On July 7, Malala Yousafzai posted her first tweet. Within hours, she had earned several hundred thousand followers and a warm welcome from the Twittersphere. Over the next few days, as word emerged on social media that she had recently graduated from high school and celebrated her 20th birthday, she garnered effusive praise and hearty congratulations from scores of Twitter users, including philanthropists, politicians, and entertainers.

The reaction seems only natural, given Malala’s story — her journey from getting shot in the head as a schoolgirl by a Taliban gunman in 2012, to becoming a Nobel Prize-winning advocate for female education worldwide, working out of her home in the United Kingdom since 2013.

And yet, as always, some of her fellow Pakistanis reacted in a starkly different fashion.

Many on Pakistani Twitter decried her as shameful and traitorous. When I posted a tweet lamenting such characterizations, Pakistanis responded with fresh torrents of opprobrium for their compatriot. The criticism boiled down to this: There’s nothing special about Malala. Many Pakistani children suffer worse fates than Malala. What has Malala ever done for Pakistan? Why does the world love Malala so much? And if Malala really cares about Pakistan, why doesn’t she come back? The vitriol also included a bizarre but common conspiracy theory: Her shooting was staged.

To be sure, many Pakistanis admire and embrace Malala. Readers of the Herald, a Pakistani magazine, voted her person of the year for 2012. In 2014, a Pew survey found that 30 percent of respondents had a favorable view of her (a relatively low figure, but still higher than the 20 percent with unfavorable views).

But Malala is no national hero. Revered by many abroad, she is reviled by many at home, including among middle-class Pakistanis one might imagine would be her greatest fans.

In media interviews over the last few years, Pakistanis of various stripes — students, traders, shop owners, journalists, housewives, and even rights activists — have registered their disapproval of Malala. Such disapproval occasionally takes more organized form: In November 2014, just a month after she was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, the All Pakistan Private Schools Federation — which claimed to represent 150,000 schools — announced an “I Am Not Malala” day and called for her memoir, I Am Malala, to be banned. Enmity even emanates from her own community. In May, a Pakistani parliamentarian from Swat, Malala’s home region, said the attack was preplanned and staged by a variety of players — and with official Pakistani government connivance no less. And her best-selling book hasn’t exactly flown off the shelves across Pakistan (though admittedly some bookstores have refused to sell it because of threats from the Taliban and urgings from local police).

On one level, such sentiment owes to the power of conspiracy theories, which a Pakistani journalist once quipped represent the country’s only growth industry.

On one level, such sentiment owes to the power of conspiracy theories, which a Pakistani journalist once quipped represent the country’s only growth industry. They’re ubiquitous in Pakistan, where they’re seen in school textbooks and heard in religious sermons and on prime-time television shows. Partially that’s the power of extremism, and a byproduct of a poor education system. But the reality of national politics also plays a role. Opaque institutions, such as the powerful military, have a big hand in shaping the nation’s fate, and major policies — including, most recently, the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor — are often executed with little transparency. At the same time, government and military officials frequently assign blame for a range public policy problems — from water shortages to militancy — to outside forces. In an environment where information is often scarce and blame games are routine, conspiracies breed.

In 2013, the website of Dawn, a Pakistani newspaper that caters to the country’s English-speaking, well-educated elite, published a savagely satirical blog post on Malala’s shooting. It “revealed” how a CIA mission orchestrated the shooting. The triggerman? American actor Robert De Niro (“posing as an Uzbek homeopath”). Such are the depths of the power of conspiracy theories in Pakistan that some readers actually believed this absurd tale. Dawn had to add a caveat that the piece was fictitious.

Pakistan’s middle class — a rapidly growing demographic given to conservative, anti-American views — is the top conjurer and consumer of such conspiracies. But others, including some members of the political elite and even Pakistani-Americans, embrace them too. A young, well-educated member of the Pakistani diaspora — born and raised in America — once looked me in the eye and insisted the CIA, not the Taliban, shot Malala.

The implication is clear: If you believe the attack on Malala was staged, then you have no reason to respect her, much less revere her.

Conspiratorial thinking about Malala is strengthened by Pakistanis’ deep mistrust of the West, where she is now based. Many suspect it of harboring designs on their country. This perception, to be fair, is at least somewhat valid. The CIA, as detailed in Mark Mazzetti’s book The Way of the Knife, has enjoyed an extensive role in Pakistan — perhaps captured most vividly by its enlisting of a Pakistani doctor, Shakil Afridi, to launch a fake vaccination campaign in the effort to track down Osama bin Laden. Little surprise, then, that many Pakistanis contend that the West — through its strong embrace of Malala and the allegedly unlimited access it grants her to prominent platforms and top power corridors — is using her for its own purposes, whatever they may be.

The disclosure in 2013 that Malala’s family had retained Edelman, a top American public relations firm, to assist with her media management has only heightened these suspicions. So have the views of Malala and her father, Ziauddin, which align with many in the West. Ziauddin has been associated with the Awami National Party, a leftist and secular political party in a conservative and deeply religious country. Even before Malala was shot, they were both championing girls’ education. Malala was also writing blogs (albeit anonymously) for the BBC and giving interviews to the New York Times (she was the subject of a gripping 2009 Times documentary film). The core themes in the messaging of Malala and her father in those earlier times — opposition to the Taliban and the importance of educational opportunities for girls — resonated in the West, and to a significant extent in Pakistan as well. However, in a conservative and patriarchal society like Pakistan’s, such views nonetheless displeased many. The fact that these opinions were imparted to prominent Western publications likely attracted suspicion as well.

Tellingly, a Taliban commander later claimed in an open letter to Malala that his organization targeted her not because of her education advocacy, but rather her anti-Taliban “propaganda.”

Pakistanis’ conspiratorial thinking is so powerful that Malala’s actual work and messaging, much of which serves Pakistan in the most concrete and unglamorous of ways, is conveniently disregarded. The Malala Fund oversees several programs in Pakistan. According to the fund’s website, these include providing educational opportunities to girls that had been domestic laborers; establishing educational programming for children fleeing conflict; and repairing classrooms and providing school supplies for girls’ schools affected by flooding. In January, the Malala Fund announced a new $10 million initiative to invest in local education advocacy programs around the world, including in Pakistan. One of Malala’s first tweets declared: “I’m proud to be Pashtun, Pakistani and Muslim.” She has said she hopes to one day become Pakistan’s prime minister, and that she will always love Pakistan even if Pakistanis hate her. She has even condemned the American drone strikes — a grievance, ironically, harbored by the same urban, middle-class Pakistanis who accuse her of espousing anti-Pakistan positions.

And yet, there’s more to this story than conspiracies. For all the talk of anti-Malala sentiment being the product of delusional thinking, such hostility can also be explained by a basic and ugly truth: Pakistan’s lack of upward mobility and rigid class divides.

In Pakistan, upward mobility is a very tall order. The poor struggle mightily to escape to prosperity. According to a 2015 study by Oxfam and the Lahore University of Management Sciences, 40 percent of the Pakistani children in the lowest economic quintile are expected to remain there for life. This entrenched inequality is easy to understand. For many poor Pakistanis, access to two key resources needed to escape poverty— education and land—is elusive. Nearly 60 percent of Pakistan’s poorest kids are not in school, and 70 percent of Pakistan’s rural poor are landless.

Pakistan has few rags-to-riches tales; it’s not a nation overflowing with Horatio Alger stories. There are exceptions; witness Jamshed Dasti, who famously escaped poverty to become a legislator in a nation where wealth and family connections are the tickets to political success. Yet Dasti is the exception to the norm. To be sure, rapid urbanization has generated new jobs away from the impoverished countryside and enabled more and more poor Pakistanis to graduate into the middle class. Still, climbing all the way up the ladder to the ranks of the upper class remains a highly difficult feat to pull off.

And yet Malala bucked the trend and rose to the very top, from schoolteacher’s daughter to embodiment of the global elite.

And yet Malala bucked the trend and rose to the very top, from schoolteacher’s daughter to embodiment of the global elite. True, Malala was not living in abject poverty in her early years; her father owned a school and was an English-speaking activist. Additionally, she enjoyed the privilege of strong connections to the Western media; she was writing for the BBC, after all, even before she was shot. Still, she’s in a far different place today — both literally and figuratively — than she was five years ago.

Pakistanis aren’t used to seeing this type of transformation — and particularly one that happens so quickly. And so, this disorienting reality provokes a range of responses. For some, it’s admiration. For others, it’s jealousy. For still others, it’s skepticism, suspicion, and outright hostility. As Aamer Raza, an assistant professor at the University of Peshawar, recently put it to me, “Maybe the perceived repeated failure of people to climb the social ladder … make[s] people distrustful of people who become rich soon without visible reasons like a sporting or performing arts career.”

Additionally, in a deeply patriarchal society, Malala’s gender raises even more suspicion about her transformation. A male Malala would be far more likely to be welcomed as a hero, not slated as a traitor.

This all may help explain why some of Malala’s most vociferous supporters in Pakistan come from the privileged classes (though to be sure, she has some poor admirers and wealthy detractors). They see Malala as an unadulterated success story, a brave young woman who survived tragedy to do great and inspiring things. For them, barriers to upward mobility don’t exist, and so they have no need to feel jealous or hostile if someone manages to surmount barriers that so many Pakistanis view as insurmountable. For middle-class Pakistanis, some of whom may have risen from poverty but are in no position to make the bigger leap to affluence and global prominence, the tendency to feel aggrieved is so much stronger.

Malala personifies what is admirable about Pakistan and its people: youth, resilience, bravery, and patriotism. But her story also holds up a mirror to the country’s dark side, not just in terms of terrorism, misogyny, and conspiracy-mongering, but also its deep class divides and the sharply divergent worldviews generated by such fissures.

This is the Pakistan to which Malala hopes to one day return: a complex and divided nation where somebody’s hero is often somebody else’s villain.

Photo Credit: AAMIR QURESHI/AFP/Getty Images

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On May 7, French voters chose Emmanuel Macron as their new president. His victory — soon followed by the legislative victory of his newly created “Republic on the Move” party, En Marche — seemed to promise a renewal, perhaps even a revolution of French politics, society, and economy. This, at least, was the message of Macron’s campaign book, aptly titled “Révolution,” in which he chided the French for “wanting change, without truly wanting it.”

One hundred days later, the bloom is off the revolutionary rose. In fact, the polls reveal the petals are already falling. In July, according to the Institut français de l’opinion publiqe (IFOP), Macron’s approval rating shed 10 percentage points, falling from 64 percent to 54 percent. A more recent YouGov poll registers an even greater decline, from 43 percent to 36 percent. While every presidential honeymoon ends sooner or later, Macron’s has ended sooner and with greater thud than most. As Jérôme Fourquet, the director of IFOP, notes, Macron’s descent in the polls — the most dramatic in more than 20 years — is “unusual.” There is, he remarked, a growing “sentiment of suspicion” concerning the true nature of Macron’s promised revolution. And rightfully so.

The source of Macron’s vaunted “democratic revolution” was civil society. The French, he declared, were fed up with the traditional parties on the left and right. Like his nemeses on the hard left and right, Jean-Luc Mélenchon and Marine Le Pen, Macron offered a kind of “dégagisme” — tossing out the bums. In his book, he blasted “the same faces and same men” who continued to apply “recipes from the previous century” to meet this century’s great challenges. By voting for his newly formed party, the voters would send professional politicians packing, their place taken by amateurs who represented the best and brightest of civil society.

But since they took office, the Macronistas have aroused deepening doubts about the virtues of amateurism claimed on their behalf — and Macron’s own. During the short summer parliamentary session, stretching from June 27 to August 9, En Marche deputies made the headlines less for their accomplishments than their couacs, or missteps. Rapped on the knuckles for applauding too faintly during Macron’s opening address at Versailles, they applauded too frantically when Prime Minister Édouard Philippe spoke the following day. (Philippe was interrupted by clapping 55 times, once after citing the high failure rate of university students.) Some members arrived too late to cast votes, others arrived in time to (mistakenly) vote against their party’s own proposals. When their parliamentary leader, François de Rugy, was not busy dissing his own deputies, he was dissing a Communist member of parliament as chiant, or pain in the ass. (Rugy was the victim of a microphone he thought was off.) Contemplating this sorry cascade of smash-ups, the government’s spokesman, Christophe Castaner, sighed that the deputies at least now “have the summer to hit the books.”

Of course, Castaner also pointed to his party’s legislative successes. The controversial revision of the Labor Code was launched — a project that risks, come September, crashing into the reefs of worker unrest and street protests. There was, as well, a much-heralded revision of political mores. Despite its oddly puritanical phrasing — the “law for the moralization of political life” — its substance is rather modest. Most notably, the legislation forbids senators and National Assembly representatives from hiring family members to staff positions — a nod to last winter’s revelation that ex-prime minister and ex-presidential candidate François Fillon had, for several years, paid his wife a lavish salary for opening his mail. (Less remarked, though, was the legislation’s failure to prevent elected officials from working as corporate consultants while also serving, at least in principle, the commonweal.)

The rookie mistakes committed by the Macronistas slowed the party’s legislative agenda but did not sabotage it. But beyond the procedural problems involved in Macron’s vaunted “return to civil society” reside a couple of larger, and more troubling, truths about the new political dispensation in France. In a recent study, political scientist Luc Rouban carefully dissected the composition of the En Marche deputies. Befitting rookies, they represent a significant generational change; averaging 46 years of age, the Macronistas are dramatically younger than the representatives from the traditional parties. (The average age of Socialist deputies is nearly 55, topping by two years those from the centrist Democratic Movement and far-right National Front.)

As for the percentage of rookies, Rouban notes that they “constitute the heart of this renewal.” Slightly more than half of En Marche deputies has never served — a striking contrast to Socialists, where only 7 percent are newcomers, and the conservative Republicans, where they count less than 2 percent. Equally striking are the gender differences: Women fill nearly 47 percent of the En Marche deputies are women, while slightly less than 40 percent of Socialist deputies and 23 percent of Republican and Frontist deputies are women.

But the most dramatic difference lies elsewhere. Like a seismograph, the legislative elections registered what has been a slow, but seismic shift among the nation’s socioeconomic classes. Since the 1980s, members of France’s middle class, many of whom had worked in the public sector, had dominated parliament. But an overwhelming majority of En Marche deputies — slightly more than 70 percent — issue from the rarefied ranks of the upper-middle class. Tellingly, while state employees still dominate the traditional parties, they barely sprinkle the En Marche ranks, whose résumés bristle with master’s degrees and startup experiences.

In effect, the En Marche-dominated National Assembly represents a particularly insidious form of what Rouban calls “democracy without the people.” One bitter irony is that the traditional parties had been organizations that themselves served as socioeconomic elevators for working-class and lower-middle-class men and women. Among En Marche deputies, however, the elevator is mostly empty: Fewer than 10 percent have working-class backgrounds.

Not surprisingly, the En Marche legislative agenda reflects its members’ professional socioeconomic backgrounds. Just as the revision of the Labor Code seeks to give employers greater leeway in hiring and firing workers, the promised tax reforms seek to lessen the fiscal burden on their businesses. Moreover, the vast amounts Macron seeks to invest in the French economy — 50 billion euros over five years — with particular attention paid to innovative industries, mirror the worldview of the REM rank and file. “I am only passing through,” observed one En Marche MP, Sylvain Mallard, about his new job as parliamentary deputy. “I was an entrepreneur before, and I’ll be an entrepreneur after.”

Compounding these ironies is the widespread misconception that “the people” fueled the rise of En Marche. As Rouban’s analysis reveals, Macron’s promised revolution, it turns out, is also missing the people. In the second round of the presidential election, nearly half of those who voted for Macron — 43 percent according to an Ipsos poll — did so because his competitor, Marine Le Pen, terrified them. Moreover, a significant number of eligible voters did not bother to vote: Roughly 25 percent of the electorate stayed home — the highest level of abstentions since 1969 — while another 10 percent made the trip in order to register a blank ballot. The results of the legislative election revealed a similar ambivalence. Not only did the predicted “tidal wave” of 440 to 470 National Assembly seats never materialize — En Marche ultimately won 308 seats — but the abstention rate hit a record 57 percent. The voters who did make it to the polls did not live in the post-industrial wastelands, but instead were professionals from large cities.

Slightly more than a century ago, the Franco-Italian sociologist Vilfredo Pareto offered an important insight that casts light on the REM phenomenon. In essence, Pareto argued that elites always rule, but that they also change. Or, more precisely, elites always circulate; when one elite begins to wane, another starts to wax. The true tension is not between different social classes, but instead between groups within the same social classes. In the case of the French ruling class, the fonctionnaires who identified with French statism are now giving way to entrepreneurs who are inspired by liberalism of a Silicon Valley variety.

But it was a full-blooded Italian from the early 20th century, Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa, who best captured the phenomenon that is Macron’s self-described revolution. In his celebrated novel The Leopard, Lampedusa tells the story of a Sicilian aristocrat, Don Fabrizio, who confronts an earlier kind of revolution — the unification of Italy, or Risorgimento — which threatens to turn his world upside down. But as his nephew Tancredi explains, this will not be the case if they make room at the top for those leading the revolution. In the end, his words to Don Fabrizio mirror the En Marche worldview: If we want things to stay as they are, things will have to change.

Photo credit: Leon Neal/Getty Images

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