From Algeria to Hong Kong, a year of anti-establishment rage

PARIS: Angry citizens have swelled the streets of cities across the globe this year, pushing back against a disparate range of policies but often expressing a common grievance - the establishment's failure to heed their demands for a more equitable future.

While street protests are nothing new, experts say the intense 2019 flare-ups reflect a growing sentiment that the social contract between governments and citizens has broken down, with voters paying the price but unable to affect meaningful change.Hong Kong has been battered by months of mass rallies and violent clashes pitting police against protesters who are agitating for direct popular elections of the city's government.

"What unites the protests is that all are responding to a sense of exclusion, pessimism about the future, and a feeling of having lost control to unaccountable elites," said Jake Werner, a historian at the University of Chicago. The financial crisis of 2007-08 in particular, he said, exposed systemic failings and induced years of austerity and insecurity for millions of people.

It also produced an acute sense of unfairness, in particular among young people who see their prospects of earning a decent living slipping away with every price hike or benefit cut."What was previously experienced as proper or natural is now increasingly experienced as a form of domination and injustice," Werner told AFP.

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