Get down to Syria’s business: coming talks with Turkey

Hello and welcome to The Intelligence from The Economist. In London, I'm Jason Palmer.

And in New York, I'm Jon Fassman. Every weekday, we provide a fresh perspective on the events shaping your world.

Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva is back in charge in Brazil. Quite apart from the insurrectionist turmoil surrounding his return, there's a huge problem of hunger in the country. Lula is going to have a harder time tackling it on his second attempt.

And almost 30% of Americans claim no religious affiliation. The share of the U.S. Congress that does? Less than 1%. We'll discuss why atheism remains a career-ending proposition for American politicians.

First up, though. It isn't in the news as much as it once was, but Syria's desperate, bloody civil war is still grinding on.

Echoing across Damascus, the noise of war and of a dozen artillery and airstrikes.

Fighting began when the Arab Spring sprung through the region 11 years ago. In Syria, a civil uprising against President Bashar al-Assad became something much messier, more complicated, with dissident militias, rival internal governments, and outside countries with their own agendas. The Assad regime was accused of widespread torture and rape and using everything in its arsenal to quash the unrest. —including repeatedly chemical weapons.

Hundreds of Syrians, including women and children, were killed or injured. A search among the dead for missing relatives. The Syrian opposition says more than 1,300 people died after government forces used chemical weapons in a number of areas east and west of the capital, Damascus.

All told, UN figures suggest that more than 300,000 civilians have been killed. The rise of that death toll has slowed at least. By many measures, Mr. Assad could be said to have won, in part by holding off neighboring Turkey, which backed dissident militias and occupying forces near their border. Even if receding horrors constitute some kind of emerging peace, Syrians are still suffering deeply, and Mr. Assad may need to turn to Turkey for help.

The past decade has been a bit of a lonely one for the Assad regime.

Great. Carlstrom is a Middle East correspondent for The Economist.

It has close ties with Russia and Iran, which helped it survive the civil war. It has relations with China and then with a sort of rogues' gallery of regimes from Venezuela to North Korea. But it has been extremely isolated, both in the West and in the Arab world, since the beginning of the uprising in 2011. So what the regime wants to do, as it always does, is chip away at that diplomatic isolation, and there is this perennial hope within the regime that ties with other countries will help them claw their way out of the very profound economic crisis in which they find themselves. They have fairly decisively won the civil war at this point, but they are also losing the peace.

So what do you mean like that? What about winning the war? What is it like on the ground in Syria right now?

GHION.AI] There is very little meaningful opposition left at this point. The violence in Syria has, of course, subsided significantly compared to 5, 6, 7 years ago. The death toll in Syria last year as a result of conflict was the lowest it's been since the start of the uprising. What's left of the opposition is really bottled up in the northwestern province of Idlib. Then you have the northeast, which is controlled by a Kurdish-led administration, a semi-autonomous administration that works with the regime in a number of areas, including economically And within regime-held territory, there is sporadic unrest, there are sporadic protests, but nothing on the scale of what we saw during the really violent days of the civil war.

So the violence is down, but this is still not a healthy, very workable country at the moment.

It's not. It is by any metric worse off than it was 10 years ago. The big story this winter has been energy shortages that have just absolutely paralyzed the country. The government last month had to give people a a couple of unexpected holidays because there wasn't enough fuel for people to get to work. There wasn't enough electricity to keep the lights on, and so it closed schools and government offices. It shut down public transport. Blackouts even in Damascus are stretching for up to 22 hours a day right now. The price of firewood in Damascus has soared this winter as people look for anything that they can burn to keep warm. And some of that has to do with the government being broke earlier this month, had to devalue its currency by about one-third, and then it has no longer been able to rely on Iran, which was of course one of the countries that helped the Assad regime survive the civil war. Iran has been a main supplier of oil to Syria, but what oil it is able to export, it would rather send that to China, which pays something close to the market price for oil and pays in cash upfront rather than send it to Syria, which has been for years now taking cut-price Iranian oil and buying it on credit. So the big story again this winter has been energy shortages, but the rest of the economy also, as you would expect, just absolutely shattered by a decade of war.

So Syria then clearly stands to gain a lot by some kind of rapprochement with Turkey. But what's in it for Turkey?

A lot of it comes down to domestic politics for Turkey. Of course, there is an election coming up where President Erdoğan looks to have quite a difficult election. Turkey has hosted 4 million Syrian refugees. It's been a safe haven for so many people who have fled the war, but their presence has become increasingly unpopular in the country. They've been there for a long time now. Turkey is struggling with its own economic problems. Inflation is soaring, and so many Turks are now unhappy. They're frustrated with the presence of so many Syrians in their country. The opposition is using this as a political issue against President Erdoğan and making all sorts of promises about forcibly repatriating recreating Syrians if there's a change of government in Turkey. So for Erdoğan, the prospect of reconciliation with Syria allows him to perhaps answer that criticism from the opposition, and there's sort of some insinuation that normalizing ties with Syria could lead to the repatriation of lots of Syrian refugees. I don't think that is likely to happen, but this is something that plays into Turkish domestic politics.

Okay, so both sides do stand to gain something here, but how to get there? What's on the actual docket for these talks, do you think?

The big ask on both sides has to do with northern Syria, where Turkey for years now has controlled a large swath of territory. So the Assad regime wants them gone, it wants that territory back, and it also wants President Erdogan to cut ties with opposition groups. On the other side, the main concern for Turkey has to do with the Syrian Democratic Forces, the Kurdish-led militia that is active in the northeast. The whole reason Turkey went into northern Syria in the first place was because they saw the SDF as a threat. They've accused it of links to the PKK, the outlawed Kurdish group that has waged a long insurgency against the Turkish government. And so the Turks, if they were to make a deal with the Syrians, want the, the Assad regime to exert more control in northeast Syria and to essentially prevent the SDF from being a threat to Turkey proper. The problem is that neither side is really willing to meet these demands. So I think it's going to be very difficult for either side to fulfill the wishes of the other here.

Does that create a role then for, for some sort of mediator? Is it better if there's more than two people in the room here? It does.

And there already has been some mediation taking place in this relationship. Russia has played a big role in that. Of course, Russia, the other country that played a decisive role in keeping Assad in power during the civil war, and then maintains its own friendly, if complicated, relationship with Turkey. Then you have the United Arab Emirates, which has also played a role here, if a somewhat more confusing one. The UAE was one of the first Arab countries to reestablish relations with the Assad regime after terminating them in 2011. They reopened their embassy in Damascus in 2018. They invited Assad to Abu Dhabi and Dubai last year, which was his first trip to an Arab country since 2011. No one is quite clear what the UAE is trying to get out of this. When you talk to diplomats in Abu Dhabi, they will tell you this is sort of a, a Hail Mary effort to bring the Syrians back into the Arab fold, to drive a wedge between Syria and Iran. No one is very optimistic that that's going to happen, and the UAE hasn't invested a whole lot of diplomatic capital in this relationship. They are also eager to play mediator between Syria and Turkey.

And so all told then, what, what chance do you give all of this for normalizing relations, for getting what either of these countries wants out of it?

I think in terms of public diplomacy, more likely than not, they will continue to draw closer. I don't think it's impossible to imagine their foreign ministers meeting, even the presidents at some point having a sit down is not outside the realm of possibility. But is that actually going to mean warmer ties between Turkey and Syria? I think that's another matter again. I think for the Syrian regime, again, to go back to the economic crisis in Syria, the Syrian regime is desperate for aid, money, investment from anywhere. They haven't really gotten it from their friends so far, from Russia, from Iran, from China. And I think whatever they might be hoping comes out of better ties with Turkey, whatever economic benefits they might hope flow from that, I think they're likely to be disappointed again.

Craig, thanks very much for joining us.

Thank you.

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Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, or Lula, is back as Brazil's president, and he faces challenges on every side. It's just 9 days since the storming of the country's Congress, Supreme Court, and presidential palace by supporters of now ex-president Jair Bolsonaro. Even if the threat to democracy fades, pandemic effects are still biting. Inequality keeps climbing. The Amazon rainforest keeps teetering over a tipping point. But there's one issue that's particularly personal for a man who first governed the country between 2003 and 2010. Shortly after his reelection, he cried on stage as he described the ravages of hunger. He said that if every Brazilian was having 3 meals a day by the end of his term, his life's mission would be fulfilled. He never expected hunger to make a comeback in Brazil, he said.

But come back, it has. When I visited Brazil, I was pretty surprised because you think of this as one of the world's biggest food exporters. They have these massive industrial-scale farms, and yet wherever I went, people were telling me about the hunger problem there.

Avantika Chilcoti is an international correspondent at The Economist.

The share of the Brazilian population that's going hungry has jumped from 9% at the end of 2002 to over 15%. So that means about 33 million people are going hungry. That's terrible news for an economy this size. For adults, being hungry raises the risk of all sorts of nasty illnesses, things like diabetes and tuberculosis. For children, it can actually affect the development of both the brain and the body, which means that This individual's ability to learn and to work for the rest of their life is essentially scuppered.

And now, at the beginning of Lula's second term, it's again something he's concerned with. How did he fare the first time around?

When Lula first took office in 2003, he really put hunger at the top of the agenda. This guy is a former shoeshine boy. He used to be a trade union boss, and he really presented himself as representing the poor Brazilian. And he got some way to accomplishing his sort of mission of ending hunger in Brazil. He had this campaign called the Zero Hunger Campaign. And any economic student will tell you that this became sort of a model for development economics around the world. It included Bolsa Família, which is the world's biggest conditional cash transfer scheme, which ensured families had enough money to pay for healthy meals. It also included a pretty clever public procurement program, which involved the government buying produce from smallholder farmers and using that produce to feed, say, students in public universities and schools.

And what impact did that scheme have?

In 2014, Brazil dropped off the United Nations Hunger Map, the UN's way of flagging countries where a serious part of the population is facing food insecurity. In that time, you saw malnutrition coming down, undernutrition coming down, fewer children were suffering from stunting. They were pulled out of poverty. And then, unfortunately, these gains reversed pretty quickly in the years that followed. The country actually went back on the hunger map about 4 years later. And why is that? I mean, the story of hunger in Brazil is sort of the story of Brazilian politics. The commodities boom led by Chinese growth funded Lula's generous social security programs. That came to a crashing halt in 2015. Then his sort of hand-picked successor, Dilma Rousseff, she managed the economy terribly. GDP per capita dropped by 10% from 2014 to 2016. You had millions of Brazilians jobless, people unable to feed their families. And the governments that followed basically dismantled the pro-poor policies. President Jair Bolsonaro rolled back support for smallholder farmers. There's talk about school feeding programs being essentially canceled during the COVID-19 lockdowns when students weren't making it to school. And now on top of that, in the last year, you've had the war in Ukraine that has sent global food prices spiraling. Inflation in Brazil is sort of easing, but the price of food and non-alcoholic beverages was still up over 11% year on year in November.

And the burden of all of that is falling disproportionately on the poor.

Yes, it's definitely falling on the poor, but I was also surprised by how many people who seem middle class, urban, with what I would assume was good access to food, how many of them were going hungry. I visited a nursery and the children there would turn up at school in the morning not having eaten since lunch the day before, which they got at school. In the favelas in Rio de Janeiro, the NGOs that I saw handing out food, they were telling me that some of the poor people in these favelas are going to state hospitals with minor ailments. They're just hoping to be checked in just so they might get a hot meal. So it's real desperation. And I had this assumption that this must be an urban problem. You know, in rural areas, people are farmers, they can make food, they must not be struggling. And there too, I was proven totally wrong because fuel and fertilizer prices are going up. And one farmer I spoke to, Daniel Benavides, he complained that the government's doing a lot to help large agribusinesses, but that smallholders don't really receive the support they need. You know, Daniel really needed access to loans. He needs some financing to get through this tough time.

So it sounds as if Lula this time again inherits quite a big problem to fix, the same one but as big or bigger. What are his plans this time around?

So we're still seeing sort of dribs and drabs of leaked ideas, policy ideas, and, you know, on the demand side, the president is going to expand the conditional cash transfer program. On the supply side, between his policy wonks and his ministers, there's talk of providing support to smallholder farmers again, which someone like Daniel will be very happy about. There's talk of reviving the public procurement policies and of building buffer stocks of food which can be bought and sold to keep prices in check. But, you know, last time he was in power, the geopolitics The economic backdrop to his rule was totally different, and he's going to face a really tricky balancing act simply because he doesn't have the money to splash it quite so widely. The money is definitely a problem. During the COVID-19 pandemic, the Brazilian government was incredibly generous. They were spending money liberally in the run-up to the election, and debt to GDP is really rising to levels that have investors worried. They're assuming that spending is going to go out of control, the fiscal balance is going to go out of control. But on the political side too, he's going to have to face some big compromises. Lula won the vote with the narrowest margin since Brazil returned to democracy in the 1980s, and he now faces a Congress that's dominated by conservatives. It's clearly truly his mission to reduce hunger, but he's going to have to keep government finances in check and The point is that Lula is going to have a much tougher time pushing through these pro-poor policies this time round.

Avantika, thank you very much for joining us. Thanks for having me, Jason.

I, you know, I think that people would love if I would tone it down.

Our Lord Jesus certainly didn't tone it down for anyone.

God will no longer provide protection in his grace over America.

For me, it's a religious thing. I believe this is God's creation.

Whether Democrat or Republican, whether discussing climate change or abortion access, America's politicians are often willing to bring religion into the conversation. And it seems more so than the ordinary American is.

About 88% of the 118th Congress identifies as Christian. And only about a third of a percent, so 2 members, say that they have no religion.

Jesse Mathewson is The Economist's Explainers Editor.

So this means that Christians are quite overrepresented in the Congress, but even more strikingly, the nonreligious are really underrepresented.

That is a striking disparity. How does it compare to the religious makeup of the country at large?

So I think what we really see is that in the past few decades, America and the American population has changed a lot, but Congress has changed very little. So in the 1970s, about 90% of Americans said they were Christian, and now that's about 64%. In that same year, only about 5% of people in '72 said that they were non-religious, and now that's 29%. So we've seen a really high growth in that, but essentially very little change in Congress.

You have almost one-third of the country represented by less than 1% of Congress. How do you explain that?

Well, there's a few things. I would say the first is age. So members of Congress are on average quite a bit older than the American population. So the average age of a member of the House is 57, and the average senator is 64, whereas the median age for an American is 39. And typically in America, as in a lot of other countries, the older generation tends to be more religious. Then there's the networks that religious organisations provide for politicians. So it can be really useful for networking, for meeting constituents, for getting donations, and so on. We see this quite strikingly in the Republican base with white evangelicals who've been very active since the '80s and '90s in politics. But for the Democrats, there are religious groups they can tap into as well. They've traditionally benefited from the votes of Black Protestants, from the Jewish population, and from other religious minorities.

So organisationally, is the converse true? Do we find that people without a religious affiliation tend to be politically apathetic?

Well, really, it depends what type of person with no religious affiliation you're talking about. And it's worth explaining that. So this term 'non-affiliated', it covers atheists, it covers agnostics, but it also covers people who basically, if you ask them their religion, would kind of shrug. Now for those people, they tend to be kind of a bit distant from a lot of civic issues. So they are less likely to vote, they are often quite disengaged from politics. But atheists and agnostics actually swing the other way, they tend to be very engaged, they are more likely to put up political signs, to attend rallies, to attend political meetings, to give donations to political candidates, even than white evangelicals, who we would typically think of as a very engaged group of voters. And I think really that is one of the reasons why these groups kind of haven't left their mark on Congress yet. Atheists and agnostics only make up 6% of the unaffiliated, of that 29%. So the vast bulk are people who really aren't that engaged with politics. And that means that if they don't turn out to vote, they're less likely to be represented on the Hill. Another reason that the non-religious tend to be less represented among politicians is that even though America's population is changing and is becoming less religious, many Americans don't really trust atheists. And this is quite clearly shown by a poll that was carried out by the University of Maryland in May last year. They essentially asked people, 'How likely would you be to vote for a candidate whose views you generally agree with if they were this faith or that faith?' And they found that the least popular type of candidate was an atheist. One expert that I talked to about this, Phil Zuckerman at Pitzer College in California, said that a lot of this distrust dates back to the Cold War when America was facing an explicitly atheist enemy in the Soviet Union. And at that time, American politicians did quite a lot to link the idea of American freedom with Christianity. And he says that today it really comes down to people associating atheism more generally with immorality.

When you are directly asked, do you believe in God, you cannot say no because then you are seen as an un-American, immoral scoundrel. There's always been non-believers in U.S.

government, they just had to keep it closeted. So yes, I think the atheist label is still, uh, poison right now politically.

Do you think this preference that the public has for someone who's religious can be, or is used in bad faith?

I think it can be. We've seen that most strikingly this cycle with George Santos using his claims to Jewish heritage in a really reprehensible way. Now, obviously that is a very extreme case. He is an outlier, but I think there is an incentive in this climate for politicians at the very least to emphasize their faith, to make it public. And obviously for many people, they prefer for it to be a private thing, But I think there is an incentive there.

All right, Jesse, thanks so much for joining us today.

Thanks, John.

That's all for this episode of The Intelligence. Let us know what you think of the show. You can get in touch at podcasts@ghion.ai. @economist.com.

And you can subscribe to The Economist at economist.com/intelligenceoffer. The link is in the show notes. We'll see you back here tomorrow.

Healthcare can feel complicated. That's why Optum uses technology to connect the people and processes that make healthcare easier, more affordable, and more effective. We're making it clearer for you to know exactly what your benefits cover. And to help you better manage your health, we're coordinating care between your doctors and your technology. We believe better, simpler healthcare is always possible. That's healthy optimism. That's Optum. Visit Optum.com to learn more.