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Dec. 31, 2020
“It’s true that we haven’t yet achieved freedom, but we can at least dream about it and imagine it,” Syrian civil rights activist Kenan Rahmani said three years ago. He was speaking in response to a survey by the website Raseef22 that posed the question “Would it have been better if the Arab Spring had never happened?”
This month, The Guardian published the results of another poll, with more than 5,000 respondents around the Arab world, conducted on the occasion of the 10th anniversary of the eruption of the protests. Judging by the results, Rahmani’s view doesn’t have many supporters today. Out of the eight countries where Arab Spring uprisings took place – Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, Yemen, Syria, Iraq, Sudan and Algeria – at least 50 percent of the respondents in five countries said their situation today is worse than before the protests.