A woman holds a sign that reads in Spanish “We are tired of being your joke” as Artists, clowns, mimes and actors protest against President Sebastian Piñera’s government, at the Plaza de Armas in Santiago, Chile, Wednesday, 23 October 2019. Rioting, arson attacks and violent clashes wracked Chile as the government raised the death toll in an upheaval that has almost paralyzed the South American country long seen as the region's oasis of stability. Photo: Esteban Felix / AP Photo
A woman holds a sign that reads in Spanish “We are tired of being your joke” as Artists, clowns, mimes and actors protest against President Sebastian Piñera’s government, at the Plaza de Armas in Santiago, Chile, Wednesday, 23 October 2019. Rioting, arson attacks and violent clashes wracked Chile as the government raised the death toll in an upheaval that has almost paralyzed the South American country long seen as the region’s oasis of stability. Photo: Esteban Felix / AP Photo

5 December 2019 (AFP) – Angry citizens have swelled the streets of cities across the globe this year, pushing back against a disparate range of policies but often expressing a common grievance — the establishment’s failure to heed their demands for a more equitable future.

While street protests are nothing new, experts say the intense 2019 flare-ups reflect a growing sentiment that the social contract between governments and citizens has broken down, with voters paying the price but unable to affect meaningful change.

“What unites the protests is that all are responding to a sense of exclusion, pessimism about the future, and a feeling of having lost control to unaccountable elites,” said Jake Werner, a historian at the University of Chicago.

The financial crisis of 2007-08 in particular, he said, exposed systemic failings and induced years of austerity and insecurity for millions of people.

Thousands of anti-government protesters, carrying open umbrellas, march on a street after leaving a rally in Victoria Park on 18 August 2019 in Hong Kong, China. Photo: Getty Images
Thousands of anti-government protesters, carrying open umbrellas, march on a street after leaving a rally in Victoria Park on 18 August 2019 in Hong Kong, China. Photo: Getty Images

It also produced an acute sense of unfairness, in particular among young people who see their prospects of earning a decent living slipping away with every price hike or benefit cut.

“What was previously experienced as proper or natural is now increasingly experienced as a form of domination and injustice,” Werner told AFP.

As a result, it often takes only a small move to spark a protest — in Chile it was a metro ticket increase, in Iran and France it was higher fuel costs — that balloons into a wider revolt demanding better living standards.

Elsewhere, like in Hong Kong and Algeria, calls for greater political freedom have become a potent rallying force.

Thousands of indigenous demonstrators march through Bolivia’s capital La Paz on Thursday, 14 November 2019 against the coup that ousted President Evo Morales. Photo: AFP
Thousands of indigenous demonstrators march through Bolivia’s capital La Paz on Thursday, 14 November 2019 against the coup that ousted President Evo Morales. Photo: AFP

“The belief in democracy’s capacity to change people’s lives is undoubtedly eroding,” said Erik Neveu, a sociologist at the Sciences Po political science university in Rennes, western France.

For Olivier Fillieule, a specialist in social movements at the University of Lausanne in Switzerland, this year’s protests built on the same dynamics which produced movements as diverse as Occupy Wall Street, the Arab Spring, or the Russian opposition to President Vladimir Putin.

“Don’t forget that TIME magazine named ‘the Protester’ its person of the year in 2011,” Fillieule said.

“The rejection of neo-liberalism is the main driver of most of these movements,” he said, noting that “the state’s abdication of some of its responsibilities leaves people alone against the market.” […]

People gather for an anti-government protest in Santiago, Chile, Friday, 1 November 2019. Groups of Chileans continued to demonstrate as government and opposition leaders debated the response to weeks of protests that paralyzed much of the capital and forced the cancellation of two major international summits. Photo: AP Photo
People gather for an anti-government protest in Santiago, Chile, Friday, 1 November 2019. Groups of Chileans continued to demonstrate as government and opposition leaders debated the response to weeks of protests that paralyzed much of the capital and forced the cancellation of two major international summits. Photo: AP Photo

“It is clear that protests and other forms of movement activity have been very much on the rise in recent years, and perhaps this year in particular,” said Doug McAdam, a sociologist at Stanford University in California. […]

“This demand of dignity is central in the movement since 2011,” Fillieule said. […]

“It’s not that the nature of authority changed — elites are just as unaccountable today as they were ten years ago,” Werner said.

“What changed is that elite unaccountability has been exposed, because popular forces are no longer aligned with elites as they once were.” [more]

From Algeria to Hong Kong, a year of anti-establishment rage