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.