[caption id="attachment_55226677" align="aligncenter" width="620" caption="A tunisian protester confronts riot police with a baguette"]
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One of the most memorable images of the protests in Tunisia, which marked the beginning of the Arab spring, is one of a man facing a row of riot control police. He genuflects in a cloud of smoke and tear gas, aiming a baguette at the police as if it were a rifle.
That the imagery of protestors wielding baguettes as weapons was seized upon so readily by the press points to the importance that economic difficulties played in mobilizing the population against Ben Ali. Indeed when Mohammed Bouazizi set himself on fire after having his vegetable cart confiscated, the economic grievances of Tunisians, and later, Egyptians and Libyans became the focus of the media coverage of the Arab spring.
Certainly the revolutionary uprisings that took the world by surprise had an important economic dimension to them. After all, rising food prices and chronic unemployment were referred to continuously by protestors. Youth unemployment and graduate unemployment was, and remains, a very serious problem for the region. In 2008, youth unemployment in North Africa ranged from 18 percent in Morocco to 30 percent in Tunisia, compared to a global average of 12 percent. And that is just the tip of the iceberg.
Poverty has also caused considerable anxiety in the region and undoubtedly contributed to the popular demand for change. Egypt for instance, a country of 80 million people, has 32 million living under 2 dollars a day—a income generally accepted as the global benchmark of poverty.
Despite the influential role that the troubled economies of these countries played, the economy in and of itself is not responsible for the Arab spring. Rather, the economy illuminated the unsustainable nature of the Arab patron state, not solely because these countries were failing to deliver on their economic promises through the provision of jobs and affordable food, but also because endemic corruption, and uneven distribution of wealth exacerbated feelings of injustice amongst the population—rupturing the social contracts that had formerly held these regimes in place.
The virtual lack of a political voice, coupled with the economic disenfranchisement of the majority of the populations, were important catalysts of the uprisings. It was not only poverty that brought down long-term rulers of the likes of Mubarak, but the blatant mismanagement of these countries (including the economy) that led the people to say enough is enough.
In January 2011, as Tunisians awaited the rigging of another presidential election and Egyptians bitterly remembered how their parliamentary elections had been stolen, these neighboring countries became increasingly willing to take the management of their countries into their own hands.
