Many governments are too indebted to cushion the blow to living standards
Save time by listening to our audio articles as you multitaskGalloping inflation afflicts Turkey again today. Officially it is 73%, but everyone suspects it is higher. Mr Pamuk, a Nobel laureate for literature, says he has “never seen such a dramatic rise in prices”. He makes no predictions about what the political consequences might be. To criticise Turkey’s modern sultan, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, would be risky.
The strongest predictor of future instability is past instability, finds a forthcoming paper by Sandile Hlatshwayo and Chris Redl of the. Historically, the probability that a country will experience severe social unrest in a given month is only 1%, but this quadruples if it has suffered it within the previous six months and doubles if a neighbouring country has experienced it, they calculate. Protesters are more likely to surge onto the streets if they think others will join them.
In country after country, the global economic storm has exacerbated underlying troubles. Take Pakistan, where squeezed living standards help explain why in April parliament ousted the prime minister, Imran Khan, with a nod from the army. He has since led mass rallies to get his job back. In India riots erupted over a plan to reduce the number of jobs for life in the army.
One country with nearly all the harbingers of havoc is Tunisia. It has a history of unrest. Almost 12 years ago a Tunisian fruit-seller, Muhammad Bouazizi, set fire to himself after police kept shaking him down. His death set off the Arab spring, a wave of protests that swept the Middle East and toppled four presidents. Tunisia’s democratic revolution initially went well. But last year the president, Kais Saied, assumed autocratic powers.
So far, it has not. But a general strike on June 16th stopped buses and trains. The government is trying to make a deal with the, but a big union objects to its conditions, which include cutting the public-sector wage bill. President Saied is trying to buttress his own power: on July 25th Tunisians will vote on a new constitution, the text of which he has not yet shown them.
Though Mr Putin is responsible for a big chunk of global inflation, people tend to blame their own governments. In Peru Pedro Castillo won power last year with the slogan “no more poor people in a rich country”. Covid-19 made that harder—it has been deadlier in Peru than almost any other country, according to’s excess-deaths tracker. And just as the economy was recovering, Mr Putin’s war choked off its supply of fertiliser.
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