When the Covid-19 pandemic swept across the Middle East and north Africa, it succeeded where regimes in Algeria, Iraq and Lebanon had failed — it brought an abrupt halt to months of mass anti-government demonstrations.
But this is likely to only prove a hiatus as coronavirus exacerbates the economic and social pressures that have fuelled public anger with the region’s regimes, which lack credibility in the eyes of many.
Most states in the Middle East and north Africa, with restless, youthful populations and rampant unemployment, lack the financial resources to mimic wealthy nations and provide large-scale rescue packages to support businesses and protect jobs.
Millions of young people work in informal sectors, often surviving day-to-day and supporting families.
Before the crisis, protesters had shown determination — neither accepting what many viewed as hollow promises of reform delivered by elites bent on self-preservation, nor being cowed by violence.
Now they are being asked to put their faith in the very leaders that many raged against.
“The coronavirus has exposed the fragility of the social safety-net systems across the region,” said Lina Khatib, head of the Middle East programme at Chatham House. “Covid-19 has postponed the inevitable unrest to come.”
Some governments have promised to reprioritise spending to support poorer families. But across the region, the trust deficit between the ruled and the rulers is wide. Transparency is anathema for regimes riddled with corruption and cronyism.
It is a curse that affects everything from economic performance — a World Bank report this month estimated that declining data transparency resulted in loss of income per person ranging between 7 per cent and 14 per cent in the region from 2005-2018 — to trust in government handling of the pandemic.
Authoritarian tendencies have remained on display throughout the crisis. Egypt expelled a British journalist after she reported on an academic report that suggested the country’s Covid-19 case number could be far higher.
Anti-government protesters run for cover during skirmishes with shop owners near Baghdad’s Tahrir Square © Hadi Mizban/APIraq temporarily suspended the licence of Reuters after the news agency published an article making similar claims. At least four journalists have been arrested in Iraq’s autonomous Kurdistan region over the past month, according to Reporters Without Borders.
In Saudi Arabia, a local critic of government plans to relocate homes away from Neom, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman’s $500bn flagship megaproject, was shot by security forces. The government said the man fired first at security forces.
Editor’s note
The Financial Times is making key coronavirus coverage free to read to help everyone stay informed. Find the latest here.
In Algeria, activists accuse the authorities of exploiting the crisis to crack down on opponents, including detaining an opposition politician and a journalist.
The economic pain is also increasingly apparent. In Iraq, hit by the double blow of Covid-19 and the collapse in oil prices, an official has warned that next month Baghdad may not be able to pay half its staff in the public sector, by far the largest employer. Algeria, another country exposed to the oil price plunge, is cutting state spending by 30 per cent.
Elsewhere, Egypt, Jordan, Tunisia and Morocco are being battered by the freeze in tourism, a vital source of jobs and foreign currency earnings.
Revenues are plummeting, remittances are drying up and currencies are weakening. Lebanon was in economic meltdown long before China reported the first Covid-19 case and small, sporadic protests have continued.
Egypt, Jordan, Tunisia and Morocco (above) are being battered by the freeze in tourism, a vital source of jobs and foreign currency earnings © Jalal MorchidiI/EPA-EFE/ShutterstockThe real test, however, will come after the pandemic begins to ease and the economic consequences of the global crisis are truly felt, particularly for the region’s most vulnerable.
As lockdowns are lifted, austerity will bite in countries already burdened with high poverty and unemployment rates.
“Who is going to accept more stringent economic conditions when the present ones are terrible?” asked Marwan Muasher, a former Jordanian foreign minister and vice-president of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. “Everybody can come up with an economic plan. But who is going to buy it if governments don’t start changing the way they conduct business?”
If they do not become more accountable and efficient — as most failed to do after the 2011 uprisings that rocked the Arab world — the trust gap will widen and herald the next wave of anger.
Source: Economy - ft.com
