Rebel with a new cause: meeting Syria’s president

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The Economist.

Hello and welcome to the intelligence from the Economist. I'm Rosie Blore.

And I'm Jason Palmer. Every weekday we provide a fresh perspective on the events shaping your world.

The resurgence of the Japanese economy has long been foretold, but as inflation and interest rates rise, our correspondent says we might just be getting there.

And Britain's members of Parliament on average don't mind doing media appearances. And they're not shy about getting paid for them either. We look at how this side hustling has earned them tens of millions of pounds. First up though, In Syria last week, Ahmed Al Shara was declared the transitional president. Mr. Sharra was the leader of Hayat Tahrir Al Sham, the main opposition militia that ousted the regime of Bashar Al Assad in December. In his speech upon becoming president, Mr. Shara spoke about the need to fill the power vacuum in a legal manner to preserve peace, prevent revenge. It's quite a turnaround. Mr. Shara was for years a dedicated jihadist, for a time the leader of Al Qaeda in Syria. Last week, our editor in chief, Zani Minton Beddoes joined our Middle east correspondent Nicholas Pelham, traveling around Syria and taking in the devastation left behind by the Assad reg regime.

We're in the heart of Yamuk, which now is just simply a wasteland of shattered construction of buildings. Fronts have been smashed out of them.

This looks like a hellscape. You can see in the house in front of us. It's in the midst of this hellscape, but there are people living there surrounded by complete bombed out shells of houses.

Over and over, the scale of the task of rebuilding was made clear.

I hadn't fathomed just what it is to be a country that's utterly ruined. And so the question is, can this man, Ahmad Al Shara, the new transitional president of Syria, create the conditions for this country to rebuild itself both politically and economically?

At the presidential palace in Damascus, they sat down with Mr. Shara for his first interview since becoming president. Zanny. Nick, you're safely back in London and in the studio. Thanks very much for joining us.

Thank you.

Hello.

Now, on Friday, you were able to secure an interview with Mr. Shah. What did you find out? What was he like?

Well, he was quite different to what I was expecting, actually. It's not often you sit down with an Al Qaeda leader. So I was really wondering what would this man be like? And the only pictures I'd ever seen of him were either in his fighter gear or in a suit. But actually when he walked in, he looked like he was going out on a date on a Friday night. I mean, he had sort of, you know, slim fitting black trousers and a shiny black shirt and a white jacket. And he's a slightly unprepossessing man, a little nervous. And it took me a while to realize that this was actually the new president. But once I got over that and we sat down and started the interview, he clearly was telling me, I think, things that he wanted the west to hear. There was lots of use of the word inclusion, but nonetheless, it wasn't clear to me at the end of it whether he was a former Salafist jihadi fighter who really had changed and was now going to be the unifying leader of a new Syria, or whether actually these civilian clothes were masking still a conservative ideological Islamist.

And Nicholas, picking up there on the history that Zani's hinting at, kind of walk us through his trajectory to get to this point.

He comes from a rich part of Damascus and grew up with some of the people who later became the top men in Assad's regime. It was a time when the Middle east was in a complete state of flux. You had 9, 11, you had the Palestinian Intifada, you had America's invasion of Iraq. And Ahmed Ashara was struggling to make sense of all of this. And Decided that his only way of dealing with it was to drop out of college. He'd been studying media studies, head to Iraq, pick up a gun, learn how to make explosives. He was caught doing that, sent to an American jail, spent five years there, was then picked up in jail, recruited on behalf of Islamic State, headed back to Syria at the time of the Arab Spring, turned what had been a protest movement into a violent uprising, set off suicide bombs across Damascus, fled to the northwest and established himself as the emir of the province there, Idlib. And from there, routed the other rebel groups, became the top dog and marshaled opposition to break out of Idlib and conquer first Aleppo and then Damascus, and finally topple the regime of Bashar al Assad.

So, Jason, you can imagine that Nick has been for two months working hard on a profile of this man, and I've got this background in the hours and days before the interview. By the time we sat down, I was in absolute anticipation of what this man would be like.

But your mission at that point was to find out his vision for Syria now under the conditions that prevail. Now, did you get a sense of that?

My first question was essentially, what is your vision for Syria? And he replied at length. A lot of the first part of his answer was going back over the torture and horrors that Syrians had experienced under the Assad regime. The economic destruction, the societal destruction. But then he pivoted towards what Syria would be like in future. And he did say a lot of the right things. There's a lot of use of the word inclusive. But when pushed for details, particularly about democracy, he was elusive. So he explained to me there that in the Arab world there were many definitions of democracy. But he did say if democracy means that people decide who will rule them and who represents them in parliament, then yes, Syria is going in this direction.

He'd never used the word democracy in the past. He'd spoken of elections, but he'd never given any details. And this was the first time that he'd ever committed to presidential elections. The fear is there are presidential elections in the Middle east, but they tend to be plebiscites, often rigged plebiscites, which just are a formulaic act of allegiance to the existing leader. He is this sort of de facto interim president and sort of self declared. I think many Syrians are deeply concerned that this is somebody who really aspires to rule Syria for a very long time.

But whether or not the democracy that's being hinted at here is hollow. There is this persistent question as to the ideology that may be behind it, the degree to which the jihadist is still a jihadist at heart in some way.

Jason, it's interesting. I really tried to pin him down on that. So I asked him, for example, specifically, would Syria be governed under Sharia law? And he gave a weaselly answer. He said, that's up to the experts to decide. If they approve it, then my role is simply to enforce it. And if they do not approve it, then my role is to enforce that decision, too.

That happened again and again. Every time he wanted to avoid giving a categoric answer, he would sort of shove it off and leave it to a committee to decide. So he could be absent on some issues which are presumably for a future constitution to determine, like presidential elections. But on issues like the application of Sharia law, where they really need to decide now, what law are they going to adjudicate by, he was evasive.

But that's sort of a longer term, higher level question. What's on the agenda right now?

There are two really immediate questions. The first is security. Can Ahmad Alshara and his henchmen in the now dissolved hts, his own militia people, actually control the country? And secondly, can they get an economy that is currently flat on its back and crippled going again? Because both of those two factors, security and the economy, are absolute prerequisites for this not to dissolve into chaos.

And Nicholas, what's your view on what it will take to get the economy out of its mess?

Syria doesn't have the means to do this alone. It's absolutely dependent on the region and the rest of the world. He's touring the Gulf at the moment, trying to drum up support for what he calls big projects. But even more importantly, he has to find a way of lifting sanctions, American sanctions. Without that, the finances can't flow into the country. And we put this to Ashara. We asked him repeatedly, how is he going to start rebuilding the country? And he replied by saying that any prohibition targeting Syria represents a punishment to Syrian people who've suffered enough at the hands of the previous regime. And it was only going to be lifting sanctions that was going to alleviate their plight.

I was also struck that he spoke about the opportunity for investment. He doesn't want Syria to be an aid economy. He wanted it to be an investment economy. He said that there's a huge opportunity for investment and that countries in the Gulf can, through their sovereign funds, make big investments in Syria.

And I think that was exactly the point that he's making, that essentially for the last 10 years, Syrians have been dependent on handouts and they've survived on emergency aid. And he wants to move beyond that. He actually wants to start rebuilding, he wants to start recovery. And he can only do that if he gets investment into the country.

I remember saying to you after the interview, he's a bit of a free marketeer. You told me not to read too much into that, but I left thinking that this was a man who believed in markets and investment. And he's cutting border tariffs. There's cars pouring into Syria right now because he's eliminated all customs tariffs. It feels like he wants to have a free market in Syria, although the place is on its back economically. So there's an unbelievable task.

And he did repeatedly refer back to his rule of Idlib, which in the past had been one of the poorest provinces in the country in the far northwest. And he had sort of managed to turn it around economically. It was the only part of Syria which had 24 hour electricity. It was the only part where there was a degree of trade with the outside world. And it's one of the few parts where there actually had been some reconstruction. So there was, from a very low base, a beginning of some degree of recovery. And I think he's using that as a model that he wants to apply to the rest of the country.

Well, I guess that's the ultimate question here is the degree to which you left that meeting feeling like he has what it takes to be a good leader for Syria at this sort of fork in the road.

Look, I think he's a man driven by power and he will do what is needed to stay in power. But the thing that struck me is that clearly lifting the sanctions was top priority for him. But he then went on, I thought, to be strikingly tough about the Americans. The Trump administration, there are reports they would like to remove their troops from Syria. Would you welcome that? I was expecting him to give some kind of, you know, diplomatic non answer. In fact, he was pretty clear and pretty aggressive. He said that in light of the new Syrian state, any illegal military presence should not continue. Any military presence in a sovereign state should be under a certain agreement, and that there had been no such agreement between Syria and the United States. In effect, he was agreeing with Donald Trump. American troops should get out.

And he was also surprisingly categoric on Israel. He said that Israel should withdraw from the territory that had taken after the fall of the Assads. He was again categoric that any suggestion that there might be some form of resettlement of Palestinians from Gaza was A non starter. And there is a sense that the man that I'd expected to see was somebody who was trying to pivot out of a kind jihadist view of the world into one which in some ways was part of the Western thinking for the region that had severed its ties with Iran, that was getting the Russians out. And what we heard was actually something more nuanced. And so here we are sort of trying to juggle where is this man? To what extent is he connected to the past, to what extent is he trying to position himself for the future? And I still don't fully have the answer to that, and I certainly don't have the answer to the question as to whether he is the right man for the job.

That's right, Nick. I mean, for all the talk about an inclusive Syria, when pushed on everything from would he rule out Sharia law to would women have real power? He demurred. I think autocracy is much more likely than outright jihadi Islamicism. But I'd be stunned if this was the Nelson Mandela or the George Washington of the Middle East.

Zanny Nicholas, thank you both very much for coming on the show. Thank you.

Thank you, Jason.

Since Japan's asset bubble burst in the early 1990s, its economy has just plodded along in these so called lost decades. Japanese output grew by about 1% a year, well behind other advanced economies. Deflation was the big worry, but recently central bankers in Tokyo have raised interest rates three times in a row. Now analysts are looking at something they haven't seen in a long meaningful inflation. And for once, they view it as a very good thing.

The biggest reason for optimism about the Japanese economy is that Japanese workers are getting paid more.

Ethan Wu is a host of our Money Talks podcast and an Asia correspondent.

This is forcing companies to pass on these higher wage costs in terms of price increases and creating what Japanese policymakers see as a virtuous cycle between wages and prices. Generally speaking, in most of the world, a wage price spiral is a negative term. But not so in Japan, which has seen anemic growth and too little inflation for decades. In Japan, higher wage growth and higher inflation is in fact a sign the economy may finally be coming back to life.

So, Ethan, not all of us have been following the Japanese economy intimately. Can you just fill us in on a bit of the backstory here?

There's an old, somewhat tired joke about Japan, which is that there are four types of economies developed, developing Argentina and Japan, which is just to say that Japan's economic conditions have long been Quite unique in the global picture. It's been on the front lines of a lot of maladies that we see around the world today, especially in terms of aging societies. And since the real estate bust of the 1980s and 90s, Japan's biggest economic problem has been weak internal demand. Partially, again, this is because of aging, but there were also deep seated structural problems. So what you had was meager wage growth feeding into too few price increases. There developed a taboo against raising prices. Companies would do absolutely anything, cut costs, lay people off before they would raise prices on consumers, which was seen almost as part of the social contract that companies wouldn't raise prices. And so that meant that after decades of Japan being synonymous with this manufacturing powerhouse, this capital of industrial excellence, Japan instead became synonymous with stagnation. The stagnating economy in turn forced Japan's central bankers to lower interest rates again and again and again. And eventually they went negative. It was a huge monetary policy experiment.

And that's finally changing, right?

That's right. In 2024, the bank of Japan started at long last to raise interest rates. First, this small incremental change from negative interest rates to just barely positive. But at the end of January, we saw the BOJ move rates up to 0.5%, the third rate hike in the row and the highest in almost two decades.

And what's behind that decision to raise interest rates?

The central bank is beginning to feel more confident about the state of the Japanese economy. Put very simply, it's seeing evidence of this virtuous wage price positive feedback loop that could unlock pricing power for Japanese companies and lead to better payments for workers. During the COVID era, there was a gigantic commodity shock across the world. This had to do with the war in Ukraine and a variety of other issues all coinciding. We saw global energy prices and global food prices rise quite rapidly. Japan is in a nation that imports most of its food and most of its energy. So Japanese consumers and firms suddenly saw a sharp, quite sudden, abrupt increase in the cost of just about everything. And this had the effect of breaking the taboo against price increases. It was no longer viable for scramble to do anything they could to not raise prices. They were simply forced to pass it on. What that's done is it's changed what some have called the deflationary psychology in Japan. And this has led to arguably a regime change in the Japanese economy. You are seeing bond yields in Japan rise to 15 year highs in some instances as the central bank gains more confidence. Investors are too. They see a kind of revitalization process coming underway. Unlike rising yields in a lot of the world, where it's sometimes seen as a potentially scary sign, in Japan, it reflects this newfound confidence.

Ethan, I think as long as I've been a journalist, people have been talking about the about to return to emergent growth and development of the Japanese economy. Is it really happening now? Are we really going to see Japan emerging from the lost decades?

Well, we won't know till we know. But what's happening this time is the economic data is showing up in the way that it needs to for the story to actually happen. And so I mentioned earlier, pay. This is one area that's been especially encouraging. Since last spring, we've seen nominal base wages for full time Japanese workers rise at a relatively consistent 3% pace year over year. At the same time, Japan every spring has a series of wage negotiations between unions and employers. These are called the shunto negotiations. We've seen wage increases in the spring shunto round. They rose 5% last year and they're set to rise 5% again this year too. So it's just another positive piece of data pointing to something having changed in Japan fundamentally.

And how much of a difference is this making to people's lives?

I think for your average Japanese household, the pay increases are welcome. But it's worth saying that when you have high wage growth and you have high inflation, it depends which one's growing faster. And in the Japanese case, often the price increases have been larger than the wage increases in some areas. And so this has really put pressure on households. Food and energy are still quite expensive in Japan. And what this has meant is the deferring of consumption from things that people might like to buy to the necessities. And so even though from the central banker's perspective, it's good news after good news after good news, bolstering confidence for the average Japanese household, it doesn't feel quite so comfortable.

And what do you think, Ethan?

I think the path ahead is still quite difficult for the boj. Despite all of this encouraging economic data, it's still not entirely clear if inflation has taken root. To your point that one never wants to be overly optimistic about Japan, given how many false dawns there have been in the past. And there's an issue now where one key ingredient in the current inflationary episode is that the yen has been very weak. And if the bank of Japan raises rates too quickly, the risk is that the yen might strengthen and then undermine the progress they've made on inflation. On the other hand, the weekend is causing a lot of consternation in Japanese households, which feel the cost of living pinch even to this day. So it's really not an easy path forward for the bank of Japan. And I think they're going to be still, despite doing three interest rate increases in a row, they're going to be in wait and see mode, as are the rest of us.

Ethan, thank you so much.

Thanks for having me.

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Matt hancock was britain's health secretary during much of the COVID 19 pandemic.

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TV viewers who tuned in to Britain's I'm A Celebrity. Get me out of here two years ago, to see him squirm in the Australian jungle may have thought it an unnatural vocation for him, or any Member of Parliament for that matter. Then again, maybe that's why they were watching.

James Francham is a data journalist for the economist.

Mr. Hancock, who stepped down as an MP last May, was paid £320,000 for 30 days work on the show, eating mammalian genitalia and completing other gruesome tasks that the British public gleefully voted to subject him to. Like Mr. Hancock, many MPs hold down second jobs during their parliamentary career, and he was not the first to enter the celebrity jungle. But do such media appearances best serve the interests of their constituents? That is the question that the House of Commons Modernisation Committee is trying to answer. Its goal, among other things, is to explore what media appearances, journalism and speeches furnish to the public versus the potential conflicts of interest. At the Economist, we've been analysing MP second jobs from financial disclosures published over the past 15 years. We've found that MPs have spent a combined 50,000 hours making various media appearances. For years, MPs alternative employment was encouraged rather than scrutinized. In the early 1990s, a committee concluded that a chamber of full time parliamentarians would not serve the best interests of democracy. But times have changed. In 2009, there was a public outcry over the outrageous amounts and types of items that MPs were claiming as living expenses.

Out in full. Parliament has come clean over MPs full expenses claims. And for some, it makes uncomfortable reading. First it was floating duck houses, most cleaning and blue movies. This time we hear about a bell tower, garlic presses and bin bags.

As a result, members of Parliament now have to provide comprehensive details of their finances, including hours spent and money earned on second jobs. The data is messy and was Largely inaccessible until we cleaned it up using a combination of code and artificial intelligence. The numbers are striking. MPs have raked in 60 million pounds across a wide range of sectors. Second jobs in the past 15 years. 27 million was earned for media appearances and speeches, and the rest for things like practising law or medicine or providing consultancy. And although paid lobbying is prohibited, restrictions on second jobs is a bit of a grey area. And the question remains, therefore, whether media appearances and speeches should be restricted in some way. Media moonlighting is nothing new. Boris Johnson, a former Prime Minister and a journalist before he entered parliament, pocketed 275,000 pounds a year for a weekly column in the Telegraph. While he was a backbench MP. The current foreign secretary, David Lammy, earned £180,000 for six years of presenting a radio phone in show on LBC.

There'll be many black people in our.

Country and listeners this morning feeling really tired and fed up and beleaguered.

Giving that up ahead of last year's election. Speeches are the most lucrative kind of media work, earning MPs 16.5 million pounds over the past 15 years, followed by writing books 5.8 million, print journalism 2 million and TV appearances 1.8 million. But of the nearly 1,400 MPs that have served in Westminster between 2010 and 2024, only 412 have earned any money at all from media work. And of those, 253 earned less than £5,000. Ministers are not allowed to do any kind of this work whilst they're in office. But of course, that doesn't stop them getting involved once they've resigned or been fired. Britain is not alone in allowing its elected representatives to have second jobs. All the G7 countries are at it too. But British MPs are about eight times more likely to moonlight in the media, according to research by Simon Velchler, a professor of political science. But the risk is that some MPs may become content creators first and legislators second. Nigel Farage, a Eurosceptic politician who finally became an MP last year at his eighth attempt, has earned £39,000 for three days work on Cameo, a personalised video service. Top Sigma.

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Congratulations for being the top G skibidi alpha male. One answer for Britain's Parliament could be to follow America's Congress, which limits second incomes to 15% of their annual salaries, but base salaries in the House of representatives about 50% higher than in the Commons, whose members periodically complain that their 91,000 pounds a year is a little bit too low. Public opinion is clear. In a YouGov poll in August, 68% said MPs should only have second jobs in exceptional circles circumstances, if at all. And most agree that they shouldn't be hosting TV and radio shows. As for the impact of Mr. Hancock's appearance on I'm A Celebrity, an attempt at public redemption after resigning from office for breaking his own Covid social distancing rules by having an affair with a colleague at work. Whatever Britons thought of him before he went into the jungle, 75% said their opinion of him hadn't changed.

That's all for this episode of the Intelligence. We'll see you back here tomorrow.