First Tahrir Square, then last year’s Gezi protests in Istanbul, and now Kiev, Caracas, Sarajevo and Bangkok – people have been taking to the streets and holding their governments accountable. A wave of popular mobilisation is gathering pace and in an age of falling voter rolls and political apathy you would have to be stony-hearted not to feel a thrill at the sight. Nothing reveals the essence of popular politics more sharply than that moment when the vast distance that separates those who have power from those in whose name they rule is annihilated. The trappings of office count for nothing, the security forces melt away and the dictator is left alone and impotent. Nicolae Ceausescu’s uncertain wave to the booing crowds in December 1989 presaged his ignoble flight and eventual death.
The epic struggle in 2011 for Tahrir, played out in front of the world press, marked the moment in which Hosni Mubarak ceded control of downtown Cairo and the beginning of the end for his regime. There were similar scenes over the past week from Kiev, where President Viktor Yanukovich has now been ousted, after the police opened fire on demonstrators.
But once the tyrant has left the scene, what then? Visitors have streamed to gawp at the “Ukrainian Disneyland” – complete with private zoo, full-size replica galleon and neoclassical schlock – that the ex-president constructed behind the fences of his opulent estate. Meanwhile, Susan Rice, the US national security adviser, has declared that her government stands “on the side of the Ukrainian people”. But who exactly are “the people”? Do they include the extreme rightwingers of the Svoboda party whose flags were visible throughout the Maidan demonstrations and who glorify the memory of Stepan Bandera, the wartime fascist? Arseny Yatseniuk, a central banker, is now in charge of the new government but with Crimea in turmoil and the economy in a nosedive, his work is just beginning.