Der Spiegel reports on a growing dissatisfaction with the Kuwaiti emir and the crony government. According to the article, the people want more rights and true representative government.
Assuming that an "Arab Spring" movement catches fire in Kuwait, it will probably end up the same as any other country--devolving into chaos and sectarian violence.
Al-Barrak is the country's conscience, his supporters say, the future prime minister of a Kuwait with free elections.
He certainly seems to be the emirate's most popular politician at the moment. At first glance, he seems fairly conventional, with his portly figure and fastidiously colored mustache. But perhaps a demagogue is not what's needed here in this city of one million, where nearly everyone knows everyone else. Perhaps it's enough to move with a reasonable degree of confidence through these tangled webs of clans and tribes, urban and rural populations, between Shiite merchant dynasties and the Sunni majority, between young people and dignitaries. Al-Barrak is as respected by the country's young people as he is by the Bedouin population. His attacks on the conservative elite in Kuwait City have also made him popular with the unions and with those who live on the city's outskirts.
"The country is being robbed," he says. "The worst of the fraud is committed by the ruling family," who al-Barrak says managed to increase its wealth even during the 1990 invasion by Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein.
The true danger to the regime, al-Barrak says, is the regime itself and its inability, demonstrated time and again, to run a modern state. Kuwait recently had to pay $2.2 billion (€1.7 billion) to American company Dow Chemical for breach of contract because the emirate pulled out of a deal at the last minute. Kuwait's political opposition takes this as proof of the government's incompetence, while the government blames it on an opposition constantly calling everything into question.
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