POLITICS
Earlier this month, the visit of Syria’s interim president to Moscow proved insufficient to produce an immediate agreement regarding the future of Russian military bases in the country or the fate of fugitive dictator Bashar Assad. The only public result was Vladimir Putin’s recognition of the outcome of Syria’s parliamentary elections. Ahmed al-Sharaa has presented himself as a successful diplomat: holding a personal meeting with Trump, addressing the UN General Assembly, and actively building diplomatic bridges with various neighbors. But he also needs to shore up his legitimacy at home, and there are questions about how democratic the recent parliamentary elections were. In this indirect vote, which was fully controlled by the country’s new authorities, representatives of the new national establishment won, as expected. According to the results, two-thirds of the seats will go to Arab Sunni men who are ideologically close to al-Sharaa. The president will personally appoint the remaining third. He is expected to add women and members of national and religious minorities, but it is unlikely that anyone from the real opposition will be included.
Content
A game with no rules
Elections under control
Barely different from Assad
The legitimacy problem
Since 1963, Syria had lived under Baath rule. The party claimed leadership over the entire Arab world (which is why its logo depicts all the countries of the region) but split into multiple factions. After the fall of Saddam Hussein’s Iraqi government in 2003, Assad’s Baath party was the movement’s lone survivor. post-Saddam Iraq, Baath, whose ideologues spent the years after World War II dreaming of a socialist Arab world united under one banner, gave way to the personalist dictatorship of the Assad family.
A game with no rules
For decades, Baath lawmakers were carefully selected based on personal loyalty to the leader. Accordingly, they voted for every bill handed down from above and supported any initiative by the president — first Hafez Assad and then his son, Bashar.
At the same time, the Assad-era political system was not technically one-party. Baath was part of a motley bloc called the National Progressive Front, which included roughly a dozen more parties, including both the Communist Party and the openly fascist Syrian Social Nationalist Party. From its creation in the early 1970s until the civil war began in 2012, this bloc consistently took every seat in parliament.
After the Arab Spring of 2011, so-called independents began to be allowed into parliament in each election — candidates who on paper were not affiliated with any party in the National Progressive Front. In reality, all so-called independent candidates were subjected to strict vetting, during which “unreliable” figures were filtered out.
In short, Syria has no democratic tradition to draw on. The new authorities have promised to draft and implement clear rules regarding party formation and political participation in the coming years, but until then, the parliament will have to be formed on a non-party basis.
Elections under control
The new interim Syrian constitution reduces the number of members in the country’s unicameral parliament from the Assad-era 250 down to 210. Ahmed al-Sharaa has been given the right to appoint 70 lawmakers of his choosing, and according to the temporary rules for forming parliament, these people are to be selected based on professionalism rather than personal loyalty to the president. The remaining 140 seats are allocated through a vote conducted via an electoral college system.
Unlike in the United States, however, Syrians did not even have the chance to vote for the electors themselves. Those electors — more than 6,000 in total — were selected by staff of the regional subcommittees of the Higher Commission for the Elections of the People’s Assembly, without any direct participation by voters.
Electors may not be members of the military, intelligence services, the Cabinet, provincial governors’ offices, or election commissions. There is also an explicit ban on allowing senior Assad-era officials to participate unless they can prove their loyalty to the renewed republic. This clause is one of the most controversial, because neither the law nor presidential decrees spell out any procedure for proving loyalty.
Another contentious point is the special status required of every would-be elector. Electoral lists were supposed to include only people who have “notable social influence,” are recognized professionals in their field, or are opinion leaders or intellectuals. Again though, there are no explanations in the official documents for how professionalism, intellectual standing, or social influence is to be measured.
Similar problems exist in the requirements for parliamentary candidates themselves. The law states that at least 20% of parliament must be women, at least 3% must be people with disabilities, 70% of lawmakers must be prominent representatives of professional circles, and 30% must be community leaders, tribal chiefs, or employees of nongovernmental organizations. But nowhere does it specify, for example, how to determine who counts as a “prominent” representative of professional circles.
The task of resolving all of these disputes falls to members of the Syrian election authority mentioned above: the Higher Commission for the Elections of the People’s Assembly and their colleagues in regional branches. These are the same people who selected both the electoral college and the pool of candidates from which the college then chose the lawmakers. In other words, both electors and candidates pass through the same filter.
The commission is formed by presidential appointees. Its leadership is made up of people appointed by al-Sharaa’s decree, and the post of commission chair is held by his ally in the “revolutionary struggle,” Mohammed al-Ahmed. The president’s appointees, in turn, appoint their own representatives in cities and provinces, and those “appointees of appointees” then decide who is worthy of becoming an elector or a candidate for parliament — and who is not.
On paper, anyone who disagrees with any election official’s decision (and that chain of authority ultimately runs up to the president himself) can appeal to the Supreme Court. However, that is unlikely to help, as the makeup of the court is also determined entirely by decrees from the very same al-Sharaa.
Barely different from Assad
The system, critics say, differs little from Assad’s and allows al-Sharaa to keep full control of parliament. The authorities answer that this approach is temporary, that the Syrian government currently has no other electoral tools at its disposal, and that the next elections will be held under completely different rules — after the new assembly actually drafts them.
This system lets al-Sharaa keep full control of parliament, appointing 70 lawmakers himself and the remaining 140 indirectly
It is worth looking closely at who ended up in this assembly after the indirect vote. Not all 140 seats envisioned under the quota could be filled this time around, as it was impossible to form election commission subcommittees in the rebellious Druze region of As-Suwayda and in parts of the Kurdish territories, when Damascus does not exercise authority on the ground.
As a result, only 119 mandates were allocated, with women and members of religious and ethnic minorities accounting for just 13% of those seats. The new parliament will include two Christians (a man and a woman), one Ismaili Shiite, two Alawites (the Islamic sect to which the Assad family belongs), three Kurds, and three Turkomans. Notably, official representatives of the Higher Commission for the Elections of the People’s Assembly voiced open dissatisfaction with the small number of women, as well as with the low number of non-Arabs and non-Sunnis.
The commission itself noted these shortcomings. “Among the most significant shortcomings of the electoral process were the unsatisfactory results for Syrian women's representation, and the fact that Christian representation was limited to two seats, a weak representation relative to the number of Christians in Syria,” said commission spokesman Nawar Najmeh.
As for the new lawmakers themselves, outside the country little is known about them beyond the fact that they were on the anti-Assad side as participants in the revolution and the civil war. This is not surprising, given that the commission was headed by a genuine revolutionary.
The legitimacy problem
The Higher Commission for the Elections of the People’s Assembly believes that President Al-Sharaa will use his quota to increase the number of women and non-Arabs in parliament. But that is unlikely to significantly shift the balance of power among lawmakers, because the real opposition is refusing to take part in forming the parliament. The Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), for example, call the indirect, government-controlled elections a “political farce” and refuse to recognize their legitimacy. Notably, it is the SDF that controls significant territories in largely Kurdish regions.
The opposition has called indirect, government-controlled elections in Syria a “political farce”
Leaders in the Druze region of As-Suwayda have also refused to recognize the election results. Residents say they fear forced Islamization and claim that they are being forced to resist violence from local Muslim residents sympathetic to Damascus. The Druze have received backing from Israel, whose military has partially occupied territory in the province and whose air force has bombed both Syrian government positions in As-Suwayda and administrative districts in Damascus.
Some Druze and Kurdish groups have refused to recognize the election results, calling them a farce
The Syrian army is fighting Druze militias, which accuse it of carrying out massacres of civilians, among other war crimes. The self-proclaimed authorities of the province are demanding that Damascus punish those responsible for the slaughter of Druze and that the powers of the central government be significantly limited.
In mid-September, petition drives began in several areas of As-Suwayda calling for the transfer of greater autonomy to the region. The organizers reported that they gathered more than 100,000 signatures. If their claim is accurate, that means the document has received the support of roughly one in six residents of the region.
The Kurdish areas face similar problems. This spring the SDF officially announced that they were prepared to integrate into a “greater Syria,” but the process is moving extremely slowly. The reasons include both the SDF’s distrust of the new government — whose top figures fought on the side of Islamist forces hostile to the Kurds— and the already aforementioned slaughter of Druze.
Kurdish leaders say their armed units cannot become part of an army that they accuse of crimes motivated by religious hatred. The SDF also wants Kurdish to be recognized as an official language in certain regions of the country and would not object to changing the official name of the state from the current “Syrian Arab Republic,” which emphasizes Arab supremacy over other nationalities, to “Syrian Republic.”
Kurdish leaders say their armed units cannot become part of an army they accuse of crimes motivated by religious hatred
In the end, real representatives of the Druze south and Kurdish north of Syria are unlikely to make up a significant part of al-Sharaa’s parliamentary list, even if the final parliament does include a smattering of token ethnic minorities. After all, it is far easier to pacify rebellious provinces, whether by military means or diplomatic ones, when a leader does not also have to waste time and energy fighting political battles in the capital.