Ten years on, the Arab Spring has only benefited the Islamists

A decade after the Arab Spring, good news anywhere is hard to find. In contrast to Asia, Latin America and sub-Saharan Africa, extreme poverty has increased in the Arab region. Both internal economic growth and direct foreign investment have declined. Unemployment, especially among the young, has grown. Education standards are falling. There is less press freedom, less freedom of association. A BBC survey last year found that more than half of Arabs want to emigrate. In the countries where autocratic leaders were overthrown — Tunisia, Libya, Egypt and Yemen — there is nostalgia for the pre-revolutionary era.

This week in Egypt, now the most brutally repressive Arab country since Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, any public mention of the anniversary of the 2011 Tahrir uprising is discouraged. Wael Ghonim, the Egyptian former Google executive whose Facebook page exposing police torture instigated the revolution, now lives in self-imposed exile in California. But in recent social media videos he resembles not so much a high-flying tech geek as the tens of thousands of political prisoners — from Islamists to liberals — languishing in Egypt’s filthy prisons. His head and eyebrows are crudely shaven, he looks painfully gaunt and his remarks are uncharacteristically expletive-laden. ‘Wael Ghonim has officially announced the death of the 25 January revolution,’ was perhaps the most poignant of the thousands of comments the videos provoked. His ‘unbelievable change’, read another, reflects what has ‘already happened to all of us… we have been waiting, suffering, till we lost hope, we are all losers’.

At least Egypt has a functioning government. Libya is still in the throes of a civil war between two rival regimes backed by different foreign powers. As is Yemen, which is also facing the world’s worst ever famine. Syria is only starting to recover from one of the most brutal civil wars in history.