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JEDDAH: Many breathed a sigh of relief as 2022 drew to a close, marking the end of 12 months of post-pandemic fatigue, geopolitical tension and global economic instability, to name just a few of last year’s challenges.

One result of the year’s turmoil and upheaval has been the pervasive anger in society, fed up with one crisis after another – solutions to which governments and global institutions seem to have shied away.

The Arab world is no exception. Three Middle Eastern countries ranked among the world’s angriest in Gallup’s latest annual report on global sentiment, largely due to anger fueled by a combination of socioeconomic pressures and institutional failures.

Just as the world economy appears to be recovering from the COVID-19 pandemic’s lockdowns, supply chain disruptions and travel bans, the war in Ukraine has sent inflation spiraling, with rising food and fuel prices hitting the world’s poorest hard .

Add to this the corrosive effects of political instability, corruption and what appears to be climate change, and the past year has indisputably proved to be a time of heightened anxiety, temper tantrums and violent unrest for millions of people around the world.

In the Middle East and North Africa, where price volatility, climate shocks and a prolonged political crisis are being felt strongly, a Gallup poll finds public anger is widespread and growing – something development experts say regional governments should take seriously this problem.

Gallup first began tracking global unhappiness in 2006, based its methodology on a nationally representative probability sample of adult populations aged 15 and over collected from 122 countries.

The survey found that negative emotions — the combination of stress, sadness, anger, worry and physical pain — reached an all-time high in the last year, with 41 percent of adults globally saying they had experienced stress in the previous day.

Furthermore, these negative sentiments appear to be increasing, with 2021 overtaking 2020 as the most stressful year in recent history.

Over the past decade, the Arab world has been roiled by mass protests, regime collapses, corruption, scandals, wars and mass migration, disrupting regional priorities and internal dynamics.

In the latest Gallup report on global sentiment, Lebanon topped the list with the highest percentage (49%) of respondents reporting anger the previous day.

Since 2019, Lebanon has been in the throes of its worst-ever financial crisis, which has devalued its currency by 95% and left much of its population below the poverty line.

At the same time, with a paralyzed parliament and an inability to elect a new president, the country has failed to implement necessary structural reforms to tackle institutional corruption and alleviate the suffering of its people.

Millions of Lebanese, many of whom are still traumatized by the Beirut port explosion in August 2020, have chosen to leave the country, including many young people and skilled workers, tired of poor conditions and lack of opportunity.

Iraq, which faces a year of political paralysis after parliamentary elections in October 2021, ranks fourth in Gallup’s anger rankings with 46%, while Jordan, itself battling persistent inflation, ranks sixth at 35%.

Jordan has seen several waves of protests in recent years due to rising living costs and high unemployment, which has been made worse by the COVID-19 pandemic and inflation.

Julie Ray, managing director of Gallup World Poll News, said she was not surprised that Lebanon ranked so high on the 2021 list, given its multilayered crisis.

“Lebanon is in the throes of political and economic collapse. People are struggling to put food on the table and onto the streets. The situation is so worrying that Gallup also saw a record 63% of Lebanese adults say , if they could, they would leave,” Ray told Arab News.

“Now, it is no surprise that some Arab countries top the ‘angest’ list, as many of them are on the ‘world’s most negative’ list almost every year.

“Iraq is a good example. Since 2010, roughly half (or more) of the population of Iraq has felt angry the day before. Most people in the country experience a lot of stress and worry.

Michael Young, senior editor at Beirut-based Carnegie Middle East, said many Lebanese were understandably feeling some form of anger and frustration because “the system just doesn’t work at any level.”

“People always feel like they’ve been robbed,” he told Arab News. “The system is completely controlled by these cartels. If people want something from the state, half the time the state doesn’t work.

“So, Lebanese feel like they are being robbed every day. They pay much more than other countries and the service they get is much more mediocre than anywhere else in the world.

“A lot of services have gone down since the crash. Hospitals, education and everything to do with energy, naturally, that’s created a lot of frustration. You have a lot of basically middle-class people who suddenly find themselves in poverty.

“The worst thing is that there was an explosion in the port of Beirut in 2020, killing more than 200 people, half of Beirut was destroyed, and no one was held accountable. When you live in this environment, it is understandable that you are angry.”

The ongoing struggle has understandably frustrated many Lebanese. However, expectations play an important role in dissatisfaction, Young said.

For example, compare a country like Lebanon — a middle-income country that has seen a sudden decline in services and political stability since 2019 — to a country like Afghanistan, a poor country ravaged by war for nearly half a century.

“When you have a country like Afghanistan, where there is endless conflict and living standards have been declining since the 1970s, (low expectations) are understandable,” Yang told Arab News.

“If you have high expectations and the reality is far from those expectations, it will make you more angry than if you have low expectations and you get relatively low rewards.

“The problem of expectations is the main source of frustration for Lebanese. Lebanese are used to a life that suddenly and somehow catastrophically collapses.”

Once one of the most corrupt countries in the world, Afghanistan, where the Taliban returned to power in August 2021, ranks fifth in a Gallup poll with 41%.

Negative sentiment reported in Gallup polls has been steadily rising in recent decades. The COVID-19 pandemic appears to have exacerbated this trend. But, as Ray points out, “every country is different.”

“The common denominator that we tend to see in countries with more negative experiences is crisis. People are living with some kind of turmoil — whether it’s economic, political or social.”

However, the data raises questions about whether analysts and governments can predict popular reactions without addressing popular grievances. Are angry masses more likely to elect populist leaders, or even rise up against their rulers?

“These data don’t predict how people behave, but how people feel definitely influences how they behave,” Ray said.

“Other non-Gallup researchers have found associations between negative emotions — such as anger, worry, stress, and sadness — and civil unrest or populist beliefs and voting.”

It is clear from the data that governments cannot measure the well-being of their societies based solely on GDP and market data.

“How people feel does matter,” Ray said. “Leaders should be looking at these numbers, as well as GDP and other indicators they are looking at.”