Recent street protests in Algeria, Chile, Hong Kong, India, Iraq, Lebanon, Pakistan and Russia indicate a groundswell of political discontent that stretches across the globe. Leaving aside environmental rallies, which have taken place in more than 150 countries, the proximate causes of the most recent demonstrations vary widely. Algeria has been resisting its military’s hold on power; Hong Kong, China’s authoritarian attempts to rein in its fragile, semi-autonomous democracy; India’s protests were triggered by the price of onions and Chile, Iraq, Lebanon, Pakistan have come out against a mix of cronyism, corruption, mismanagement and economic distress. Nevertheless, in every case young people have been at the forefront of the protests. That should come as no surprise: four in ten of the global population (7.7 billion) is under the age of 24 and a steadily increasing fraction of this demographic no longer seems content to leave its political futures in the hands of governing elites.
A decade after the global financial crisis, the economies in almost all of these countries have been slowing or stagnant. Chile used to be the poster child of Washington’s neoliberal experiments in Latin America, with an average of 6 percent growth the 1990s and 4 percent in the 2000s. That plummeted to just 2 percent in the last five years and looks set to fall further. The International Monetary Fund (IMF) forecasts growth of just 0.2 percent for Latin America – down from ten times that figure just a year ago. Elsewhere, national wealth has vanished for different reasons. In oil-rich Algeria and Iraq, much of the state’s revenues have been looted by corrupt officials and in Lebanon chronic political deadlock – parliament took 12 years to agree on a national budget – has produced a level of frustration that harks back to the early days of the Arab Spring. A recent account in The Nation magazine notes that “[Lebanese] want to rid themselves entirely of the whole regime: every single member of the ruling elite, regardless of their allegiance. ‘All of them means all of them,’ as the protesters have been shouting nationwide.”
As often happens, economic stagnation has illuminated other dysfunctions and it has taken place while political uncertainty in established democracies has offered little reassurance. Britain’s shambling attempts to divorce itself from Europe, three and a half years after an ill-judged referendum, are one example of such democratic embarrassments; Trump’s impending impeachment, another. Both have revealed an ideological and rhetorical bankruptcy in major political parties and an inescapable sense that several of them no longer represent their traditional constituencies. Nor, on the evidence of the last few months have they grasped the depth of the political and economic rift between young and old. Young people coming of age in the last decade, have endured a near complete absence of political leadership and a glut of shallow posturing, often nativist if not outright racist in character, in nearly every part of the globe.
There are few political reasons to believe that the near-term future will be better. Further austerity and recession lie on the immediate horizon in most of these countries, exacerbating already dangerous levels of social inequality. Consider too that an average of 1 million Indians reach voting age each month and, during the next five years 27 million young people in the Middle East and North Africa will need to find jobs. If the international community cannot address the faltering economies and military conflicts that have displaced some 80 million people during the last decade, the chaos which these figures forebode will worsen, perhaps dramatically. The recent protests which have brought millions of angry citizens to the streets around the world are a mild foretaste of that uncertain future.
