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Simeon Mitropolitski is a Canadian analyst, of Bulgarian origin, and a former syndicated columnist with the Bulgarian News Agency (BTA). He is the author of several hundred articles dealing with hot political and economic topics, both national and international.

He was part of the first group of Bulgarian intellectuals and students that began the opposition movement that finally put an end to the communist regime in this country in 1989, and in 1996-1997 participated in international observation teams during the elections in several Balkan countries - Romania, Albania and Bulgaria.

In 2002 Simeon and his family moved from Bulgaria to Canada where they live now in Montreal, province of Quebec. Simeon is a Master of Political Science from McGill University and a B.A. of Political Science and History.

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Most Arab and Middle East countries still don't offer any opportunity for affluent foreigners to settle down, to buy own residence and to start new life or to pass their golden age. Some day this situation may change because to allow foreigners to immigrate legally you don't need anything apart from changing some laws, which is easier than making industrialization or giving equal political rights to different social groups. What political picture will the foreigners see, what will be their rights and liberties if they are allowed right now to be part of all these societies?

We asked this question last year, comparing all Central and South American countries, and Caribbean states as part of our task to determine where the smaller foreign investors could feel better in terms of political, economic and social life. We will apply the same objective criteria for assessing the Middle East situation, i.e. they will be based on the results of the same comparative surveys produced recently by the international organizations Freedom House and Transparency International.

Freedom House is concerned primarily with the political rights and civil liberties in different countries. The level of political rights depends on the freedom of people to choose freely their rulers; the question of civil liberties depends on the private sphere everyone can enjoy against the state. These indexes are limited in their scope. They can't check all interferences to the individual rights that are coming from the public opinion instead of the government, but in most cases they are useful to determine roughly the level of freedom in different countries.

All countries in the Middle East with the notable exception of Israel are considered by Freedom House to be "not free" or "partly free". Such concentration around these two less prestigious categories goes in striking contrast with the Latin American case, when as we saw earlier with the notable exception of Cuba all countries were considered to be "free" or "partly free". It seems that all talks about undergoing process of democratization in several countries in the region as well as the huge financial assets provided by the oil reserves aren't prerequisites for freedom, at least for freedom in its western understanding. The case of Israel isn't representative and can't be considered as showing the future of its neighbors.

The situation with the corruption on state level as seen by Transparency International is less alarming, but still not a source of national pride. For those countries that are reported the results show that they fall in the second half of the list. Again there isn't huge gap between the states depending on their pro- and anti-western official rhetoric or proven oil reserves.

Generally speaking, some Middle Eastern societies may offer good investment opportunities, but none of them go so far as to recognize that these investors have any substantial political and social rights, which are generally denied to the whole population. There are no rights as such in their western understanding, nothing that the individual can claim as inalienable right against the state of residence. The privilege to come and settle isn't an inalienable right and can be revoked at any time. The lack of strong public opinion makes it easy to introduce new legislation granting foreigners with buying privileges; this lack of strong public opinion can lead to frequent and arbitrary change in the rules.

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See also the directory of companies providing real estate services in, and general real estate information of Middle East.