A retired law professor with no prior experience in government won by a landslide in Tunisia’s presidential runoff in mid-October. Kais Saied’s victory, with more than 70 percent of the vote, was widely seen as a sign that the electorate is fed up with the country’s political establishment. In parliamentary elections held between the first and second round of the presidential race, no party won more than 19 percent of the vote. Ennahda, the moderate Islamist party, won a plurality of 52 seats but is likely to face difficulty assembling a coalition government in the 217-seat parliament. In an email [...]
From Lebanon and Iraq to Ecuador and Chile, popular protests have shaken governments and captured the imagination of pundits worldwide in the past few weeks. Combined with the mass demonstrations that forced regimes in Algeria and Sudan to cast aside longtime leaders earlier this year, as well as the Yellow Vest movement that stunned France from December 2018 through the late spring, some observers are wondering whether we are witnessing a revolutionary moment of global proportions. Has popular dissatisfaction with the unfair distribution of globalization’s spoils reached a tipping point? Or are these protests locally driven, offering little or no [...]
Mass protests are unfolding across the Middle East and North Africa, as demonstrators take to the streets to decry a wide range of social and political ills. From Algiers to Khartoum, Beirut to Baghdad, the list of grievances includes rampant corruption, economic malaise, oppression and sectarian divisions. The protests have already resulted in the ouster of two leaders this year, in Sudan and Algeria. In other countries, demonstrators have clashed with security forces, resulting in hundreds of deaths and injuries, and many more arrests. Given their wide geographic scope, the protests have drawn comparisons to the Arab uprisings that swept [...]
