خلق الحوار. التأثير على السياسة.
Generating Dialogue. Impacting Policy.
A reliable new Lebanese public opinion poll, conducted in November, shows that a large majority of the country’s Shiites retain positive views of both Hezbollah and its Iranian patrons—even as major anti-government protests include many Shiite participants for the first time.
Fikra Forum
Within Algeria’s nascent and evolving political scene in the country's post-Bouteflika era, there exists a multitude of clashing ideological and political backgrounds and experiences that political parties have adopted as their reference point for how to move forward in the upcoming elections.
Fikra Forum
This is a high-stakes call, but Iraq’s ongoing protests also represent a unique opportunity. This is the first time mass protests have been launched by individual young Iraqis, not by Islamist demagogues who are themselves part of the problem.
In the Ahwaz region of Iran, protests broke out predominantly due the worsening living conditions and sudden increase in fuel prices in an already impoverished region, along with frustrations regarding systemic corruption, high unemployment, and the regime’s anti-Arab racism and brutality. But Ma`shour, Koura, and Jarahi have been particularly targeted by the regime as they are known as the seat of the petrochemical industry in Iran.
Fikra Forum
With the protests already starting to alter the political landscape of Algeria, this movement is giving hope to outside observers for broader regional changes, from potential rapprochement between Algeria and its neighbor and bitter rival Morocco to expanding regional dialogue between neighbors––which has been withered by a legacy of colonial rule and the differences in subsequent state-building practices.
Fikra Forum
With the AKP’s embarrassing double loss in local Istanbul elections last spring, Erdogan has since faced increasingly sharp criticism not just at the hands of leaders of the country’s two main opposition parties—the Republican People’s Party (CHP) and HDP—but from some former senior members of his own party. Notably, Ahmet Davutoglu, a former AKP prime minister and a prominent politician once known as Erdogan’s and his party’s “mastermind” has recently formally split from the AKP after carefully distancing himself for years.
