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FORTUNE.COM // DECEMBER 2019
POLLING
ERROR
A SECOND ARAB SPRING
EMERGES
A second Arab Spring
will seek to finish dis-
mantling the authoritari-
an systems that survived
the regional revolts
nearly a decade before.
Energy from late-2019
antigovernment protests
in Egypt, Lebanon, and
Iraq will spread to the
rest of the Middle East.
Once activists succeed
in Egypt, demonstra-
tions will follow in other
countries with weakeconomies, like Morocco
and Jordan.ANGELA MERKEL’S
COALITION COLLAPSES
Germany’s ruling coali-
tion of Angela Merkel’s
center-right CDU and
the center-left SPD
collapses, as the SPD’s
struggle for relevance
forces it to assert itself
against conservative
policies. An election
sees the Greens, who
have been peeling voters
away from both parties,supplant the SPD as the
main counterweight to
the CDU—perhaps even
becoming the leaders of
the next coalition.LION ECONOMIES
START ROARING
With Africa’s largest
economy, Nigeria, joining
the African Continen-
tal Free Trade Area in
2019, a decade of rapid
economic expansion will
kick off for the continent
in 2020. The 54-country
trading bloc will attract
foreign investment,
particularly from China,
but more important, local
economies will boost
intra-Africa trade, which
currently accounts for
only 17% of the African
Union’s export activ-
ity. With nearly half of
Africans expected to live
in cities by 2030, and
with a working population
around triple that of the
European Union, expect
Africa to assert its influ-
ence beginning next year.L AM OUT IN HK
It doesn’t seem as if
Hong Kong Chief Execu-
tive Carrie Lam will last
much longer in the job.
In September, Lam was
caught on tape telling
a group of business lead-
ers that she would quit if
the leadership in Beijing
permitted her to. When
the protests end, Beijing
will want to get a firmer
grip on Hong Kong. A
weakened Lam will be
squeezed out.The World in
Motion
With institutions like the EU and NATO waning
in influence, expect a new order in 2020.
No one got more of a
shock in 2016 than
the pollsters. Whether
response bias, pollster
bias, or lying respon-
dents were to blame,
the industry as a whole
got it dead wrong when
it came to predicting
the outcome of the
presidential election.
Despite attempts to
make surveys more
representative, adjust
weighting, and tweak
method ologies (most
are still conducted by
landline), the polls will
be wrong again. Pun-
dits will say pollsters
focused on the wrong
thing, putting too
much weight on the
non-college- educated
white voters who
helped elect Trump
in 2016. Maybe the
“wrong things” we’re
focusing on are polls
themselves.Fortune
Crystal Ball A Pelosi successor emerges The House Speaker turns 80 in
2020, and she’ll start grooming a replacement to secure her
legacy. Majority Leader Rep. Steny Hoyer (D-Md.) is a safe
pair of hands, and Rep. Sean Patrick Maloney (D-N.Y.) would
make history as the first openly gay speaker, but our money
is on campaign committee chairwoman Cheri Bustos (D-Ill.).