“In general, do you think that things in your country are going in the right or wrong direction?”
This question was posed by the Arab Barometer in 2018 to 26,739 individuals from 12 Arab countries. The answers were supposed to give us a panoramic view of the region, but instead they showed something else.
While the majority (61%) of respondents from Algeria, Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon, Morocco, Tunisia, Iraq, Kuwait, Libya, Palestine, Sudan and Yemen, said they thought their country was somewhere “in between”, the rest were divided over whether it had gone in the right or wrong direction. This division not only reflects the degree of polarisation in each country, but also whether respondents were among the winners or losers of their country’s changes.
