Islamists out of Tunisia's future at this juncture is seriously premature, and the predictions based on doing so should be taken with a large dose of scepticism.

As one corrupt Western-backed dictatorship falls...

Aisling Byrne describes the rise of a Western-built police state in the West Bank.

Anyone spot any topical parallels? A pro-Western Arab dictatorship led by an uncharismatic successor to an iconic nationalist leader? Family cronies? Blocking Islamist opponents, if they're not actually in jail, from living every day lives? Absurdly high numbers of police and internal security forces and a marginalised/non-existent military? I just can't put my finger on it...