Today, Explained - Why is the world protesting?

Episode Date: October 30, 2019

A WhatsApp tax, a metro fare hike, and a check to a South African model have inspired a wave of anti-government protests. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

There are so many protests going on around the world right now, it's kind of hard to keep track of them. They can even sound completely different. In Hong Kong, they've got vigils. Sing Hallelujah to the Lord. Sing Hallelujah, sing Hallelujah. In Lebanon, they've got raves. And in Chile, they've got a pop song. In 200 metros, gira a la derecha y corre con Che tu madre que viene en los Pacos. Cacerolazo, Cacerolazo, Cacerolazo, Cacerolazo.

This is Cacerolazo by a French-Chilean musician named Ana Tijoux. Cacerolazo, Cacerolazo, Cacerolazo. Cacerolazo has become an anthem for the ongoing protests in Chile. Some of these protests have been peaceful, others violent. In Chile, they've prevented transit fare hikes from being imposed. In Lebanon, they've toppled the government. Today, we're going to try and figure out why it seems like people in every corner of the world are taking to the streets right now.

I asked Max Fisher to help. He's been covering the protests for the New York Times, and we started with where the protests are happening. Oh, man. It's honestly really hard to keep track. I mean, the big ones right now are Chile, Lebanon, and Iraq. But there's also been really big recent protests in Bolivia and Ecuador, in Spain, Russia, before that in the Czech Republic, in Algeria, in Sudan, in Kazakhstan. It's almost easier to list the countries that haven't had these, you know, huge historic record-breaking uprisings.

It's hard to look at all of this happening at the same time and not see some sort of correlation or want to see a correlation. Is that the right way to approach thinking about these protests or is that misguided? If you just look on the surface for, you know, well, what do the protests say? Are there big motivations? Or what do the protesters say they're upset about? Then it becomes really hard to find commonalities. You know, in some countries, it'll be, you know, an increase of attacks. In some, it'll be, well, local government is not responsive. In others, it'll be public corruption. You know, it'll be disputed election results or it'll be you know my demographic group is not being paid attention to but if you kind of look

at the data you'll see that there has been this incredible mounting trend for decades now of peaceful anti-government protests getting more and more common all around the world. And that effect is cumulative because it creates all of this information, you know, these are all on the news internationally and people see it happening. And it creates a sense of norms that we can do it too. We can take over the streets and force change and that this is a legitimate and worthwhile way to force the change that we're not getting through elections or political parties. Well, let's go through some of them, starting with Lebanon, where I think we've seen the most news recently. Lebanon has had a very corrupt, broken government for a long time. I mean, it is a democracy, there's political parties, there's elections,

but nobody in Lebanon has ever really thought that they were particularly responsive. The proximate trigger for the most recent round of protests there is corruption at the top of the government. Saad Hariri, the prime minister, it turned out, had paid millions of dollars, I believe of his own money, not of government money, to a South African model. And so on the surface, are the protesters upset about the payment? No, they're upset about public corruption, they're upset about the party systems not working for them. And most immediately, there was a tax on WhatsApp calls that everybody was

upset about. Lebanon is in the grip of unprecedented protests, triggered in part by a plan to tax calls on WhatsApp and other messaging services, but have turned into a revolt against a weak government, ailing services, and a looming economic collapse. The way that all of these link together in Lebanon

is a sense that there's us, the people over here, just trying to get by and not seeing things improve for us the way that we expect them to. And then over there, there's the kind of governing elite who doesn't really have anything to do with us, and they're paying off models in South Africa and then imposing these petty taxes on us that just prove that they're all corrupt and that the system as a whole is broken. And these protests culminated on Tuesday when the prime minister stepped down.

Yeah, in Lebanon, in a lot of countries, they actually have been quite successful at forcing change. In Lebanon, the prime minister stepped down. Prime Minister Sadriri announced his resignation, standing in front of a portrait of his late father, former prime minister, Rafiq Hariri.

In Iraq, it looks quite likely the same could happen. They chanted, free Baghdad, corrupt officials out. Iraqis demanded the resignation of Prime Minister Adel Abdel Mahdi and his government. Chile, it's not clear, but there's at least enough pressure that the president is clearly feeling really at risk. Just hours before, Chilean President Sebastian Panera replaced a third of his cabinet in an effort to assuage the public anger. This is not the same Chile from a few weeks ago. Chile has changed and the new government must change with it to confront these new challenges and these new times. All of these countries have announced reforms trying to meet the protesters' demands,

although none of it seems to have really assuaged the protesters, which I think is one of the signs that there's something deeper going on here than just, you know, anger over a WhatsApp tax. The WhatsApp tax seems to sort of compare to what happened in Chile in a really obvious way because those protests started with an increase in metro transit fares. Are they comparable in other ways? Yeah. I mean, if you talk to people in Chile, they won't say we're coming out and, you know, filling the streets and burning buildings down downtown because we're mad about a slight transit fare hike. What they'll say is that we feel like we were promised this kind of bright future,

and we never got it. And instead, what we see happening is the government looking for little incremental ways to rob us of our hard-earned money, and that just goes to show that they've sold out our future. And everything that they cite about it's becoming much harder to save for retirement with things like privatized pension system, there's not the same social and economic mobility that people expected are absolutely true.

But then at the same time, if you look at the kind of macroeconomic trends, inequality is down in Chile. GDP is up, poverty is way down. But it's clear that that is not actually the deeper trigger for what is happening. Because if it were, then you would expect to see inequality going up. Okay, that's why people are going into the streets. There's something much deeper in almost all of these cases that they feel a sense that they have to take these tremendous

risks and that it's also worth taking to try to force change from the streets rather than through elections or ballot box and political parties, even knowing the kind of risk that they're going to be facing. By tremendous risks, I assume you're talking about life or death situations, which we've also seen in Iraq. In Iraq, there's been kind of a rolling wave of protests for, I mean, basically like a year and a half. So it's honestly hard to identify a single trigger. It's really kind of a protest movement that has been building a long time over instances of corruption, local government councils that are seen as just, you know, irredeemably corrupt and unresponsive. And then cycles of government crackdown that have been

really horrifically violent have kind of built on public outrage and built on this sense that the government is against the people instead of for the people. So in Chile and Iraq, there's building off of legacies of internal conflict and dictatorship. In Chile, which was a military dictatorship up until 1990, which is really recent, the government was pretty quick to put troops into the streets to put down the protests, and troops are not police. They're trained to use deadly force, and that is what they did. It's the worst crisis the country has seen in more than three decades.

A violent crackdown by police and military in Chile against thousands of demonstrators has left several dead. Thousands of others have been arrested. And that has really shocked people and really turned people out and made them really angry. Iraq has been far deadlier. I think it's over 200 people killed so far. This time, security forces fire tear gas at the marchers,

but they have been using live ammunition for weeks, adding to the rising death toll. Officials confirmed that masked armed forces fired on protesters on Monday night. And this again builds on a recent history of the Iraqi state using violence to dispel protesters, which is also connected to its history of internal conflict. Lebanon has been more peaceful, and that has to do with just the weakness of the state. There's just not this kind of centralized military, centralized militia, even though there's a lot of militias in government, that is going to be willing and able to go out and use that kind of

force, and also just because there's more of a norm and history of peaceful protest in Lebanon. Does that mean that even though we're seeing more and more protests across the world, that governments aren't necessarily getting better at dealing with them? Governments are actually getting much better at stopping protests from succeeding. And that's true of democratic governments and authoritarian governments. There was this really fascinating study put up by Erica Chenoweth, who studies protests and uprising at Harvard, that tracked the success rates of nonviolent protest movements over time. And she found this really striking change. The success rates of protests had been growing steadily since World War II, basically throughout the modern era.

And they hit a peak of 70% success rate, which is basically most of them in the mid-2000s. And then all of a sudden that change, that trend reversed, and their success rate has now plummeted to 30%, which is really bleak. Government violence is actually down against protests. The violence still happens, but governments have gotten a lot more effective at kind of co-opting protests, waiting them out, using monitoring technology to figure out, you there you saw these mass protests demanding a change of government. That change of government was realized, and then things seemed to not necessarily get much better. Does that still count as a success? And will that maybe be the case in Lebanon or Iraq or even Chile? That's a really good point.

And that gets to part of why we are seeing protests become so much more common is that protests have gotten really successful, especially in Latin America, at forcing a change of leader. But because what often is actually motivating the protests is a sense that the system as a whole is unresponsive, changing out the president or the prime minister will not actually fix the underlying issue. And that is part of why we see these recurring cycle of protests, where protests will come out, they will manage to force some set of reforms, maybe the prime minister resigns, maybe they don't manage to get that. But either way, the underlying political system does not change. And so sure enough, they're back out on the streets

now. Just to be sure here, are you saying that there are more protests now globally, but less success? Is that what I was getting there? Yes. Historically, they're at an all-time high. And the success rate has plummeted from also their all-time high in the mid-2000s to now the lowest they've been since, I think, the 1950s. So how do we explain that? that are creating this set of, on the one hand, rising expectations, the things that make people want democracy, things like a rising middle class, access to information, education rates, those things are still rising. So you're getting this buildup of pressure that used to be released by governments becoming incrementally more democratic,

but now they're not, and in many cases are reversing. So that frustration is getting released as mass protests, partly because people don't see elections and political parties as a way to force change in the way that they used to. But you're also seeing a set of changes that just make people more frustrated with this system and more likely to distrust the system as a whole. Economic changes have led to some real stalls in growth. People used to expect that they were going to do better and better and better, and now they're not, or at least not as much as they thought they were going to. Social polarization is way up, which makes people more distrustful of society as a whole.

And another big change is social media. It used to be that in order to get, you know, 100,000 or a million people in the street, it would take years of organizing, grassroots building, organization building, maybe a decade of work. And now because of social media, that's something that you can do in a matter of weeks or months, which creates more protests, but they're thinner is the way that some researchers put it, because there's not that underlying organization behind it, not that underlying kind of grassroots work. The underlying sentiment behind what we're seeing now is really similar to the big populist backlash that we saw across North America and Europe a few years ago. It's this sense that elites have sold us out and the sense that there are social changes that are making, you know, the UK, France, the United States,

was to vote in these populist, outsider, anti-system candidates and parties that would promise to tear everything down. And none of this has really been resolved yet. I mean, all of the trends that have been driving their rise, the stall of democracy, the rise of social media, rise of social polarization, all of those show every indication of continuing to mount. So there's no reason to expect that regular, repeated unrest wouldn't

continue growing and wouldn't grow more common, especially now that we're seeing this contagion effect really pick up where one country's protests inspire another others. Max Fisher co-authors The Interpreter column at the New York Times and a weekly newsletter of the same name. They're both all about explaining major developments around

the world. I'm Sean Ramos from This Is Today Explained.